From among the best of the class... Fall '08

Bloods Point Cemetery - Haunted?
One reporter tracks the ghosts

“Once inside Bloods Point Cemetery itself, an eerie sense of foreboding can quickly envelop you, smothering your rationale and prickling the hairs on your arms and neck.”
—from Ghost Whispers – Tales from Haunted Midway (2005), by William Gorman

By Keri Bugenhagen
BELVIDERE, Ill. – On a chilly October Monday, eleven days before Halloween, the trek to Bloods Point Cemetery is increasingly common among curious locals. Amid the scattered farms of rural Boone County, at the corner of Bloods Point and Pearl Street, the remote cemetery has become a regional hub for ghostly gossip. Just shuffle through the message board on http://www.realhaunts.com/ for a treasure-trove of supposedly haunted Bloods Point experiences.

While message boards feature eerie postings year-round, for some locals, the cemetery seems particularly spooky at this time of each year. Indeed on a recent Monday, I found the grass dying and imbedded with weeds and crispy leaves. The fall winds had swept the surrounding trees almost barren, their branches casting ominous-looking shadows across the grounds.

At the cemetery’s farthest edge away from the road, overgrown shrubbery conceals an old empty shed—a source of much of the lore that circulates the Internet. While story variations exist, the shed is supposedly guarded by laughing phantom children and a ghostly growling dog.

But is Bloods Point truly haunted? Might the residents of Boone County be possessed by overactive imaginations?

Lately, there clearly seems to have been a heightened interest in the supernatural world not only here in Belvidere but even in the sophisticated big city. In fact, those afflicted by demons after visiting the cemetery might even find help in nearby Chicago. For according to local Chicago newspapers, “a full-time exorcist” has within the last few years been appointed by the Archdiocese of Chicago for the first time in its 160-year history.

Hence, my attempt to expose the truth behind what is perhaps the creepiest local legend. So, armed with pen and pad and my journalistic skills, I set out to conduct my own investigation, seeking a little help from some real-life ghost busters and a couple of locals prone to investigate creepy legends…

...MORE THAN GHOSTS IN THE GRAVEYARD

The graveyard tells another tale as most of the headstones—dated from the early-1800s to the mid-1900s—are cracked and crumbling. On that recent autumn day, the remnants of one stone lie in three shattered pieces. Inside the infamous shed, the moldy brick walls are coated with a rainbow of spray painted graffiti, and the floorboards have become a wastebasket for empty soda cans and plastic bottles. The burial ground is enclosed by a mangled chain-link fence with a bent front gate, perhaps because visitors don’t seem to respect the cemetery’s lockdown from dusk until dawn.

Around 11:30 on a recent September night, Mike Stringini, an independent construction contractor in the Rockford area, and a friend jumped the broken, padlocked fence to investigate the cemetery. Stringini, a hefty guy at 5’10”, 230 pounds, with dark hair and a whiskered chin, says he doesn’t scare easily. However, on that night he says he couldn’t shake a “cold, dark, certain spine-tingling feeling.”

As a native resident, Stringini says he first heard of Bloods Point when he was about 13. Now a decade later, he says it was finally time to inspect the place. “I wanted to see if all the stories were real,” he says.

The men had only explored the cemetery for about 15 minutes before Stringini says he noticed the once-locked fence was now wide open. At that point, he says, “It was time to leave, and I could not do it fast enough.”

Spooked, the men took off running…