Ghost: Resurrection Mary

You've heard the story right. A man offers a ride to a ghost on the side of the road. You know how it goes, right, so you could pick him up. Blah blah blah. Either way, I love telling it, so we'll take it one more time. This true account is set up on the South side of Chicago, and it comes from a man named Ralph. It is January in nineteen seventy nine and a taxi driver was driving late at night. It was a cold one and his heater for some reason, wasn't cranking out enough hot air, so he put his hand over the vents to feel for it just as the car was moving. Then, from out of the corner of his eye, just then he spots a figure all in white standing on the side of the road, facing away from him. Wondering how anyone could be out there in such a nice dress and without a coat, he became worried. As he got closer, he realized that it was a young woman, a maximum of twenty one years old, and he pulled up, pulled on the window and asked if she needed a ride. Quietly, she nodded and stepped into the car. She wouldn't give directions. Instead, she would answer in simple nods and nose shaking her head. Her face was almost always hidden by the shadows of that night, and just as they were approaching Archer Avenue, though everything changed, she suddenly jumped up and said, here, here, stop here. The cab driver was slightly startled. Are you sure, he questioned the young woman. As he looked around the area where the cab had just stopped, He could see nothing but the dark sections of the road and the large gates of Resurrection Cemetery. She repeated his question as he turned around, but when he did, there was nobody in the backseat. This account comes from an issue of a magazine called Suburban Trip from nineteen seventy nine, and despite it being such a common tale, it wasn't the only one witness accounts. Investigators and the production crew of the original Unsolved Mysteries, and many other amateur reporters flocked to the area. They wanted to catch something new about the story of the phantom of the Woman in the White Dress. But when reports started coming in of multiple witnesses who were in the same car together, reports from respectable people around the community and the way they all seem to match, made the news turn from just a ghost appearing on Archer Avenue to the mystery of who the ghost could be. And that is what I'm going to tell you about today. If you're from Chicago, you're in luck. Is Chicago's most famous ghost story. This is a tale of Resurrection Mary. My name is Edwin, and here is a dark memory. In nineteen eighty five, the Chicago Tribune published an article that depicted the tale of a young, attractive blonde in an old fashioned white prom dress that appeared to be in need of help. In it, they mention a man named Richard T. Crowe who has collected reports of resurrection Mary that go all the way back to nineteen thirty nine, and according to Richard, over three dozen of them have been substantiated. According to Richard, the ghost belonged to a woman who died tragically in a car accident in the nineteen thirties a long Archer Avenue between Resurrections Cemetery and the Willowbrook Ballroom in Willow Springs. A couple of patterns that he noticed were that it was usually men, young ones that would spot her. Women rarely became witnesses to the ghost, but it was also common for her to appear at one thirty in the morning. This first account from nineteen thirty nine that they mentioned was one that I was able to trace down all the way back to Unsolved Mysteries Season six, episode fifteen. And I'm not talking about the new Netflix one. I mean the original one with Robert Stack. There was an interview with a man who was by this time much older, who was talking about his story, the one that started everything, and it begins in Chicago at a dance hall where Jerry Pallace was a regular. It wasn't too late and the people we're having a good time. That's when he spotted a young woman with blonde hair and blue eyes and asked her to dance. She accepted and he touched her hand. Then he realized just how cold she was. He tried his usual lines, complimenting her and trying to get her to smile, but she seems very quiet. She did tell him that her name was Mary and that she lived in the South Side, but that was about all he was able to find out about her. When it was time to leave, he offered her a ride home and she accepted, and so they walked to the car and soon they were on their way to the woman's home. By now he had her address instead, though the young woman asked to be taken to Archer Road. Confused, Jerry was like, why do you want me to take you there and not to your house? But she insisted, and so they headed that way. They were along that road when suddenly she yelled here here. Jerry stopped for a second and asked why there there were no houses there and what was she going to be doing. She then got out of the car and walked over the cemetery gates, and as he watched in a bit of shock, wondering where she would go, she vanished on her way into the gates. The next day, Jerry visited the house where she claimed to have lived, but instead found a woman who sadly said that the woman he was referring to was actually her daughter, her daughter who had died five years before. In fact, all of that information comes directly from Jerry. Before his death in nineteen ninety two, he had been the very first witness to Resurrection Mary, and in the year sinds that night in nineteen thirty nine, accounts started popping up with Resurrection Mary spotted at the dance hall crossing the road, being picked up by taxi drivers, and even being struck by passing cars. Drivers would report an accident after striking a young woman dressed in white. It was said that as she struck the car, she would vanish, but other times she would fall to the ground in front or by the side of the car, but when the driver would step out to help, there would be no girl in sight. Adam Seltzer's book The Ghost of Chicago, The Windy City's most famous Haunts, makes a mention of resurrection Mary and what I'm about to share