Of all the true tales of high strangeness I’ve shared with you, none scare me more than this one.
Joe–true name withheld for reasons that will become obvious–grew up in the 60s in one of the more upscale Chicago suburbs. After college he returned to his hometown and settled into a teaching career at the local high school.
Every year at Halloween he would suspend normal lessons and instead tell his class this story, which I relate in as close to his own words as I can recall.
OK, the blue light story.
At the start of my senior year, news was making the rounds about three grade school kids who’d gone missing. A local kid had his cousin over for the weekend, and the cousin brought a friend. The first kid’s folks lived in one of those big houses out in what at the time was unincorporated Cook County.
Saturday afternoon the homeowners went out for the day and left the three boys horsing around in the backyard. That was the last they’d seen of them.
At first the parents thought that the kids had hitched a ride downtown to see a movie or something. People still did that back then. When Saturday came and went, the fear started to grow that they’d wandered off into the woods and gotten lost. You know all the miles and miles of forest preserves out there? Well, there was even more of it back then.
The police got involved, and bulletins went out on the radio and in the local papers. A guy from a neighboring town came forward and said he’d seen the three boys walking down the turnpike early on Sunday morning. It’s assumed the kids got it in their heads to run away from home, and they’ll come traipsing in any time now.
But another day passes, and they don’t come back.There was a famous case from a decade before where two young sisters went missing after seeing a movie in Brighton Park and turned up dead a few weeks after that. They never caught the guy, and the wound was still pretty raw those years later.
At that point panic set in, because now the leading theory is kidnapping. Everybody expected a ransom note to come down in a couple of days, because this kid’s folks are pretty well-heeled. But days go by, and there’s no ransom demand, no sign of the boys, nothing.
Now folks start whispering–where the parents can’t hear–that the boys were picked up by some pervert, and this pervert’s got them locked up in some basement or garage somewhere so he can take his time with them. It became a popular pastime for the junior and senior boys to head out onto the maze of back roads sprawling through those woods on pervert hunts. They’d pile into the car with flashlights, baseball bats, and cases of Old Style and make a night of it. But no one found anything.
Then one day about a week after the kids went missing, a patrolman cruising the turnpike happens upon all three boys wandering down the side of the road in broad daylight. He pulled up alongside them and called their names, but they didn’t respond; just kept ambling along like they were in a trance.
He finally coaxed the kids into his squad car and called it in. He told the dispatcher that the boys looked disheveled but otherwise okay. They were non-responsive to questions about where they’d been and who they’d been with. The only thing any of them would say was, “Blue light.” If prodded enough, they’d repeat it like a mantra before trailing off again.
This cop takes the kids in. The doc who checks them out confirms they’re in pretty good shape physically, just a bit dehydrated with a few scrapes and bruises. But all they can get out of the boys is that same litany of, “Blue light … blue light.”
So everybody concludes that this pervert had the kids locked up in a basement lit with some kind of blue bulb. The cops kept searching, and the high school boys kept up their nightly pervert hunts–now on the lookout for this weird blue light. This goes on for weeks, but nothing turns up. Eventually they stop looking and people stop talking, but it’s never really forgotten, just like the Brighton Park case.
A reporter friend from the Tribune tried to do a follow up on the three victims back in the 80s. The story had made all the papers at the time, but to his consternation he couldn’t find a single clipping in any of their records. One small town paper losing part of their archive is feasible, but not every Chicagoland paper at once. This reporter started wondering who might have an interest in hushing the story up.
He did pick up a few breadcrumbs on the boys’ trail. All three had been committed to a psychiatric hospital. He found evidence that one had died there in the 70s. After that, the trail went cold.
Anyway, by October talk of the kidnapping had died down. The boys in my class still went out on nighttime rides into the forest preserves; more to clown around than to hunt perverts.
