Mt Thabor Cemetery Investigation

Mt. Thabor was founded around 1846 by Owen Dyer, an Irishman who settled in the area. He deeded one acre of the land to the Catholic Church for $1, and for this, a log cabin was constructed on the property. It was called North Barrens Church and also Little Church in the Woods.

For awhile Mt. Thabor housed the only Catholic Church in the entire southwest section of the county. Some of the earliest families are interred here. There are graves that contain both Civil War and Mexican War veterans. According to cemetery records, there were close to 120 burials here, however only about 35 or so stones still remain standing today. No one is buried here today but in the 1960s a number of infants and children were buried in a large section of the property. Most of those buried in Mt. Thabor, however, date back to the 1890s or earlier.

Located in a very rural section of Crystal Lake, this cemetery is haunted by a number of various types of phenomena. The area is especially photogenic as many have come away with interesting pictures. In the late 1980s a woman apparently photographed what she described as a “phantom tombstone”. Looking at the picture, you could almost read the inscription on the stone but at the same time, grass can be seen through the grave marker!

GRS member John Cachel visited the cemetery in early November of 1998:

“On November 7, 1998, Walter Meyers and I went to Mt Thabor Cemetery at night near Crystal Lake in northern Illinois. We noticed a scent that we agreed is women’s strong perfume. It was near a baby lot. We didn’t wear any aftershave. There are no flowers, or anybody in the cemetery, just the two of us. We also smelled the same perfume at the north section of the cemetery. Maybe that’s the same woman, who followed us. Who knows?

“We used temperature scanner and we found a cold spot near a baby lot. It was 5 to 7 degrees from around 34 degrees so we followed the cold spot to the near northeast section of the cemetery where we lost it. We also found several cold spots as cold as about 32 to 34 degrees. We checked our scanner to the sky, (cloudy, about 45 degrees from the horizon). It read between 22 to 25 degrees so we knew that the temperature between 5 to 13 degrees on the horizon was something.

“I took three rolls of Kodak Goldmax (ASA 800) film and we found on several photos balls of light, a ghostly mist that spread across the entire frame of the photo and also several more solid shapes in the mist.”

John made another trip to the cemetery in April of 1999:

“One Friday my friend and I went to Mt Thabor Cemetery at night. Not much happened, just a few orbs and one orange strand out of two rolls of film. I got several orbs and a faint cloudy (possible could be a mist if it’s on photograph) from my Sony camcorder.

“One Sunday I went there during the day to make maps. I also used my Sony camcorder for my records just in case. I noticed a small shadow about the size of a large butterfly that followed me. It took only about two seconds. About four to five seconds later, a white orb moved and curved to hit a large tombstone and went down to near the ground then floated away. I caught the orb’s own shadow on the smaller tombstone.”

Hauntings: A number of orbs and green mists have been both seen and photographed and even GRS members on a trip to the site in 1998 photographed a nice round orb near a tombstone with a Polaroid camera. Voices of both genders have been heard sometimes laughing, sometimes singing or mumbling. Other times words can be ascertained. Most often a ‘hello’. There has even been a whistling sound heard on occasion.

Green mists have been observed by many, orbs levitating around visitors to the site as well as around the baby plots. One time the entire center of the cemetery was brightly illuminated almost like daylight even though there was nothing that could have caused this naturally. There have been malfunctions caused to automobiles left running near the cemetery. Automobiles that are new and have no true mechanical problems. This cemetery is surely one of the most haunted in the far northwestern suburbs and consistently produces interesting and often unexplainable spirit photographs. Though the cemetery has had some creepy accounts of red, green and white glowing orbs, strange shadows, and a mysterious green mist that at times, engulfs the whole graveyard, there have been no reports of a hockey mask wearing maniac killing teenagers. Strangely cold pockets of air have been detected using thermal scanners, near the "baby lot" at the north end of the cemetery. Around thirteen babies, all who died in a two year period are buried there. It is also said that the current count of headstones accounts for only one third of the number of bodies actually buried there.

The GRS investigated Mt. Thabor Cemetery on June 27, 1998 and the team included: Stan Suho, Howard Hight, John Cachel, Matt Hucke and Dale Kaczmarek with help from Monty McClennon and Stacy McArdle.

A video showing part of the GRS team investigating Mt. Thabor Cemetery.