Ghost story back from the dead
GRACELAND | Phantom girl stories were debunked -- but records may give tale new life
On certain nights when the fog rolls over Graceland Cemetery, it has been said that the ghostly spirit of little Inez Clarke inhabits the sculpture of a girl that marks her grave.
Some people swear they've seen "tears'' streaming from the marble girl's face. A night watchman once reported the statue vanished from inside the case that protects it. Children have told their parents they've met a little girl wearing funny clothes named Inez at Graceland. Thousands of folks visit every year hoping Inez's ghost will come out to play.
(John J .Kim/Sun-Times)
But two years ago, Al Walavich, a historian, tour guide and Chicago cemetery know-it-all, said the famous haunting was a bunch of hooey.
Cemetery records show no such person buried in that grave, he said. In fact, U.S. Census records from the 1800s found no proof there ever was a girl named Inez Clarke.
"It's kind of hard to have a haunting when the supposed person never really existed," said Walavich, who at the time surmised the Inez statue was an advertisement for Scottish monument maker Andrew Gage, whose name is chiseled in the base.
Lingering uncertainties of this supposed haunting inspired Chicago author and historian John Binder to do some ghost hunting. A "sucker for historical mysteries," Binder scoured death and marriage records and census data in hopes of finding the truth -- or at least the spirit of it.
"History is about facts," Binder said. "What I came up with . . . puts the ghost story back on the table."
The legend of Inez Clark starts, of course, on a dark and stormy night -- Aug. 1, 1880.
As the story goes, Inez had been a bad girl that night. Her parents locked her out of the house during a brutal storm that let loose a thunderbolt that struck the girl dead. Her mortified parents told people tuberculosis killed their daughter.
She was buried near the center of Graceland in Uptown, surrounded by the graves of early Chicago's most famous citizens -- Marshall Field, Cyrus McCormick, Potter Palmer and George Pullman.
The marble girl -- sitting cross-legged in a lace dress, holding a parasol and wearing a ribbon in her long wavy hair -- has only the name "Inez" carved in its base. "Daughter of J.N. & M.C. Clarke" is also carved in the base. Nearby are the graves of John N. Clarke and Mary C. Clarke.
That's how Inez Clarke got her name.
Graceland records show an 8-year-old boy named Amos Briggs is buried under the statue. But Binder's search of Illinois death records found no evidence of anyone named Amos Briggs or Inez Clarke.
Binder searched for the death certificates of anyone with the first name Inez. Only one came up: Inez Briggs, a 7-year-old who died of diphtheria in Chicago on Aug. 1, 1880 -- the same date memorialized in the Inez statue. (And the same day Amos Briggs died, according to cemetery records.)
On Inez Briggs' death certificate is a handwritten notation: "Graceland."
Since there is no other Inez Briggs buried at Graceland, Binder believes that a graveyard administrator must have written the wrong name down. To the ear, Binder says, Inez and Amos sound alike. "There's a lot of people buried here and a lot of handwritten records," he said. "Mistakes happen."
Binder found 1880 census records that showed Inez Briggs lived in Chicago with her grandparents, David and Jane Rothrock. The Rothrocks are buried next to the Inez statue, which Binder believes the grandparents might have commissioned.
Using a popular genealogy Web site, ancestry.com, Binder traced the Rothrock family tree and found a tangled web of second marriages and stepchildren. He pieced together census data showing that Mary C. Clarke -- the woman memorialized on the plaque beneath the Inez sculpture -- was likely Jane Rothrock's daughter from a first marriage, Mary C. McClure.
In 1872, records show Mary C. McClure married a man named Wilber Briggs and was either the mother or stepmother of Inez Briggs -- the Rothrocks' live-in granddaughter.
Binder found Chicago directories from 1885 that show Mary C. McClure's second husband, John Clarke, and the Rothrocks, both lived at the same address, 201 Center, now the 800 block of West Armitage.
"The data on Mary McClure and Mary Clarke is the same in many respects. Year born. State born in. State parents born in. It's too exact to be coincidental. As well as the details of who lived with whom," Binder said. "The pieces of the story are fitting together like jigsaw pieces that were made to be that way. . . . I'm close to 99 percent sure that Inez Briggs is buried beneath that statue."
The problem with Binder's theory is a 1910 affidavit in cemetery files from Mary Clarke that claims the Clarkes had only two daughters, both of whom were still living at the time and that neither parent had any other children, Walavich said.
Binder says that's the kind of thing "ghost believers" might say would inspire a little girl's spirit to stalk a graveyard.
"If there is a girl named Inez buried there and her existence was denied by her own birth mother, this is prime evidence for a ghost hunter," Binder said. "It's why the girl was unhappy in life and is wandering around to get fulfillment. What's more traumatic than being denied by your own mother? It puts ghost hunters back in business."
For Ursula Bielski, author of Chicago Haunts and purveyor of a popular ghost tour that includes the Inez statue, Binder's research "feels right."
"That absolutely changes her name," Bielski says of Chicago's most famous little girl ghost. "Inez Briggs. I'm definitely convinced."