The Lore of Bachelor's Grove Cemetery - The Hook and the Caretaker
The Hookman urban legend is one we all know but did this legend start at Bachelor's Grove Cemetery? The lore of the Caretaker has ties to the Disappearing House, doppelgangers, and a theory that Lily wants to explore more...
Watch the wrap-up video here.
The Hook
The Lore
Back in October 2022, I shared the legend of the Hookman as part of my American Urban Legends: Killer on the Loose and said that multiple states claim to be home to the origin story location. Bachelor's Grove Cemetery happens to be one of those locations.
According to my new favorite unknown writer, compiler, and general spooky story-teller, Pete Crapia, a researcher by the name of Richard Crowe helped introduce people to the legend of the Hook in the 1970s during radio broadcasts and later in 1985 as part of his The Ghosts of Chicago documentary. Now as this is one of my favorite urban legends, I would love to assume y'all all know this legend, but in the event you don't, here is a quickie rundown of the Hook (Hookman) legend:
Two lovebirds are parked in a nice little secluded part of town and having some teenage fun. A news alert pops up on the radio of an escaped mental patient or killer or something and to be on the lookout as he has a hook for a hand and isn't afraid to use it (insert naughty jokes here 😂). She is scared and wants to go home. He is a jock and just wants the booty, so he calms her down. She hears a noise, he checks it out, and wham bam, thank you, ma'am, he ends up the Hook's victim and because the girl is smart, she stays in the car and cops come to her rescue. In other versions, they drive off and when he drops her off at home, he finds a hook on one of the car handles. Either way, the girl was right. Or possibly in cahoots with the Hookman.......
There really isn't much more to this piece of lore, so we will move on to the facts.
The Facts
While Richard Crowe did bring awareness to both the Hook and Bachelor's Grove Cemetery, there is no actual evidence of the two having a real connection and when asked about it in a 2011 interview "he did not appear to be very interested and even chuckled, suggesting he had little belief that any sort of incident took place at Bachelors Grove Cemetery."
One of the more likely, and well-documented, origins of the Hook legend is the Texarkana Moonlight Murders, which I also included in last year's American Urban Legends: Killer on the Loose. (If you missed out on any of my American Urban Legends series, it's a fun way to start a few YouTube rabbit holes on a lazy afternoon.)
Lily's Thoughts
As much as I would have loved to go down some epic journey for the Hook, this one does seem to come up blank in being anything more than a spooky story to tell around Halloween about how women are always right about spooky sounds, I mean the virtues of chastity as teens. (But we are always right about spooky sounds, don't you dare send the dog to investigate!)
***
The Caretaker
The Lore
The story of the Caretaker is one that has taken me down the most random and interesting path of my research to date. That's right - to date! So much so, that I am putting my Fort Fisher research project on hold, at least for a short bit while I focus on a new theory itch that I definitely need to scratch.
The story of the Caretaker has two parts, the original story which links with the Hook legend, and the Disappearing House, and then the modern story which still ties into the Disappearing House but other bits of lore as well.
The Original Caretaker Lore
The Caretaker is said to have killed his family and himself and burned his house down with everyone's bodies, including his own, inside. The legend varies on how he killed his family and himself, but his ghost was often reported being seen with a lantern and/or shotgun. (As the details vary, I am not really sure how someone offs themselves and then burns down their house after, but I'm sure there were pulleys and levers involved.)
Personal experiences with the original Caretaker ghost date back to at least 1971 when two college students were visiting Bachelor's Grove Cemetery in hopes of locating the blue lights and disappearing house. They were approached by an elderly man with a lantern claiming to be the caretaker. He tells them the lights are not real but the house is the caretaker's house and follows them on their way to see it. At some point in time, his lantern light vanishes and when they turn around, he is gone. There isn't any mention of if they saw the house or not.
Stories throughout the years are similar with urban legends like the Hook, One-Armed Sniper, and others being linked with this one. In some personal accounts, people have some sort of paranormal experience in the area or homes surrounding the cemetery and will associate with the Caretaker as a warning.
The Modern Caretaker Lore
In more modern times, the Caretaker is actually a man by the name of Rick, who is very much a living person (at least as of 2018, which I think is the last update on him). Rick has been known as the "Caretaker" since 2014 and claims to have grown up in the "blue house", a house located near cell towers and associated with both the Caretaker legend and the cemetery itself. Again, while Rick is a real person, he has been linked to accounts of disappearing in an instant and even reappearing somewhere unlikely far too quickly.
This is where things start to go down an additional, weird path not really associated with strictly the Caretaker lore, so for the sake of trying to wrap this legend into a little package, I am going to save the extra layer of WTF for my thoughts, because WTF indeed.
The Facts
The truth behind the legend and lore of who the Caretaker is still a mystery. Bachelor's Grove Cemetery never had an official caretaker and certainly not a caretaker's house that burned down with him and his family inside. The families of the deceased maintained the grounds and as we discovered with the Disappearing House, there were homes on the property at one time that have since been torn down, if someone was squatting in the properties, it is possible they told visitors they were the caretaker to avoid detection and eviction. Even the carrying of a gas lantern makes sense as any electricity to the properties would have been turned off.
The "Blue House" Rick claimed to grow up in was relocated to its current location sometime after 1938, as verified by an aerial photo from that year. (I think this is the house based on where it says it is located and the fact it's blue, but if I am wrong, someone correct me.) Even though Pete's paranormal guide doesn't mention the exact year the blue house was moved, it does state this story is one of the stories Rick made up and tells for fun. The humorous truth is Rick enjoys adding to the lore of Bachelor's Grove, something I can't fault him on too much as a jokester myself, but it does make my research a bit harder.
Much like the Hook, the story of the Caretaker was given new life through the years by Richard Crowe and his radio broadcasts and documentary.
Lily's Thoughts
On the surface, the story of the Caretaker seems to be about as real of a story as his buddy, the Hook. With no definitive proof of an actual caretaker, murder/suicide, or a house burning down (and possibly being rebuilt), we have nothing to anchor this story to in our history.
But what if there is more to it than that?
If you have been watching the research, you know I have been stumbling down the path of doppelgangers, bilocation, and even time slips. Not just one person who has seemingly appeared in two places at once, but multiple people. When prepping this post, I went back and really watched all of Pete's linked videos. During my research, because I am filming, I often have the sound turned off when looking at videos and I use captions/subtitles to skim my way through videos to the parts I am looking for. This makes it easy to miss things. In this case, