by Adam Selzer
“All right,” Rick says. “Start researching all the stories you heard tonight, and be ready to tell the Resurrection Mary story next time you come on the tour.”
“You can get the Chicago Tribune archives online through the same library portal you use for the OED,” says Cyn. “A few years of some other local papers’ archives, too.”
“Thanks for giving me the opportunity,” I say. “I won’t let you down.”
This may be the most sincere promise I have ever made.
I will learn everything. I will be the best tour guide ever. They will never regret hiring me.
On the train ride home, I start poking around on the Oxford English Dictionary online using my phone and find a fantastic word from 1785: “murdermonger.” A word for one who deals in murders, or in murder stories.
That’s what I am now. A murdermonger in training.
Awesome.
Chapter Four
From: Megan
To: Ricardo Torre, Cynthia Fargon
Date: Thursday, 12:15 a.m.
Subject: Articles
Reading up like crazy on all the stories in the newspaper archives.
The devil baby was definitely a real rumor that everyone got all excited about; Jane Addams wrote a whole book about it. But she said it was just an urban legend that had no basis in fact. Even if someone had brought a “devil baby” to Hull House, I assume they would have taken it to the hospital, not buried it alive! Jane Addams would never have buried a baby alive, and fuck anyone who says she would.
Also, I found a whole physician’s report on the guy they tried to bring back to life after they hanged him. They got his heart beating again but his neck was broken.
From: Megan
To: Ricardo Torre, Cynthia Fargon
Date: Thursday, 12:45 a.m.
Subject: More Articles
Found a few articles about that Marjorie Kay Stone woman, too. Have you seen this one from the 1960s describing her “Finders of Magwitch Park” business? Not that I doubted you guys, but she sounds like a real trip. It talks about her finding a monkey who could play Monopoly in a commercial. Fun job.
From: Ricardo Torre
To: Cynthia Fargon, Megan
Date: Thursday, 1:15 a.m.
Subject: Monkey
I could totally teach a monkey to play Monopoly. You just have to lay down the law. You say, “Listen, Monkey. Getting $500 for landing on Free Parking is a house rule, not a real rule, and we play the real rules here.” If he doesn’t play right, no bananas.
Thursday, 1:22 a.m.
From: Cynthia Fargon
To: Ricardo Torre, Megan
Subject: Re: Monkey
Doinkus.
ZOEY BABY:
Congrats on the job! You will be awesome.
MEG:
YAY!
MEG:
I’m a murdermonger now. Mom’s gonna kill me.
ZOEY BABY:
Murdermonger?
MEG:
OED word for a person who deals in murder stories.
ZOEY BABY:
Hehe. Look up “ghost.”
MEG:
The “ghost” entry is huge! Earliest English use is from “Old English Text #178” in the year 800: “To ymbhycggannae . . . hust his ‘gasta’ . . . seter deothrage doemid uueorth[ae.”
ZOEY BABY:
Bork bork bork.
MEG:
HEHE! Well, autocorrect hates me now.
MEG:
Here’s a pic of the inside of the tomb. Rick just sent it to me, so you are the first outside Chicago to see it in decades.
MEG:
Would that be enough to get you to send one of you? Even just, like, a silhouette, so I know what to picture when we’re . . . you know . . .
ZOEY BABY:
Hmmm . . . *blush* I just get so nervous about that stuff. . . .
MEG:
It’s okay. No pressure.
MEG:
Here’s another of me. Enjoy, baby.
ZOEY BABY:
mmmmmmmmmmmm nighty night, my little murdermonger.
MEGAN:
Swoon.
From: Megan
To: Cynthia Fargon, Ricardo Torre
Date: Thursday, 2:30 a.m.
Subject: Re: More Articles
Digging up articles on the Couch tomb now.
There’s a 1911 one in the Chicago Examiner where a Chicago city official says he went inside in 1901 and it was empty. But in the same article, Ira’s grandson says the bodies were never moved, and that he thinks there are at least eight people in there, including two of his own brothers. Dude ought to know where his own brothers were.
From: Megan
To: Cynthia Fargon, Ricardo Torre
Date: Thursday, 4:45 am
Subject: Script for my Res Mary story
See attached file. This look okay? Found a few things on Mary Bregovy in the archives. Even if the ghost is real, it can’t be her—the stories were already a few years old when she died. But people have been saying the ghost was her for years, so I can see why you’d use her as an intro. None of the others died right on the tour route!
From: Ricardo Torre
To: Cynthia Fargon, Megan
Date: Thursday, 6:00 a.m.
Subject: Re: Script for my Res Mary story
Jesus, Megan, go to sleep! Seriously!
But—great job. You’re a natural, my little padawan!
On the Couch tomb: the guy who says it was empty in that article is a Chicago city official. Might as well listen to Edward Tweed.
On Mary: Your script looks good, but it might be too long. For stories we tell while we’re moving, not parked, you want a very basic, short version of the story for nights when traffic isn’t too heavy, then a bunch of extra things to add in case you have to stretch it out. For that story, my basic outline is:
1. In 1934 Mary Bregovy died RIGHT ON THIS SPOT!
2. She’s a popular candidate for the true identity of Resurrection Mary, our most famous local ghost.
3. People pick her up, then she disappears outside of Resurrection Cemetery.
4. Similar to other vanishing hitchhiker legends, but we have firsthand accounts. So there. Na-na na-na boo-bug, stick your head in a thunder-mug.
Then, if you need to fill space:
—Other possible Marys at Resurrection Cemetery (there are at least 70 from the right time period) (I always try to point out that no one’s sure Mary Bregovy is really her, because she’s totally NOT the ghost, the story was at least three years old when she died. But she was the girl they focused on when the story was on Unsolved Mysteries and she died right on the tour route, so.)
—Note that there’s no reliable sighting in which the ghost even says her name, so we might just be calling her Resurrection Mary because it has a better ring than, say, Resurrection Ethel.
—Specific sightings
—How those specific sightings differ from the standard “vanishing hitchhiker” urban legend
—Other local vanishing hitchhikers (there’s a hitchhiking flapper who disappears at Waldheim Cemetery, out by you)
—My plan to kidnap her (if you absolutely must)
We’re working the early shift at the home today. Off by 2 p.m. Wanna come meet us at Graceland Cemetery? We’ll do some training stuff. You can also sit in on the stand-up class I’m taking at Second City tonight if you want to. Being a tour guide is a similar skill set.
Now GO TO SLEEP!
—Ricardo
Chapter Five
The last three letters in my bowl of alphabet cereal the next morning are D, I, and E. Die.
“I’m calling in sick at the grocery store,” I say.
“You’re going to work,” says Mom. “Don’t listen to your cereal.”
“If the youth of today stop listening to their breakfast cereal, this country is done for,” I say. “You say so all the time.”
“I’ve never said that.”
“I heard you say it w
hile you were embalming some punk who didn’t listen to his cereal just last month.”
“Not funny.”
“Look, how is this not an omen?”
Mom looks down at my cereal. There is no denying that it says “die.”
“It’s German,” she insists. “It means ‘the.’ ”
“They make this stuff in Michigan,” I say. “Why would it be speaking in German?”
“It’s trying to say ‘the only way you’ll work off the damage you did to the hearse is by going to work.’ ”
“In German?”
“In German.”
“There aren’t enough letters in a full bowl to say that all in German.”
“You owe me money. Go to work.”
I know I’m fighting a losing battle, but at least I’ve made my stand. I gather the last three letters—D-I-E—up in my spoon and gobble them down. In a symbolic way, I’m conquering death.
I’m not quite ready to tell Mom about the new job yet. And anyway, I’m not sure when I’ll start getting paid, or how many tours I’ll get to run. For now, I have to keep bagging groceries to pay off the damage I did backing her hearse into a cement pillar in a parking lot. A cement pillar which frankly had no business being there, for the record.