with you is a series of encounters that date back from the early seventies, based on his collection, A subtle sighting with a man that picked up a person who he thought was his friend from sie school. When he pulled up to her, he found it awkward to simply drive away when he realized it wasn't her, so then he just offered her a ride and she accepted, but just a couple of blocks down, she disappeared out of the car right as he passed by the cemetery. A man named Bob Maine told the Chicago Tribune back in nineteen ninety two about a woman he had seen two different times in nineteen seventy three at the nightclub the one that used to be at eighty fifty eight South Cicril Avenue. He speaks of an occasion on a Friday night when a woman appeared, looking to be in her mid twenties, about five feet eight inches tall, with yellow blonde hair with big curls coming from a high forehead. She wore an old white but looked faded yellow dress and was dancing by herself. People who were there that night were wondering who she could have been. She was so strange. The thing was, nobody ever saw her actually come in, and nobody saw her leave. On a Saturday night, two weeks later, she was spotted again. There's a place called Chet Melody Lounge that sits adjacent of Resurrection Cemetery, and the owner at the time, a man named Chet Prazinski, recalls the first time a strange event happened. It was a regular night, but a lot slower than usual. At this particular moment, it was just him at the bar when all of a sudden, a man stormed in through the door. He looked around and wandered about the locale before heading up to the bar. Area where Chet was. He demanded to know where the blonde woman was, the one in the white dress. Confused, Chet simply looked at him, wondering if maybe he had one too many drinks in it him. But then the man explained himself, saying that he was a cab driver and that a blond woman in a white dress had disappeared out of his taxi without pain. The newspapers say that Chet started leaving a bloody Mary on the counter every night for Mary, though he claims that sometimes it would disappear. In the interview, he laughs, saying that it could have simply been a guest who had taken it thinking that it was a free drink. The Saturday before Christmas in nineteen seventy four, two boys told the story of seeing a blonde woman in an old fashioned ball dress dancing down the street, acting weird. The story was told to Richard Crowe, the ghost hunter slash historian, who had been taking reports at the time, saying that Mary had also been spotted jumping in men's cars down by Archer Avenue, completely out of it. Could her restless ghost be showing her frustration? And the sightings continued with reports of a police officer who received a call to get him to check on Resurrection Cemetery based on a sighting of a blonde woman inside of the gates. She was suspected to have gotten locked inside back in August tenth, nineteen seventy six. When he got there, he saw that there was nobody there, but the gates of the cemetery had been pried open, as if something someone but the type of superhuman strength, had tried to escape. The gates were shown to have fingerprints edged into the metal, supporting the idea that perhaps a ghost had tried to escape from the cemetery and it stayed that way for years. There's even photographs of it on the internet. However, the keepers of the cemetery denied this, saying that it had been an accident and the workers had attempted to mold the gates bars back into place with a blowtorch, therefore leaving glove marks edged onto the bars, and they were trying to shape it back into place. In an account told by Nick Muros, a taxi driver that took place around nineteen eighty talks about him driving by the cemetery early one Sunday morning when he saw a dark object on the graveyard, and that's when he saw a girl in a flowing white dress walking toward the gates. All he could do was stare for the ten seconds or so as she walked up to the median strip and stood there with their palms turned up. She didn't disappear or anything. He didn't even offer her a ride. He simply retold this story as he saw it, explaining just how creeped out he was. And like this. There are dozens of accounts, some of which you can find on Adam Selzer's books, with sources that look into the newspapers and books where they were published. Could they be true? With such a famous story circulating for what eighty years, there has to be some truth to it? Right? Who was she and how does she die? And researching about it I found stories of car accidents, debates and theories, all which charter points at who Mary was And I'll tell you all about it up next. Researchers have looked into the story and have speculated that this woman is resting at Section m M site number nine eight one nine of Resus Direction Cemetery. She is a large and beautiful graveyard, being the home of almost one hundred and fifty thousand souls in the four hundred and seventy five acre lot, and the woman's name Marie Brigov, a woman who was killed in a car accident in nineteen thirty four on her way home from a dance. However, I do have some questions about this, and lots of people caught on that. The only details that seem to match are the name and how she died. But for context, here's how the story begins. The report on the newspaper from the Chicago Tribune, dated March eleventh, nineteen thirty four, reads as follows girl killed in crash. Miss Mary Brogovi, twenty one years old, was killed last night when the auto in which she was writing in cracked up at Street and Whacker Drive. John Reiker, three Knight Street, park Ridge suffered a possible skull fracture and is in the County hospital. John Tole, twenty five, driver of the car, and Miss Virginia Rozanski twenty two, were shaken up and scratched. The scene of the accident is known to the police as a dangerous spot. Thol told police he did not see the substructure. A friend of Marie Brogovi found out about this ghost story in the nineteen eighties and explained to the South Town Economist how her friend had