Hello, I'm Kirarose, If you are just surfing through you are most likely wondering what in the world is so special about a cemetery? If you came through on a link you're still wondering what's so great about it?
Springwood Cemetery is a fictitious place based on a real cemetery. I have taken a real cemetery and it's half remembered legends and I'm slowly turning it into a book. As you can guess it's a book of ghost stories.
The Real Springwood Cemetery isn't named Springwood. It's named Greenwood. Greenwood Cemetery is reputed to be one of the most haunted Cemeteries in Central IL.
[email protected]
My Passion | The Book | The Pictures | Hell's Hollow | Greenwood Cemetery | My ghost stories
My Passion Well to put it quite bluntly, Greenwood Cemetery has always been a secret passion of mine. I remember as a small child passing it and feeling a certain amount of awe. The Cemetery is so vast. It is like visiting a city of the dead. The rich and the poor, the famous and the infamous...they all lay together at Greenwood. Once a private burial ground for a family, it is also reputed to have been an Indian Burial ground. Later the city of Decatur came to own it. Three other cemeteries were emptied to make way for progress and the bodies were moved to Greenwood. Sometimes they didn't find all the bodies....but that is another tale. The hills of the cemetery are very steep and you don't dare wear dress shoes to walk about. That would be a good way to twist an ankle or end up doing a header down a hill. But what has always fascinated me was the ghost stories about the place and indeed the entire area.
The entire area is supposed to be haunted from the cemetery to Hell's Hollow, from Spring street. (yes spring street is it's actual name) to the factory/warehouse across the street. Even some of the houses in Lincoln Park are supposed to be haunted and indeed the area attracts the violence of gangs. The Spring Street ghost is my favorite by far of all the ghost stories outside of the actual cemetery. No one knows who she is and her clothes are timeless. She is extremely beautiful and seen in complete daylight but as someone tries to turn around and see her better she disappears. Both my father and my grandfather saw her as well as countless others. But you can't go look for her or she never appears
Here lately my secret obsession has made it's way into other hobbies. My fanfiction and my RPG. but that's okay I think in the long run it will help with the book. You know work out some of the bugs in it.
The Book Writing a book about the place has been floating around my mind for a long time now. There is a non-fiction book (indeed a series of books) written by Troy Taylor called Haunted Decatur and it touches upon Greenwood but doesn't concentrate on it. The book I'm writing though is a fiction book called Tales from Springwood Cemetery. I take the legends of Greenwood and flesh them out (no pun intended). The book is a collection of short stories all ghost stories and many with a twist at the end. They are all connected together by two central characters Red Gentry the caretaker and an un-named Reporter who is interviewing him. The book isn't finished yet and I'm loathe to provide any more details on it.
The Pictures
Hell's Hollow Tainted ground is what Hell's Hollow is. Once upon a time as legend tells a band of settlers got cut off from the small town (located on the other side of what is now Decatur) during a terrible winter. The end result? Can we say Donner Party? Yep they ate the dead. What animals were around the area had long since fled as the winter wore on and no food could be found. They couldn't make their way through the wilderness. They say that anywhere cannibalism has happened the land becomes tainted and prone to violence. Perhaps that is true. Later in the twentieth century Hell's Hollow as it became known during that time had another rash of violence. The term Hell's Hollow was actually from a news paper in Chicago. Yellow Journalism as I believe it was called played up a couple of murders in Decatur. The actual murders were crimes of passion committed over a girl. But to read the paper it was thought that it was because of gangsters or a cult.
It was a bit of a shanty town, a lot of would be vagrants and dirt poor people lived there building houses out of anything they could find, on the edge of the shanty town that would become known as Hell's Hollow, lived the coal miners, there you were starting to get into the more respectable people.
To this day, it is still called Hell's Hollow though no one lives there now. Many people don't even realize why it's called Hell's Hollow but they will be quick to tell you it's a bad place. Over the years it was torn down but there is still street lights that no longer work standing where once houses(shacks) stood. Lately the power company has put lines up on them, I guess it's better to do that then go to the trouble of putting new ones up. At one point the area was a way of proving your courage. You went there at night and told ghost stories, of course a favorite one involved the famous Hook story. You know the one where the kids are in the car making out when across the radio it's announced an escaped lunatic is in the area and one of his hands is a hook. They try to leave but wouldn't you know it....no gas. So the brave teen boy leaves to get gas with the instruction to the girl lock the doors and hide under the seat. Then for the rest of the night she hears a scratching noise. In the morning a cop comes and gets her and tries to keep her from looking back but of course she has to, her boyfriend is hanging over the car his finger nails lightly scraping the roof of the car....headless.
Ahhhh a classic tale told across America but Hell's Hollow is definitely the setting to tell it, especially if you are trying to get a quick grope
In recent decades the area became known as a make out place, but not so much anymore. They have put up these metal bars deep in the ground that stand really high that block the entrance. When Blackadder (my husband) went in to take pictures with in the Hollow wouldn't you know it? A cop pulls up wanting to know what we are doing I told him we were taking pictures of the cemetery from down there. The lesser of the two evils. I'm sure if we had mentioned taking pictures of the Hollow we would have gotten a ticket, because that is considered off limits
Funny though how for the most part even after all these decades...the trees have never taken over the hollow
Greenwood Cemetery Greenwood...rolling hills. It's gigantic. But unfortunately it looks like no one has ever had a set plan for how the dead were to be buried. I think that it's part of why I'm attracted to it. The place is so unexpected, so contrary! There are graves where you least expect them. Some are stuck in the oddest places. At the bottom of a hill a lone grave marker bares testament that someone resides under the earth, Yet no other marker is seen and you would need a rope to get down to the darn thing to even see who is buried there. There are people buried in the actual sides of hills. They are shoved in sideways, on top of each other, any way that they could get in. The markers are sliding toward each other in some places making you wonder about the caskets themselves. Do they now lay next to each other?
Beautiful monuments lay next to tiny anonymous markers of the poor. The place is uncanny. They have actual tours go through the place and at the end of summer people dress up like those famous and (infamous) people buried out there.
There are mines under the cemetery and there are tales of workers who go to lunch and when they return the casket is gone having fallen through the earth into a mine. With stories such as these who can resist wondering about ghosts
In the past caskets have washed out of their graves when it had rained too much and had to be reburied and not always in the right grave. Sometimes people ended up under the wrong marker! That don't happen so much anymore particularly since they put concrete around the worst washout areas
My Ghost Stories Someone asked me, "Do you believe in ghosts?"
And I said, "It depends on when you ask me."
And it's true it depends on when you ask me. Some days I laugh at the very idea that ghosts exist and will tell you so readily. But then there are some days when I truly believe. After first starting my book I visited Greenwood for inspiration. For days afterward strange things would happen, but only on the nights I tried to write. As long as I didn't open up the file I was fine but if I opened the Springwood file...all hell would break loose. It took months before I could open the file without something happening. And that fact that I moved 45 miles away didn't hurt. Recently when I and Blackadder went to take pictures for the Book and this site. Minor annoyances cropped up. Stuff like a brand new scanner that wouldn't scan in any of our pictures at first, but would scan anything else in. It took two days to scan in the pictures! And there were false starts every time. Tonight typing this in the dark yes I believe in ghosts, tomorrow in the light I will laugh and say no they don't exist. But in truth the answer is I don't know they could, they might not, I don't know.