But during my whole walk to work, I’m messing with my phone, trying to get the Tribune archives to load on it.
I’m hooked.
There is no way to be good at bagging groceries. Everyone has their own weird way they want their stuff arranged, and they all expect you to be able to guess their preferences. Even the most hardened skeptics in the ghost-hunting business probably think their baggers have psychic powers.
Plus, the porta-potty blue of the uniforms is really, really not my shade. And they let me get away with the two-tone hair, as long as I tie it back, but I have to wear a Band-Aid over my lip ring, which is supposed to make me look more respectable to the old people but probably just makes them think I have herpes or something.
Trying to do the job on one hour of sleep is torture.
The line of registers beep and ding. The clang of the grocery carts sounds like the gurneys that carry bodies through my basement.
“You’re doing it wrong,” one old lady whines. “Eggs get their own bag. You just put a bag of rice on top of them!”
The previous old lady was mad that I didn’t put enough things in with her eggs to stop them from bouncing around in her car.
I’ve never gotten used to this, having people complain about me right in front of me. I see their scowling, disapproving faces when I close my eyes at night. Sometimes I think of good ways to respond to their complaints, but I never actually say them. Even in my sleep.
One old woman today is such a freaking bat that I find myself imagining shoving her into the trunk of her car and just letting her roast inside of it. As she drives away, I wander around to the side of the store, where the break area is. Kacey—who is sort of my “work wife”—is taking a smoke break, and I take a seat across from her and pull out my phone to look up new disparaging words for “old person” in the OED. You’re only really supposed to go to the break area if you need a cigarette, but the OED is my version of smoking, in a way. My addiction. It calms me down and relieves me of stress.
“ ‘Grave-porer,’ ” I say. “First recorded in 1582.”
“What’s that mean?”
“An annoying old person. Also, ‘mumpsimus,’ 1573; ‘huddle-duddle,’ 1599; and ‘crusty cum-twang,’ same year.”
“You just made that one up.”
I hand her the phone and let her see for herself. Most of those terms were coined by Thomas Nashe, who was sort of an Elizabethan insult comic and pornographer. He comes up in the OED a lot if you’re looking up naughty words.
You can’t go around using most of these antique swear words in casual conversation without looking like a nut, but it’s nice to know they’re there.
The morning drags on. I can’t wait to get to the graveyard.
When I finally get off work, I sleep through most of the Blue Line ride into the city, except for a part when some lady across from me is telling a little kid how to pray to the archangel Michael if he ever gets chased by witches. You don’t want to sleep through a scene like that.
Rick and Cyn are waiting for me by the cemetery gates, holding hands. Cyn takes one of my hands, so all three of us walk into the cemetery like we’re off to see the Wizard of Oz. I nearly start whistling. Rick actually does.
Graceland is a gorgeous cemetery. It looks like it should be autumn in there, even though it’s June and hot as hell. There are statues everywhere among the beautiful trees. Not a bad place to get planted. There’s lots of interesting company—architects, film critics, boxers, robber barons. Charles Dickens’s no-good brother Augie is in here someplace, too. You know that guy’s got some stories.
Rick starts pointing out notable graves right away. We walk up to this really spooky statue that looked like a grim reaper or something, and he shows me a decaying stone nearby that marks the grave of John Kinzie, an early settler who killed another early settler, Jean La Lime, in a drunken brawl. This is his fourth grave—they kept moving Kinzie’s body when the earliest cemeteries closed down. Or at least they said they did. They might have left him in Lincoln Park, for all we know. Or even down by the Water Tower.
The guy he killed stayed buried in one place longer than he did, but in 1891 they accidentally dug up La Lime during construction and gave his bones to the Chicago Historical Society. I’m sure they must have been thrilled.
After Rick explains all this, he says, “Now tell that story back to me, like we were on a tour.”