With Halloween falling on a Friday, my two best partners in crime and I decided we’d show up our friends, the cops, and everybody by finally catching the pervert. We each told our folks we were going camping at Starved Rock for the weekend. Our wheel man pulled up to my place that evening with our other accomplice in tow. I said goodbye to my folks, ducked into the back seat with a diversionary sleeping bag and a cooler full of Old Style, and we hit the road.
The first few hours of that night are still a fond memory. We drove down the turnpike, cracking jokes and talking girls with the radio on full blast. The fun continued as we hit the forest preserve, and the sun sank below the trees.
We must have driven around out there for hours–veering randomly off the turnpike to tear down narrow dirt roads that wound through the woods. They all eventually led back to the turnpike, at which point we’d repeat the process again. This was all unincorporated Cook County back then, so you could pull stunts like that without waking the neighbors. There was nobody for miles.
We’d emerged onto the turnpike for the umpteenth time and made it down the road a ways when our wheel man checked the mirror and said:
“What’s that weird light back there?”
“That what?”
“It’s been tailing us since we passed the old cemetery pond.”
Against my better judgment, I turned and looked back. And here’s this solitary light–must’ve been a hundred yards back. At first we think it’s a car with a headlight out or a guy on a motorcycle, but the weird thing is, the light is blue.
And it’s gaining on us.
I must have called out, “Oh, shit!” or something, and that was all the wheel man needed to floor it. I saw that old Chevy’s speedometer hit a hundred miles per hour. But that lone blue light kept gaining. It grew to the size of a beach ball, and as it was about to hit our rear bumper, I saw that there was nothing behind it. The damn thing was just a big ball of cold blue light. I think I screamed first. At any rate, we were all screaming as the road turned left but my buddy kept going straight. We plowed into a harvested cornfield with a bone-rattling thud. Cornstalk stumps smacked against the undercarriage like baseball cards in a bike’s spokes. The wheel man slammed on the brakes, and we fishtailed to a halt.
And the light was right there with us. It orbited the car, slow and menacing. I just knew it was looking us over–like a glutton selecting cuts of beef.
My buddy who’d been riding shotgun threw open his door and bolted. Me and the wheel man took off after him. We hightailed it out of that cornfield and into the woods. I couldn’t tell you how far we ran before we finally stopped and stood doubled over, heaving for air. It felt like miles.
We were shivering from cold and foggy from shock as we picked our way back to the corn field. My buddy’s car was still there, doors wide open. Otherwise the field and the roadway were empty. We climbed back in the car, drove to Starved Rock, and came back on Sunday. None of us said anything to our folks or blabbed at school on Monday.
The first time I publicly opened up about this story was to another class full of kids on Halloween. Maybe it was a form of therapy. Anyhow, the amateur historian of the bunch came up to me after class and asked about the pond where we first saw the blue light. I confirmed that it was an old quarry pond behind a flyspeck cemetery. This kid told me the place went back to pioneer days when they were digging the Illinois-Michigan Canal. He said crazy stuff has gone on there over the years–satanic rituals, cops driving by to find the gates blown off their hinges and coffins erupted from the ground; and weird floating lights.
I’d heard ghost stories growing up about a cursed cemetery somewhere out in the woods. I just didn’t associate them with that place until my student filled in the dots. There are reports going back a hundred years of people following a farmer who carries a lantern to an old house back in the woods. Many say the lantern is blue. They say the farmer and the house disappear before you can set foot on the porch.
The ones who come back sane, or at all, say that.
This story disturbs me more than the others I’ve told because unlike the others, I have direct personal experience with the setting.
I have been to the little cemetery from the teacher’s tale. I have seen the deep, scum-ridden quarry pond and walked among the neglected graves.
It is a sad, decrepit place. The only signs of remembrance were the ragged toys and flowers left at a worn grave marker labeled only “Infant Daughter”.
I experienced nothing out of the ordinary there, except that no rain fell within the cemetery grounds during my visit, though steady showers soaked the woods all around.
An oily feeling of wrongness clung to me as I left and for weeks thereafter. I would not go back even if offered considerable inducement to do so.
I wonder about those who did not–or cannot–leave.