Who is Resurrection Mary?

Beautiful they say. Young woman. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Pretty dress. Wouldn't you pick her up and give her a ride?
Well, you might. If you are driving along Archer Ave. in Justice, Illinois located just South West of Chicago. Then again, if you have heard the tale of Resurrection Mary, you might drive right by her and not look back until you got home. It depends on the type of person you are really.

Resurrection Mary (as can be determined by records) was first seen in 1939. A man by the name of Jerry Palus said he danced with a young woman who called herself Mary at the Liberty Grove Hall in Chicago (no longer standing). He described her (in an interview in 1986) as being around five feet seven inches with blond shoulder length hair that was curled around her face. He said he remembered that she spoke little and that her hands were like ice. As the evening wore on he offered to drive her home. Mary said she lived on the South side but asked him to go down Archer Avenue. When they reached the gates of Resurrection Cemetery she told him to stop the car and both got out. Mary said she had to leave him and asked him to stay where he was. She ran from the car and vanished before his eyes as she reached the cemetery gates. The next day he went to where Mary had told him she lived. The woman he met at the door said her daughter had been dead for five years.

Many documented cases similar to these have been reported since that time. Later in 1939 there were a handful of reports from drivers claiming that a woman was trying to jump onto their cars running boards as they passed Resurrection Cemetery. Also in 1939 a cab driver (the first of many to follow) stopped to give Mary a ride, as it was a cold January night. Mary got in the rear of his cab and directed the driver to go north up Archer Ave. At some point while driving past Resurrection Cemetery the girl disappeared from his car. Without opening a door.

From 1939 until1976 the sightings were sporadic, but still occurrences were reported. On August 10, 1976 a driver who was passing by the cemetery later at night (around 10-11 PM) called the local Justice Police Department saying that he had seen a young woman (or young girl, depends on who is telling the story) locked inside. He said that she had been wandering around just inside the gates. A police sergeant was sent to the scene to investigate. No woman was found to be wandering around inside the cemetery gates, but what was found was perhaps a bit more of a shock. The sergeant reported back that he had found two of the bronze bars to the cemetery gate pried open with "scorched" handprints imbedded in them.

"The marks were shown to various metallurgists, copper and bronze experts but nobody could explain how those bars could have been bent. Shortly after the first of the year, 1977, the bars were blow-torched by the cemetery. They attempted to blowtorch the marks off the bars and although they burned off the scorch marks, they could not obliterate the marks that were imbedded into the metal. More people came out to see those bars so about a week before Halloween the bars were hacksawed out by the cemetery and were hidden by the cemetery officials in an attempt to keep people from coming out to see those marks. The cemetery denies this story emphatically. They claim that the bars were bent when a front-end loader truck backed into the gates while doing sewer work and in an attempt to straighten the bars by first blowtorching them to soften them a bit and then grabbing the bars with an asphestos glove which, according to the cemetery, made the hand-marks."

Only two days after the "handprint incident" occurred the Justice Police Department received another call from the vicinity of Resurrection Cemetery. A young girl had CB radioed in that she had found the body of a woman on the side of the road. When the police arrived it was to find the young girl still holding the CB in her hand and staring at a place by the side of the road. When questioned about the body she had found she replied that just as the police car was turning onto the road in her direction, the body in front of her had simply vanished. A man heading to work very early one morning also reported the finding of a woman. Not on the side of the road this time, but right in front of the cemetery gates. The man saw that she was still alive and went to get help. When he and an ambulance returned though, the body was gone. The imprint of where the body was remained on the ground.

The best time to have seen Mary looks to have been from the last weekend in August through the first week of September in 1980. Literally dozens and dozens of people reported seeing her in this time frame. Many of these people made reports to the Justice Police Department. All reports had officers dispatched but no responding officers ever saw Mary.