And I do. I repeat the story, then he helps me refine it, and tells me how to figure out which parts are important, which parts I would only throw in if I had time, and where the “gasp” lines are, the factoids that’ll make people’s jaws drop if I tell them just right. This one isn’t a story he tells on the regular route, but it’s good practice, and the spot where they dug up La Lime is close enough to the usual route—two blocks south of the gallows site—that we can use it as an alternate tour stop if we can’t access all the usual ones some night.
When we’re done with that exercise, the three of us head north on the path and end up at a massive family plot with a giant statue of a bored-looking guy on a throne, staring down at a reflecting pool, some benches, and a bunch of small stone markers.
“This,” says Rick, “is the grave of Marshall Field, the department store guy, and his family.”
“The reflecting pool is full of the tears of his workers,” says Cynthia.
“With benches, so Field could enjoy the company of the sort of weirdos who hang out in cemeteries,” I say.
“Ironic,” says Rick, “because he hated weirdos.”
Rick tells me some stories about how Field had helped get a group of anarchists hanged, and the mystery of whether his son’s death was really an accident, like Mr. Field insisted, or if he was killed in a brothel, like everyone else believed.
Cyn walks up to the grave of Marshall himself and shouts “You stole all your good ideas from Harry Selfridge!”
“Dare you to piss in the reflecting pool,” says Rick.
Eventually we end up on Burnham Island, a tiny wooded isle in the middle of the cemetery lake. It’s sort of eerie here.
Rick loves it. “It looks like the spot where a guy in a folk ballad would take his pregnant girlfriend to murder her.”
“Might make it more haunted,” says Cyn.
She opens her backpack, pulls out some sandwiches and drinks, and sets us up for a graveyard-island picnic next to a boulder marking the burial place of Daniel Burnham, an architect.
The sandwiches are made with mayonnaise and look like they’ve been in the bag long enough to turn. But Rick tears into his, and Cyn looks at me expectantly, so I take a bite of mine and smile. It’s terrible and possibly poison. But I don’t want to hurt her feelings. I nibble the
edges and put the rest in my purse when she isn’t looking.
“So, you definitely want the job?” asks Rick.
“Hell yeah.”
He nods. “We’ll do your real initiation after the next tour,” he says. “You make it through that, you’re one of us.”
“One of us. One of us,” Cyn chants.
Right after the picnic, we get off the island and roam through the cemetery, past a bunch of mausoleums with the same basic aesthetic as the Couch tomb, and Cyn shows me how to see inside some of them. A couple of them aren’t locked as tight as they should be, and no one cares since the whole family has died out and no one maintains them anymore. “Good places to stash some valuables if you ever need to,” she says. “No one’s ever gonna look.”
Good to know.
I pull the sandwich from my purse, shudder at the thought of eating any more of it, and when Cyn’s and Rick’s backs are turned, I slide it into one of the tombs to rot away, never to be seen again.
We do a few more training exercises, but then we notice the tomb of the “Fuchs” family. Things get a little middle school from there. I think you can only spend so long in a graveyard before you notice that half of the gravestones look like dicks, and then names like “Johnson” and “Fanny” on the stones start to be hilarious.
Maybe some people can see that sort of thing and not chuckle.
But not Cyn. Certainly not Rick. And not me.
These are my people.
For dinner we go to the nursing home where Rick and Cyn work their day jobs. Part of the deal for them is that they get to eat for free in the cafeteria when they want to, which saves them a few bucks on groceries.
It’s cute how popular Rick and Cyn are with the residents. We’re invited to sit at nearly every table, and end up with a woman who can’t be less than a hundred and fifty years old. She has a nurse with her to work her silverware and stuff, since she’s too frail to feed herself.
“They keep wanting me to give a talk on local ghost lore for the residents,” says Rick, as we sit down at the round table with our cafeteria trays. “But I’m afraid that’d be like giving a talk on career day at high school. Like, ‘This could be YOU in a couple of years!’ ”
