The Madonna of Bachelor's Grove: the Ghost Research Society infrared photograph

Bachelor's Grove Cemetery is a small pioneer burial ground in Bremen Township, Cook County, Illinois. It sits inside the Rubio Woods Forest Preserve, near Midlothian, with one side bordered by remains of the old Midlothian Turnpike. The last burial was in 1989. Vandalism in the 1970s destroyed most of the markers. Few original stones remain from more than 200 burials.

The cemetery already had its legends. Among them was a Woman in White, a dark-haired figure in a long, old-fashioned dress said to wander among the graves, sometimes carrying an infant.

August 1991. Several members of the Ghost Research Society, a group from Oak Lawn led by Dale Kaczmarek, came to the cemetery with cameras, tape recorders and camcorders. Some of the film was black-and-white infrared. Most accounts give the day as August 10.

Jude Huff-Felz was among them. Near one stone, team members were experiencing electromagnetic deviations. The stone bore no name, only a checkerboard pattern. Huff-Felz felt the presence of something there and took a picture. In the society's words: "Nothing was seen at the time of the picture taking."

Then the roll was developed. One frame held "the unmistakable image of a strange woman sitting on a checkerboard tombstone." She wore an old-fashioned, full-length dress, had long brown hair and sat in profile, "staring off in the distance." Her head and legs were semi-transparent, while her face looked flat, with only a hint of a nose. Her feet blended into the grass, which infrared film renders white.

Decades later, Kaczmarek gave a similar description. "It was a woman in a long kind of Victorian gown, long brown hair, kind of staring away in profile."

The Chicago Sun-Times and the National Examiner published the image. The Chicago Tribune and Discovery Channel programs followed. It became known as the Madonna of Bachelor's Grove, one of the most widely reproduced ghost photographs in the world. The checkered stone has since been photographed hundreds of times without producing anything nearly as spectacular.

No official body ever examined the photograph. Troy Taylor, co-founder of the American Ghost Society, showed it to several professional photographers, who ruled out double exposure. They were never named, and no written report has surfaced. Skeptics still favor double exposure. Others point to the infrared film itself: its low contrast could make a real, seated person look translucent. That would require someone sitting there unseen, and the group says nobody was visible.

In 2012 the photograph was borrowed. The Ghosts of New England Research Society promoted a "full body apparition" at Ryder's on Main, a bar in Meriden, Connecticut. Kenny Biddle, now chief investigator for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, recognized it as the Madonna of Bachelor's Grove pasted onto a photo of the bar.

Who is she? Some say Kathryn Vogt Fulton, a mother searching for her infant daughter Marcia May. Others say Luella Fulton Rogers, killed by a hit-and-run driver in 1937 and said to be seeking her infant sister Emma. Kaczmarek told WBEZ the society later captured further images of a figure seemingly holding a baby. Writers such as Ursula Bielski keep the cemetery's stories alive, and the woman on the checkerboard stone remains their most famous image.