About this episode
In 1900, Chicago families spent their Christmas inside a cemetery. Sleigh rides, carolers, children playing among snow-covered monuments — all of it unfolding across 350 acres on the city's north side. It sounds like a Hallmark movie. It was Rosehill Cemetery.In this episode of The Grim, host Kristin explores Chicago's first and grandest private cemetery — a Gothic fortress of ambition, tragedy, and restless spirits receiving the city's dead since 1859. Its castellated limestone entrance gate mirrors the iconic Water Tower on Michigan Avenue, both designed by the same architect. Inside, Chicago's largest mausoleum holds Tiffany-crafted windows, including a chapel commissioned to bathe its occupant's crypt in underwater blue light at sunset — chairs adorned with seahorses included.That occupant is John G. Shedd. Nearby rest Richard Warren Sears and Aaron Montgomery Ward — mail-order rivals for eternity. Legend says Sears never accepted the arrangement. Witnesses report a tall figure in a top hat pacing the marble corridors and vanishing into the chill.Rosehill holds sixteen Union generals, three victims of the 1929 Saint Valentine's Day Massacre whose grave locations are withheld from public record, victims of the 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire and the 1915 SS Eastland disaster, and Bobby Franks — the fourteen-year-old victim of Leopold and Loeb's crime of the century — beneath a small stone carrying an unbearable weight.Among its other residents: a Nobel Peace Prize-winning Vice President, the inventor who helped wire the modern world, the man who gave Chicago its planetarium, and the composer of The Little Drummer Boy.And among its haunted: a glass-encased statue where ghostly mist rises on the anniversary of a young mother's death, a sixteen-year-old girl whose memorial receives coins and flowers through a glass case — and where visitors report hearing cries on quiet evenings.In December, when snow covers the winding paths and wreaths hang on wrought-iron gates, Rosehill keeps its own quiet vigil.Support the showSupport The Grim by buying a cup of our next Grave Grind!https://buymeacoffee.com/kristinlopesFind All of The Grim's Social Links At:https://www.the-grim.com/socialmedia
