Shawn Ford remembers the Halloween night years ago when his father drove him to the Old St. Patrick’s Cemetery. He was just 6-years-old at the time, sitting in the leather-backed passenger seat of his father’s dark blue, two-door 1978 Lincoln Continental.
Ford’s dad was telling ghost stories.
These were tales from the ‘30s, when he had been a kid. A strange creature had been going around killing cattle and howling at night, sounding “like a woman and a baby screaming at the same time.” His dad had even seen it; a form atop a hill at a local farm, screaming at the moonlight.
Then, the young Ford heard scratching at the door.
It was not, in fact, some terrible creature of the night, but a little prank his dad had pulled.
“I don’t know how he ended up making it so it sounded like something was scratching on the outside of the door. But he must have run a string or something,” Ford recalled, with more humor than he likely had at the time. “I don’t know, but that did scare me pretty good.”
The old cemetery was an appropriate location for the familial prank. Now over 175 years old, it’s connected with stories factual and fictional — and often a mix of both — perfect for the Halloween season, and has been ranked as one of the most haunted places in the state.
The cemetery isn’t just a local curiosity for Ford. He’s got family buried there. His great-great-grandmother, who had a husband killed in the Franco-Prussian War, is buried at the cemetery. And he has uncles who died shortly after birth who hadn’t been baptized, and so were buried outside the fence.
Consecrated in 1849 and with over 600 interments according to the Archdiocese of Chicago, Old St. Patrick’s Cemetery had its own church until it was destroyed in a fire in 1911.
Today, Ford is the president of the Newport Historical Society, and during his research he’s come across numerous local ghost stories, with several tied to the small cemetery.
One of the most infamous has been Mary Worth, who is sometimes connected to variations of the Bloody Mary story. In some versions, she’s described as a morally deplorable witch taking part in the abuse of runaway slaves who was ultimately burned for her misdeeds and buried near the cemetery.
Ford’s research has found there was a real Mary Worth who lived in the area, but he isn’t particularly convinced she was quite the malicious figure portrayed in the stories based on the documentation he’s been able to find.
The Mary Worth he’s seen in records was the daughter of Union soldier Fred Worth; she was born in 1878, 13 years after the end of the Civil War. Ford conceded it may be a different Mary Worth to the one spoken about in the stories, however.
The closest connection he’s found to anything particularly unusual was some accounts during her time in Gurnee, where Mary Worth was from, of students believed to have been bewitched; tearing off their clothes and running around in the moonlight.
Ghost stories, witches and cultural anxiety
Colin Dickey, an author and professor at National University who has written on the historical and cultural side of ghost stories, found the description of Mary Worth as a witch to be particularly interesting. American stories about witchcraft are “fascinating” because of the prominence of the Salem witch trials, he said.
“We’re raised with the story of Salem, and we’re taught pretty unequivocally that this is a horrendous miscarriage of justice. It’s a warning to not fall into these kinds of hysterical ‘witch hunts,’” Dickey said.
And yet, ghost stories will often have women as supernatural witches, coming back to curse people or cause trouble.
“In the same breath that we want to say that witches are persecuted innocent people, we also want to say they have this power,” Dickey said. “I’ve always thought that’s a very strange contradiction that people have a hard time resolving.”
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That can lead to modifications that make a “more stable ghost story,” even potentially at the expense of history, Dickey said, such as turning a woman into an abuser of runaway slaves.
Dickey’s work with ghost stories has less to do with the validity of the supernatural than it does examining what such stories can show about American culture and history. There’s often repeated tropes in American ghost stories that reveal underlying anxieties or societal views, Dickey said, such as the Indian burial grounds that appear in movies and stories.
“I’ve always thought that for particularly white Americans, it’s a way of having an anxiety or some sort of latent feeling that ‘this land is not really ours,’ but at the same time keeping it a little bit at arm’s length,” he said.
It was taking a difficult question of social justice and moving it into “myth and fantasy.”
“You’re not talking about reparations or ceding lands back,” he said. “You’re talking about how the Native Americans have put a curse on us, and all of our calamities are a sort of payback for that.”
And for those growing up away from rural life, small town ghost stories may reflect their own anxieties about the countryside. They may find the “dead quiet” unnerving, and the stories are a confirmation of their feelings that “something is off.”
He talked about cemeteries, and how their popular perception has evolved over time.
In the 19th century, the concept of “garden cemeteries” rose to prominence, he said. These were meant to be expansive, pleasant places to visit, where people could be near their deceased loved ones in an aesthetically pleasing environment and even hold picnics.
Smaller cemeteries like Old St. Patrick’s, in contrast, fell “more and more into disrepair,” taking on “this sheen of being neglected and forgotten.” From decrepit Victorian mansions to abandoned stone asylums, America’s most haunted spots are typically any space “that has outlived its purpose,” Dickey said.
He also highlighted the differences between urban and rural ghost stories. Tales like those from Wadsworth often focus on otherwise historically minor figures, and in some ways act as a preservation of local history.
Compare that to the supernatural tales shared in places like Los Angeles, where “all of the hotels are haunted by Marilyn Monroe or Rudolph Valentino,” he said.
“They’re very star hungry in Los Angeles or New York,” Dickey said. “You get this divide between the famous, who tend to haunt cities, and these kind of forgotten, no-name people who tend to haunt more rural and smaller towns.”
Ghost stories are often a way “to resolve things that we left unresolved in this life,” Dickey said. Ghosts can haunt their killers, or serve as a warning for the living to not forget the tragedies of the past.