Spooky weekend

In the spirit of Halloween and fall, Dave and I visited some famous north side Chicago cemeteries today: Rosehill and Graceland.

We visited Graceland first, where Weird Illinois told me I could find the statue "Eternal Silence," or, more popularly, the Statue of Death.


Supposedly, if you look it in the face, you'll get a vision of your own death. Dave and I looked it in the face, but nothing happened. It is a very spooky statue, though.

We walked around to various graves of famous Chicagoans, including Marshall Field, George Pullman, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and others. Here's an interesting one with a pyramid:


We also searched for the grave of Inez Clark, which, according to Weird Illinois, is supposedly haunted. The statue of the little girl supposedly disappears sometimes, particularly during thunderstorms.

At any rate, it is a beautiful statue, and we managed to find it even without the help of a map, which we used to find the other graves.

That's one annoying thing about Weird Illinois - they don't include any cemetery maps, even for huge cemeteries like Graceland and Rosehill.

Then we drove a few blocks up and over to Rosehill Cemetery, where another serene and beautiful fall scene awaited us.


Rosehill was a little more difficult to navigate, as it is even larger than Graceland, yet there are no maps to the graves that we wanted to visit from Weird Illinois. Nonetheless, we found many interesting statues, such as the deer, above, and a stone couch, below.


Yes, Dave had a good sit on the couch. We had been walking a lot, what can I say.


We never found the sites from Weird Illinois, but it was a good walk around the cemetery, and we thought maybe we'd come back for one of the free guided tours sometime.

The whole weekend has been perfect for getting me into the Halloween spirit, especially since we had a Halloween horror movie marathon last night. The movies included The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an interesting but somewhat hard to follow German expressionist horror story from the silent film era; Freaks, a really good film starring real "freaks" from the 1930s; and The Fly, an obviously creepy story from a couple of rough months in the life of Jeff Goldblum.

Anyway, after this weekend, I'm suitably creeped out, and definitely ready for Halloween.