One man who had considered himself a non-believer in the Resurrection Mary "tale" had a change of heart on Sept. 5, 1980. He was heading home on Archer Ave. after going to a sport's game on a Friday evening. He claims he saw a young woman standing on the side of the road in a white dress. He pulled over, opened the passenger side door and offered her a ride to where she was going. The young woman got in his car and directed him to go down Archer Ave. He claims to have tried numerous times to try and get the woman into a conversation with no luck. He even claims to have made a remark similar to, "You look like Resurrection Mary but I know there's no such thing as Resurrection Mary". After he asked if she would like to stop and maybe get a drink (and receiving no reply) he sped up the car and kept driving. He said that he did not slow down until after he passed the gates to Resurrection Cemetery. He had been doing a solid 45 MPH, and after passing the gates he turned to try and talk to her one more time. She was no longer in the car with him. He had not stopped and the car door had never opened.

On Sept. 7, 1980 a woman named Claire, her husband Mark and two friends were driving on Archer Ave past Resurrection Cemetery. Claire described what she saw as this: "bright, very bright. Like illuminating. She was walking very slowly and I thought to myself, "Oh my God. That's Resurrection Mary!"". Claire's husband insisted on turning the car around and going back. Even against Claire's protests. When they passed the Cemetery gates again the woman had vanished. Two things make this sighting of Mary different from all of the rest. One item that is different was that out of the four people in the car that evening only three saw Mary (in sightings after this one occurrences of some seeing her and some not seemed to increase). The other item was, that of the three witnesses that saw her all agreed that Mary had no face. She instead only had a black hole where her face should have been.

"On October 23, 1980, four people spotted what appeared to be Resurrection Mary walking through the main gates on the right-hand side."

A week before Christmas in 1980 Mary was seen to be dancing in front of the gates to the Cemetery. "Just before Christmas of 1980 she was seen dancing down the street, down Archer, east of Harlem. The two young men who saw her were instantly aware that there was something very unusual taking place. They stood and watched this girl dance by them, and they got the strangest sensation. There were other people walking by who didn't even notice the girl. The fellows ran home and told their father what they had seen. They never heard of Resurrection Mary but their father recognized her by the description they provided."

One weekend in May 1983 there were as many as four different reports of Mary being seen walking down Archer Ave.
In October of 1989 Janet and her friend named Pam were driving past the cemetery during an evening drive. "She was all in white and her hair and dress were flowing back, it was like a stream backward; away from her. And I just saw this profile of a young woman.", Janet recalled. Both Janet and Pam saw the young woman described above dart out from the gates of the Cemetery, and directly in front of the car they were in. Janet had slammed on the breaks, knowing that it was too late to miss the woman in front of her. "But there was no impact. There was no bump to say I had hit something. I knew I had hit her, and yet there was no sound…nothing whatsoever to show that I had hit anything." Janet and Pam were neither the first nor the last ones to have this happen to them.

Occurrences have slowed since the early 80's but they do still happen. Mary is still seen in dance clubs, in taxi's, strolling listlessly along the side of the road and inside of the cemetery. But who was Mary in real life? That is a question that has yet to be answered with any conclusive proof. Let us now go and explore a few of the generally accepted ideas of whom Resurrection Mary was and why, per chance, she became a ghost in the first place.

Often when one hears the story of Resurrection Mary for the first time it starts with a beautiful young woman out for a night of dancing with her boyfriend at the O'Henry Ballroom (located down the road from Resurrection Cemetery). The couple has a spat and the young woman decides to walk home on her own. Then the story (generally) has two directions to head in. One is that while walking home the young woman is killed by a hit and run driver. The slightly different (more macabre) other direction is that while she was making her way home her own boyfriend, that she had fought with, ran her down and left her for dead on the side of the road. Both end with the young woman being buried in her favorite white dancing dress and shoes in Resurrection Cemetery. Then the ghost of Mary began to be sighted, as she never got home from the dance that night, and she will forever be trying to.

Are their any facts to back up the main belief though? The answer to that looks to be yes…and no. Yes, to the fact that there was indeed a young girl who left the O'Henry Ballroom, and was then killed on her way home. No, to the fact that the woman generally though to be Mary, was killed in a completely different way from the accepted story.

Let's start with the first girl, shall we? A young girl named Anna Mary Norkus was indeed killed on her way home from the O'Henry Ballroom. It was the eve of her thirteenth birthday (July 20, 1927). The young girl had been at the Ballroom with her father. She was described as a slim girl with blond hair and blue eyes who loved to dance. "On their way home, around 1:30 in the morning, they passed Resurrection Cemetery on Archer Avenue, then turned east on 71st Street and then north on Harlem to 67th. Moments later, the car overturned sideways into an unseen railroad cut and Anna was killed instantly. The grieving family made plans to have Anna buried in one of three newly purchased lots at St. Casimir Cemetery."

In a ghost investigation compiled by Frank Andrejasich (of Summit Illinois) he says that some people were, "buried in a term grave, or temporary grave, in Resurrection Cemetery. Stories claim, that some bodies were buried at Resurrection Cemetery, while renovations were being made to other cemeteries nearby. Some suggest that the same bodies were never moved back to the original plots, and remained where they were buried at Resurrection Cemetery. I am not suggesting foul play. I am only suggesting that all parties involved, may have decided to keep the bodies buried in the temporary gravesites." "According to the stories of the time, strikes were often common among Chicago gravediggers and during these strikes, bodies were usually buried for safekeeping until a proper internment could take place. Andrejasich learned that a man named Churas had once lived in a brick bungalow across the street from Resurrection Cemetery and that part of his employment involved retrieving bodies from cemeteries where workers were on strike. They would be temporarily placed in Resurrection Cemetery for a short time until the strike was over. However, in cases where the strikes continued for an extended time, the temporarily buried bodies could be forgotten or misplaced. This is exactly what Andrejasich believes happened in the case of Anna Norkus. His theory is that her body was left behind at Resurrection Cemetery and for this reason, her spirit still wanders Archer Avenue."

While that theory sounds like a good explanation, there is a rather large flaw to it. Almost all accounts from those who claim to have seen Resurrection Mary do not describe her as a 12 or 13-year-old girl. Most describe her as a young woman. Perhaps in her early twenties. And it so happens that the young woman generally thought to be Resurrection Mary's true identity was in her early twenties when she was killed.

Mary Bregovy was killed in a car accident on March 10, 1934 on the cusp of her twenty-first birthday. However, she was not coming home from the O'Henry Ballroom, or from any kind of dance. The fatal accident took place in downtown Chicago on Wacker Drive, well away from Archer Ave. The car Mary Bregovy was riding in collided with an elevated train support and she was thrown through the windshield. In a picture of Mary Bregovy's grave marker the dates clearly state 1888-1922. You will note that the date of death does not even coincide with the facts (as I have learned them) that I just told you about.

1922. Then how was she killed in 1934? Are the facts wrong? Or is the stone? Either way, there is a problem with the Mary Bregovy as well. *Sigh* Can you guess what it is before I tell?

If you are thinking again about how Mary has been described, then you are on the right track. The real Mary Bregovy, from all accounts, looks nothing like the Resurrection Mary apparition that is so often seen. Mary Bregovy had short dark hair. Not the classic blond that is Resurrection Mary's look. Mary Bregovy was also (again, by accounts) not buried in a white dress but an orchid colored one.

So you may be asking yourself (as am I) who exactly was Resurrection Mary when she was alive? How did she really die? When did she really die? Where did the accepted story come from? Weren't their any family members alive when the ghostly Mary began to get rides? Wouldn't they have come forward? Will this poor young woman ever find peace? Is there more than one Resurrection Mary?

All of those questions are as yet unanswered. Resurrection Mary remains the enigma she started off as back in 1939 when Jerry Palus's accounting of an evening with her started account after account of meeting this mysterious ghost. Never has a ghostly apparition had so many well-documented cases spanning decades of time. Resurrection Cemetery is located at 7600 South Archer Ave in Justice, Illinois. The cemetery is home to over 150,000 graves. And apparently at least one lost soul.