died, with a few more details about her life. Marie's friend's name was Verne Ritzkowski, and she told the story of that faithful day. The two friends had accepted a trip to a shopping district by two young men that Marie had met. Vern was not happy with them and started telling Marie about how irritated she was regarding the types of men she was meeting. They left the car before getting to their destination, but Marie managed to make a date for that night. Verne was angry with Marie. Marie called Verne rude, but still they were friends, and Verne told her to be careful that night. That next morning, though Verne's mother woke her up to tell her about the accident that had killed Marie. Three days later, she was buried at Resurrection Cemetery. But here are the discrepancies. Marie died in downtown Chicago, so her path to go home just did not make sense. How would she go from a Southwest side ballroom to her house and then pass by there. Plus, according to the funeral home, that helped prepare Marie Bragovi for burial, said that she died on the ambulance on the way to the hospital on the spots, had the wrong hair color as a ghost story, and she wore the wrong clothes. Now, I'm not trying to play detective here of a ghost story, but I wouldn't be bringing this up if there wasn't a better alternative, because you see, there's another woman that seems to match the witness accounts of the ghost sightings. But still it doesn't mean that Marie Brogovi isn't roaming around the cemetery. A caretaker has called in the funeral home to tell them about a ghost that has been walking along the cemetery when that resembled Marie with the short, dark hair. And here is the other candidate, And that's a story of Anna Norkis a man named Frank and Dregisich of Summit, Illinois who became obsessed with this story after his brother sent him an article back in August of nineteen ninety four. It was about the phantom that would appear along Resurrection Cemetery, and so he got to work gathering information and opinions, photographs and burial records. One of the people he spoke to was Chester Jake Paulis and told the story of him and his brother taking a woman home after a night of dancing at the Liberty Grove Hall in ballroom in Brighton Park in nineteen thirty nine. As they were heading to her address, the one that she had given, she disappeared. As it turns out, this Jake Palace was the younger brother of Jerry Pallace, the man who had supposedly danced with Mary at the ballroom. Yes, from that same story I told her earlier. So now holes were being found in the story and a new one was coming up, And then suddenly everything seemed to start making sense. You see, Anna loved to dance, and when she was thirteen, she convince her father to take her to a dance hall, to the old Henry Ballroom, and that evening of July twentieth, nineteen twenty seven, they set off with one of her father's friends and his friends state at around one point thirty in the morning. They passed by Resurrection Cemetery on Archer Avenue, and that's why they turned east on seventy first Street and then north on Harlem when suddenly the car fell into a ditch for the railroad that was twenty five feet deep. Anna was killed on the spot. Obviously, the death of such a young woman was a tragedy and the entire burial possession was painful. However, there were a few problems behind the scenes, some that might have caused or goes to wor under around. Ever since, we have to consider the times for this one. Back then, grave digging was not a very well paid job and it was tough digging graves by hand, so workers from cemeteries would go on strikes to demand better pay every so often. It is said that it is very possible that during the burial of Anna this could have been going on. So at the time, a man named al Truris Junior used to live across the road from the Gates of Resurrection Cemetery and he was in charge of the grave diggers. It was sort of a deal for him to live there and work, and he had a strange task during one of those strikes. You see, because the cemetery was one of the main ones in Chicago, he was usually given the coffins to bury them temporarily before they were put in their eternal resting. Place. But again, considering the times, there was no proper refrigeration and the coffins were not built that well, the best place to put them would be in the ground right away, So it is possible she was buried in the wrong spot, away from her family quietly, and no one ever found out. Frank's research might seem like just another theory among many other marys, but it's by far the most convincing. The area itself has its own set of theories, among ancient Indian trails, spirits through the waterways, and many other ghosts spotted by the caretakers. One of these stories is that of a sad man one who waits outside of the gates. Some say it's just a lost soul, but others claim that it's the father of Anna, the man who turned to alcohol as he was blamed for the death of his daughter all of his remaining years, so he died with guilt. But about the ghost of Anna, there was one little detail that I've skipped. The year of her death and the location where she roams all seemed to match in order to give us a clue as to who this ghost belongs to. But there is one more thing, and it's about what Anna used to call herself when she was a part of the Living. Her name, in fact, the one that has been suggested many times to be her actual name, was Anna marriage Norkis. May she find peace. This episode of A Dark Memory was written and researched by me Edwin ko Aruas an idea or location you want me to visit or talk about, send me an email or find me on discord or on social media. I'll leave links in the description of this episode. Join me on another podcast that I may called Scary Mystery Surprise, where Michelle and I talk about creepy things that we find around the Internet, but with a lighter perspective. Search for it on your app and it's live now. Look for an episode called a Taste for Human Meat, but just out after you eat. 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