Accident, Suicide or Murder?

Part One

Let’s start this chronicle in the 21st Century, not the early 20th Century when the events of the story actually unfolded.

The location is Lake Forest, Illinois, specifically Sheridan Road near the former property of Barat College of the Sacred Heart, which closed decades ago.  Sheridan Road bisects the city of Lake Forest, starting at Fort Sheridan in the South and eventually merging with E Westleigh Road to the north. A woman named “Mary” was droving that stretch of road one rainy evening in July 2023 and subsequently posted on a hauntings and “old spirits” website an acknowledgement to the apparition she saw.

The Chicago Tribune also reported what the woman observed that July evening, in part writing: “. . . recently a woman was driving down Sheridan Road . . .  saw a girl on the side of the road in a long blue dress which was wet from the rain.”  The paper reported the young girl was standing close to the road, so the woman driver, concerned for the girl’s wellbeing, grasped her cell phone to call the police. At that moment the girl smiled at her.  It was not the smiled she found odd or disturbing, but, rather, it was her “black stained mouth” that sent chills through her body.

The woman driver knew the local lore of the young girl who died in that exact location over one-hundred years earlier from ingesting potassium cyanide . . . a deadly poison . . . that would have likely blacken her  mouth. When her car’s headlights went through the girl she concluded it was not a living human she was seeing. It was a 21st Century apparition of Marion Lambert who, at age 18, died in that spot on February 9, 1916 from cyanide poisoning.