A fascinating walking tour with the author of Graceland's "Who's Who" book featuring the spookiest graves and darkest stories.
About this Event(This tour is sold out! There is a bit of space on the morning tour or on the ghost tours in the evening downtown! and we've added another of this tour on Nov 1)
Diamond queens, runaway brides, flappers who worked hard to "confound the stuffy," robber barons with dark secrets, and heroes who risked it all escaping from slavery... the stories in cemeteries are a unique lens for viewing history. They say that everyone has a story, and most people have many of them. But some of the best ones are hidden in unmarked graves!
This edition will feature the "Halloween" stories - from statues rumored to be haunted to the most gruesome old time true crime tales, including some that are a little too dark for most tours.
Tour guide Adam Selzer has made a career of uncovering those stories, poring over microfilm newspapers, crumbling paperwork, and old ladies’ diaries (just, a LOT of old ladies’ diaries), with an aim not just to identify interesting people in the cemeteries where he works, but to find out what they were like, what it was like to know them, and how they interacted with each other and with history. He has spent the winter on volume 2 of Graceland Cemetery: Chicago Stories, Symbols, and Secrets, and can't wait to share what he's been finding!
Nearly all of his 90 minute Graceland tours include the famous Inez and Eternal Silence statues, but each one is a little different; routes may include the first sportswoman to grace the cover of Time magazine, the only confirmed revolutionary soldier buried in Chicago, people who inspired some of literature’s most colorful characters, firebrand feminists and abolitionists, a man so comically dull that people were still poking fun at him decades after his death, or victims of the city’s earliest serial killers.
Adam is the author of Graceland Cemetery: Chicago Stories, Symbols and Secrets (University of IL Press, 2022), and the brand new Graceland Cemetery Volume 2 - as well as , HH Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil (S&S 2016), and many other Chicago History books. He's a regular on PBS, The History Channel, and Netflix.
Praise for Adam's Graceland Book:
"Tantalizing... A prolific and stylish writer, tireless tour guide, and passionate researcher." - Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune
"A truth-seeking research glutton....(the book is) an adept melding of the tours, the research, and the writing." - Chicago Reader
"Emblematic of...hipster tour guides. Selzer goes beyond mere trivia. He turns up fascinating individual stories of cemetery residents without leaning too heavily on the big names." - Third Coast Reviews
What You Need to Know:
- Meet a bit before the start time inside the gates. We'll be at the newly renovated main entrance at Clark and Irving Park! Look for Adam with the white glasses and headset mic.
- There is parking in the cemetery, and more in the nieghborhoods nearby. Parking along Clark Street is harder now, as they've changed it to a bike path!
- - Tour runs rain or shine!
- The cemetery is near the red line (get off at Sheridan or Addison and it's a few blocks), the 22 Clark bus, and the Irving Park bus.
- The walk covers about 1.5 miles over the course of around 90 min. Some of the walking veers off the paved paths. You'll get about 3k steps!
