Ghost in the graveyard
Coal City cemetery yields signs of spirits
By Peter Krowiak
Herald Writer
Wednesday, October 31, 2007 1:32 PM CDT
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ORDER STAFF PHOTOS |
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Sarah
Johnson takes a temperature reading in Short Cemetary in Coal City on
Tuesday night. Johnson, along with four other members of the Will
County Ghost Hunters Society, visited the cemetary to collect data of
ghostly phenomena. The Society takes photos, video, and audio hoping to
find evidence of paranormal activity. (Herald Photo/Adam Nekola) |
COAL CITY - It is 7:17 p.m. on Halloween Eve, and Dan Jungles is
walking into a tiny cemetery in Coal City. All the fields, as Jungles
says, are normal. The pollen reading is at 1.2. The moon is at 30
percent waning, and the temperature is about 40 degrees.
This
night, Jungles and four other members of the Will County Ghost Hunters
Society are about to spend a few hours searching for spirits, as the
society has for the past three-plus years. Activity for them is
booming, Jungles said with the group booked into the new year.
The group did, however, agree to take the Morris Daily Herald out to the cemetery for a somewhat impromptu investigation.
Called Short Cemetery, the location is one of Jungles' personal favorites, one the group visits as much as a dozen times a year.
Even
equipped with an owl that occasionally patrols the area, and sometimes
spooks the investigators, the graveyard fits perfectly in the mold of a
stereotypical haunted cemetery.
“We go a lot of places, and even in the winter we'll come out here
just because it's nice and quiet out here and, for a lot of people,
it's got that classic what they think of when they think of creepy
cemeteries because it's overgrown and not maintained,” Jungles, who is
the group's director, said.
“There's old headstones in here, it's in the middle of nowhere, it's surrounded by trees.”
The life of a cemetery
If
you did not know it was there, you would pass by Short Cemetery and
never bat an eye. A small, grassy entrance way leads to it off a lonely
road.
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| Following
its investigation of the Short Cemetery in Coal City Tuesday evening,
the Will County Ghost Hunters Society found a photo with what appears
to be a ghostly figure in the left side of the photo. The inset photo
shows a close-up of the ghostly figure. (Photos courtesy of the Will
County Ghost Hunters Society) |
The cemetery itself lives up to its name as being a small,
enclosed space. Wind, a few coyotes, and the occasional car passing by
are the only things that disturb the air here - at least to the naked
eye.
The name of the cemetery, however, actually comes from the
bodies buried there. Jungles said he does not know much about the Short
family, the first family whose deceased relatives occupied the burial
grounds. The cemetery was first occupied around the late 1850s.
At one time, the group did have a partial list of those buried in the cemetery, which they found in a local newspaper article.
However,
finding information about the people buried at the cemetery has proven
to be difficult, especially because the group is so busy lately.
“Because it's such an older cemetery, too, it's harder to find
stuff. Records weren't kept as well as they are now,” Jungles said.
“And everything's not computerized. A lot of these smaller cemeteries, nothing's computerized.”
Though they don't know a lot about the Shorts, they can gather a few things about the history of the cemetery.
For
one, most of the people buried there are related. In fact, the only way
any new bodies can find a home there is to prove some relation, Jungle
said.
“It's all friends, it's all family,” Sarah Johnson, a
fellow investigator from Coal City who has helped research the area,
said. “I don't think there's too many separate families in here. I
think they're almost all one.”
Many of the people buried there
were immigrants who came from places such as Scotland or Ireland. Some
of the gravestones reflect that fact, as their home countries are
engraved as readily as their names or life spans.
And, as is the
case with many immigrants, many of those buried in the cemetery lived
the hard life of staking a claim in the American way of life. A lot of
them worked in the coal mines of Coal City, trying to carve out a way
of living, though often many died in the very same mines.
“So,
you have a lot of working-class people in here,” Jungles said. “There's
really not too many businessmen or anything like that in here.”
The
cemetery is minimally maintained. Aside from a small patch leading in
to the cemetery, which is mowed only a few times a year, the cemetery
is overrun by all types of plant life.
The reason for the
overgrowth is many of the plants are rare to Illinois and need to be
protected. There are even a bevy of cactuses all over the cemetery,
whose yellow spring flowers add to the cemetery's oddness.
The
cactuses - along with other plant life and the cemetery's location -
tax the soil quite a bit, making it soft and spongy. While walking on
it, visitors may find they sink a few inches, bringing them that much
closer to the graveyard's inhabitants.
The overgrowth - along
with factors such as a coal-mining accident or death from a disease -
may actually be a reason why the cemetery may be haunted.
“It's
not maintained at all, and that sometimes leads to spiritual activity,
where they're not happy because it's either vandalized or it's not
taken care of very well, and nobody comes here to visit them,” Jungles
said.
Signs of (after)life
As far as any ghostly
activity goes, Jungles said the group has noticed a few tell-tale
signs. There's ectoplasmic mist that forms on nights too warm to see
your breath. Some members have heard loud footsteps in the brush.
Jungles
also has heard some people say they have seen an apparition in the
center of the cemetery, which is its main burial area. People have said
they have seen the image of a young girl, who was possibly the victim
of some sort of disease. The hunters cannot, for certain, pinpoint who
the girl is until they can tie her to a certain time in history.
The
group also experiments with digital voice recorders, with which they
try to record the voices of the dead. The process involves gathering in
an area of the cemetery and asking questions, hoping some response will
register on the recorders.
During these recording sessions, the
group also measures the temperature in the area, along with its
magnetic field. Ghosts are said to occupy the electromagnetic plain and
can affect it with their presence.
One of the member's cameras
ran out of power during a session in the main burial area of the
cemetery, only to come back to life later on.
As far as
more-concrete evidence goes, it will take the group hours of combing
through data before they can find that lone voice in the night.
Luckily, the group did manage to find a photo in its initial analysis
of Tuesday night's visit showing a ghostly image that apparently
appeared during the recording session.
“It was taken during one of the (electromagnetic field) spikes,” Jungles said in an e-mail sent later Tuesday night.
A bond beyond the grave
With
little visitation from others, the ghost hunters end up becoming the
dead's mourners. It leads to a relationship being developed, fueled by
the hunter's scientific curiosity and the ghosts' natural curiosity and
loneliness.
“They're people, that's what people forget. They
think ghosts are spooky. They're not like Hollywood movies and stuff
like that,” Jungles said. “They're only people, that's all they were.
So I think you do develop a relationship with them. Even if they
initially don't want that, they kind of recognize that you're there.”
That
recognition is one of the reasons why Jungles enjoys the Short Cemetery
so much. It's quiet brings the feeling that someone is actually there
with you, watching your every move. Though the quiet may be deafening
to some people, Jungles takes a solace in it.
“It doesn't bother
me. It's very relaxing. Sometimes if I need to clear my head, I'll go
to the cemetery, which sounds weird to a normal person,” Jungles said.
“But it's very relaxing and soothing for me. I can clear my head and do
what I love to do.”
