Haunted Illinois True Ghost Stories and Experiences

Anyway, there are always foxes in there and every time I come to see my grandma, I bring food for the foxes. So I’m walking in the cemetery looking for the foxes and looking at the graves. Many have photos in frames of the dead on them. That's when I came to this one grave and for some reason I was intrigued by it. It was nothing special and everything was written in Hebrew so I had no idea what I was reading.

However, staring at it I felt a presence and I looked to my left and standing there is a young man in all gray with calf high flat black boots! I blinked and he was gone! The experience scared me and I left cemetery immediately. That was the first time I ever saw a ghost. Often though before that I just sensed their presence.

Like while I’m sleeping I feel someone sit on the foot of my bed, but when I wake up no one is there. Or, I will walk into a room and it will smell like roses or perfume or cologne and no one sprayed anything. My grandma said she was sensitive to those things too and she often feels presences or hears things, once about a month after my grandpa died the intercom went off in her room and the only way it could happen is if someone was upstairs in my grandfathers bedroom pushing the call button but she was home alone.

Also my bedroom mirror at home in Chicago, I once thought was a portal for spirits because I would see movement of a sort from the side of the mirror and weird smudges though I never touched it. It could also just me my overactive imagination.

The stone belonged to Jeanette Solar, born 1898 and died in 1918 as a young mother at the age of only twenty. Maybe child birth was what killed her. Also, yellow fever, cholera and influenza were very fatal at that time in history.

One night we heard someone come up the stairs to knock on our door. My sisters were in and out so we thought nothing of the footsteps coming down the hallway and up the stairs echoing on the hardwood against the walls with no carpet to muffle the sound. As these steps stopped on the top landing we all turned our heads to see who was coming in. The brass knob turned halfway through its complete rotation and snapped back! The old chandelier directly above my brothers head exploded. The heavy parts remained attached but the bulbs and crystals all came raining down on top of my baby brother who was sitting on the table directly under the chandelier.

Soon after this incident, we started catching glimpses of a white object moving around. Just a flash at first moving from one room to another and after looking straight on, or investigating we found nothing. This would happen at least twice week for sometime thereafter.

My older sister once yelled and we came running only to find her freaked out saying there was something white that went in the closet that looked like a moving dress. It was around this time that what we were seeing began to take on a more focused shape. I remember my mom telling what she thought was my sister to stop walking away when she was talking to her, following her into the middle bedroom and finding nobody in there.

The moving white dress now had long brown hair when seen from behind. It didn’t take a family of geniuses to figure out what was going on here. The moving white dress with brown hair now had a name, and that name was Jeanette. As the appearances became more frequent, we began to accept this for what we thought it was, a haunting.

One night during “Indian Summer”, my best friend and I were walking through my gangway from the street. As we came walking past a basement window, he turned and asked what the light was down there. We crouched to see what looked like someone with a flashlight. As we crowded in and cupped our hands to the glass, we saw her! She was wearing a glowing white dress with long brown hair. Where her face should have been, there was only a foggy blur! I yelled, “It’s her!” and we ran around to the back, down the stairs and opened the door to nothing but darkness. She was gone!

We had an empty apartment downstairs where you could hear the sounds of a muffled conversation. All this time we would catch a glimpse of the white gowned figure we determined must have been a wedding dress.

One night, while I was taking a shower, I heard my dad shouting, “That’s enough! That’s enough!” I came running out into the hallway, wrapped in a towel, to find myself now standing face to face with our ghost!. I don’t think she saw me as there was no change of expression, or direction of travel, or speed as she walked right through me.

I can still see the dark void where her eyes should have been. My whole body shook and a drumming vibration of fear fell through me. My body hair stood on end as I rotated a quarter step back and I fell against the wall, sliding down to the floor. About that time, my dad came down the hall and ask if I had seen her.

The next day the tombstone was gone. My dad gave it back to the cousin who had originally carried it into the house. It wound up in a motorcycle repair shop one of my other cousins operated and he kept it in a shed behind the shop.

Without any knowledge of any of these events, one of his friends who stayed there started seeing a white figure walking around outside and didn‘t want to stay there by himself any longer so he up and left. Shortly thereafter, the place burned down, but from what I’ve heard, they left the tombstone there.