Haunted Roads

Haunted+Roads

The car lurks onto a one way road just to the right of a cemetery. The only noise the young woman can hear is gravel crunching against the tires. The car crawls for a quarter of a mile and she can only see what the car headlights reveal. Something, someone was silently following.

Jenny Miller, senior and supernatural enthusiast, was curious one night about the many stories of Rainbow Road and Cuba Road, both supposedly haunted, so she decided to investigate. “I was definitely not alone that night,” Miller said. She is not the only person who has felt there was something unusual on these roads.

There used to stand an old mansion on Cuba Road, assumed to have been an asylum and/or haunted by gangster ghosts, but it burned down. Two mansions were built in the early 2000s on and around where the mansion used to stand. There are also supposedly phantom cars that chase people off the road and a house that suddenly disappears and reappears, but the most well known story involves floating light orbs, according to the book Haunted Illinois.

“I saw the orbs when I was about 7. I thought the lights were like a car because they look like headlights but they don’t move, and it’s almost as if the light is trapped,” Sara Cozzi, junior who lives on Rainbow Road, said. “I thought there was a murderer outside of my house. I was terrified. I kept telling my brother ‘Look! Can’t you see?’ and he just couldn’t see them. It was so creepy.”

Though Cozzi was able to see these orbs without any technology, many sightings are discovered after visiting Cuba Road, specifically the White Cemetery that was built in the 1820s, saying these orbs only show up in pictures taken at night, according to the book Haunted Illinois.

“When I was about 10 years old [on] Halloween [some of] my [family members] had [heard] about how Cuba Road was haunted so we went down to the cemetery,” Heidi Smith, junior who used to live on Rainbow Road, said. “We were driving down Cuba Road and our car actually broke down. My cousin took a picture when we went into the cemetery and [when] we looked at it, there were probably five or six orbs in the picture.”

Smith confesses that this was a terrifying experience, not only because she was so young at the time and did not understand what was happening, but also because of the belief that spirits were around her. She is not alone in her beliefs. Miller is a strong believer in ghosts and she has previously sought out connects with this other world.

“I’ve [played with] ouija boards and I believe I’ve been visited by spirits before,” Miller said. “I think cemeteries are homes for spirits and when I was in the cemetery and I was walking in the middle of the graves, I felt like there were spirits all around me. I didn’t feel threatened or scared because it felt like they were more curious of what I was doing there then anything else.”

Though Miller did not see any ghosts that night, she did experience some things that, to her, were unexplainable.

“After I started driving away from the cemetery, my car suddenly began veering to the right even though I wasn’t moving the steering wheel,” Miller said. “Also around that time, my car felt really stiff and sluggish and I had to put more pressure on my gas pedal. But after I was away from [Cuba Road] the car was fine again.”

Miller describes this experience as “weird and unusual” but this was not what unsettled her the most that night. There have been reports of “crying sounds that cannot be explained” according to Haunted Illinois which may directly correlate to Miller’s findings.

“Driving onto Kathreen road, it was fine. There was a line of trees surrounding the road and it was calm but then I heard a noise resembling a dying chicken. I had no idea what it was and I was not planning on staying to find out,” Miller said. “It really freaked me out and I think that was easily the scariest part of the whole night.”

The individual events that Smith, Miller, and Cozzi lived through have only deepened their beliefs in unexplainable beings.

“This experience definitely proved my belief in ghosts even though I never questioned their existence,” Cozzi said. “I just kind of think why wouldn’t they exist? What else would explain situations like this?”