County Farm Cemetery Investigation

The Will County Poor Farm, in operation between 1850-1955, was home to hundreds of people. The folks that lived and worked at this poorhouse were paupers, elderly, injured Civil War Vets, alcoholics, abandoned children and people with physical or mental disabilities. This wasn’t a very pleasant place to be, as there were murder, suicide, rape and unwanted pregnancies.

There are almost no records of the dead buried in a grove of trees. There are 49 stones in this potter’s field. With only a number etched into the top, 48 of them remain nameless. The one stone with a carving has only the name George H. Miller. It is estimated that there are over 400 burials on the property. Long forgotten are the answers or who, where.

The markers could be mass burials. The burial laws before 1916 were much different, and people weren’t always put six feet under the ground. The first burial, in this pauper’s cemetery, was in 1851, when a woman and her two children were laid to rest.

Others laid to rest under numeric markers include: Soloman Richards and his wife Rachael, Polly Boon, an African-American woman who was born on a Kentucky plantation, Albert Munich and probably his wife Louisa Buck and their four children.

Address: Joliet, IL 60431. It can be found in a clump of trees just beyond the Inwood Soccer Complex near Bloomfield Drive. You cannot access this location via automobile. You must park in the parking lot for the soccer field and travel north across the open grassland until you reach the clump of trees. The address of the soccer complex is 640 Mission Blvd.

GPS: 41.50780, -88.15170

Hauntings: It is said that this location is haunted. Cameras malfunction and SD cards are often wiped clean of photos. People who have visited the site at night have reported seeing strange lights and orbs that move quickly. Some have also felt cold spots in certain places.

The Ghost Research Society visited County Farm Cemetery on May 18, 2022 team members included: Paul Adams, Charles Williams, Diane Oksanen and Dale Kaczmarek.

Equipment setup: Only hand-held equipment was employed such as digital recorders, cameras, camcorders, Melmeter and Phasma Box.

Experiments performed: Only a single Phasma Box EVP session was conducted in the woods due to increment weather.

Personal experiences:

Charles Williams: Experiments- Phasma Box, EVP

Personal Experiences- Chuck- None, Diane- None

Nothing sticks out here, it was hard to find, me and Paul had to hike across the field and look through the brush to find it.

Dale Kaczmarek: I felt nothing out of the ordinary while visiting this location except a bit a sadness as the poor people have simply been forgotten over the years and the cemetery is overgrown and pretty much lost to history. It had been drizzling during our investigation out here so we cut this stop a little shorter than we would have wanted.

Evidence collected:

Hello countyfarm.MP4 – while conducting a Phasma Box session, a comment was made, “This machine gives you a voice so that you can talk with us.” The device responded with, “Hello.”

Conclusions: This was a sad location, lost to history and hard to find. Even some neighbors don’t know that this place even exists. It’s a bit of a walk from the soccer field parking lot into a large clump of trees and vegetation.

I didn’t expect to receive too much communication while her except for those spirits that might be lingering around due to the remoteness of this location and others that might have wanted to reach out to us with any messages.