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The Supernatural characters belong to Kripke Enterprises and the CW, not me. No money is being made from this story. It is for entertainment only.
Real Ghost Stories
Chapter 13
Bachelor Grove Cemetery – Illinois
"What are we doing here, Sam?" Dean asked as he lightly vaulted over the broken down wooden fence and pushed through the straggling weeds. Once through these minor barriers he was on a dirt path leading under the trees, further back into the woods.
Sam had directed the way down the old, closed Medlothian Turnpike by the Rubio Woods Forest Preserve near Chicago's southwest suburbs. The place had the look of a long abandoned and forgotten piece of ground visited only by vandals and teenage party animals who drank their illegally purchased beer far from adult supervision. The path was dotted with empty beer cans and old trash.
"You take me to only the best places," Dean joked as he kicked old cans off into the surrounding trees.
"This is the path to the Bachelor's Grove Cemetery." Sam said. "I have always wondered about this place. I didn't know that it has been let go this badly. It was taken over by Cook County when the original owners died out and the place was completely deserted.
"I'm still waiting to hear why we are here, bitch." Dean complained.
"Among a multitude of ghost sightings and even sprit pictures there is mention of a particular apparition I find interesting." Sam replied. "Someone reported a man in a yellow suit who appears and disappears in a shower of sparks. What does that sound like to you?
"Huh," Dean snorted. "It sounds a lot like a Devil's imp. What would keep one of those attached to a field of dead people? I thought they preferred to annoy the living."
"Good point." Sam agreed. "There is something going on here that I don't understand and it's dangerous for all these idiot kids to be standing out here in the night getting drunk with a minion of hell lurking in the background. I figured it was something that we should look into."
Within a quarter of a mile the brothers ran into a six foot tall chain link fence that evidently had been erected with the idea of keeping people out. It hadn't worked too well as the brothers could see looking down the fence line to where great gashes had been cut in the chain link allowing pretty free access to the site.
"Who put the effort in to try and protect the place?" Dean asked Mr. Wizard.
"Local historians are taking this whole place seriously; there's a web-site for it with the original plot maps naming various burials and they have been trying to recover and replace a lot of the looted headstones." Sam responded.
"The historical value of the site is pretty high but there isn't a lot of money left over to fully restore it and make it an official historical site. The Cook county Real Estate department has a lot of problems on its hands that benefit the living more than the dead. "
"Are you going to tell me the tale or let me trip over the ghosts on my own?" Dean asked.
"Fine." Sam pulled a couple of folded pieces of paper out of his back jeans pocket. "The first known burial was thought to have been in 1834 of William Nobles. The original holder of the property was Samuel Everdon and it was called Everdon Cemetery,"
"However a lot of the early burials were of German immigrant men who came to work on the Illinois and Michigan canals. Later a flood of Anglo immigrants arrived and settled here, almost all of the single men. This was the "western Frontier" at the time and life was pretty rough. Very few women were enticed by the complete lack of civilization and so a lot of these men died unmarried."
"That's the most likely explanation of the name Bachelor's Grove. There is some support for it being based on the old German name of Betchleor but there's very little proof that anyone by that name ever lived around here."
"As time went on families were buried here and headstones appeared. There might have been as many as 200 or more burials but now, with the passing of time, only about 20 or 25 broken and vandalized headstones remain."
"Pioneer family names like Fulton, Crandall and Rippet appeared on the stones but now those stones are eroded and have been dragged around to become seats or stolen outright. The police even found some that had been dumped into a quarry pool nearby. That little bit of vandalism took a lot of energy."
"The list of supposed apparitions is pretty impressive, "The Madonna of Bachelor' Grove is a white lady carrying a child; there might or might not have been the spirit of a two-headed man." Dean snorted at that one.
"I know," Sam grimaced, "a little too much. Also some mysterious hooded figures and, surprise, surprise; the first sighting of "The Hooked Maniac" better known now as "the Hook Man", was here in Bachelor's grove. "
"Some fun," Dean commented.
"Yeah, this cemetery is on all of the 'most haunted' lists. What really put it on the list through was this photograph."
Sam handed Dean a book page and pointed at a headstone in front of them. It had an odd quilted pattern carved into the four sides.
Dean looked at the page in his hand and saw a pensive looking lady sitting on that same stone, alone in the empty graveyard.
"That picture was taken in 1991 and hit the newspapers locally and in the Chicago Sun." Sam said. "She's a ghost supposedly and the picture has never been debunked. It has been reprinted so many times it's almost a cliché."
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Hours later Sam and Dean sat in the peaceful graveyard in the dark. Sam had cleared some ground and drawn an odd, lop-sided star in the earth. Around that star he had drawn another pattern with six points and 6 vales. In each vale sat a thick, handmade candle, fragrant with embedded herbs. Each point was crowned with a quartz crystal. Right in the center was a brown glass bottle.
"What's going on here, Sam? Dean smiled. "You hauled all this stuff in your backpack so I guess you think you know what you're doing, right?"
"When the moon rises we're going to light these candles and call our imp. If it is what we think it is he'll appear in a shower of sparks right above our 'imp bottle'. There are rose hips and safflower pollen and rosemary in the bottle, things an imp just can't ignore. If we are fast enough we'll pop the wax cork on him and "viola" an imp in a bottle." Sam stretched his arms behind him, releasing the kinks in his back caused by crawling on the ground drawing his pictures.
"Wow," Dean said. "What do we do with him then?"
"We'll keep him in the trunk," Sam replied. "As long as the bottle isn't broken he won't be able to get out. We'll have an option if we ever want to curse a location. "
Dean scratched his ear. "If we want to do what? Curse a location? Aren't we in the business of un-cursing locations? Maybe you're getting a little too close to your magic, Sam. "
Sam reached over and held on to his brother's arm. "Don't worry. If you don't want it in the trunk we can stored it in the armory in the MOL bunker. The place is made for things like this. You have to agree that it is best to get him out of this graveyard before he does even more harm. Perhaps some of these spirits can rest when he's gone and no stupid drunk teenager will fall for one of his tricks."
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In the early morning Sam and Dean walked back down the path to Bachelor's Grove. The imp hunt had been a complete success and Sam was mugging at the little sparks in his brown glass bottle. Dean was a somewhat concerned about his sibling's discovery of yet another dark path to follow. Sam's talent for trouble could find a lot to feed on in the MOL library and Dean was beginning to think that perhaps being related to a modern wizard had advantages and disadvantages.
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Further research:
Haunted Encounters, edited by Ginnie Sienta Bivona, Michael Whitington and Dorothy McConachie, Atriad Press, 2004
Wikipedia, Bachelor's Grove Cemetery
Web site: Bachelorsgrove : picture of lady ghost on tombstone displayed on home page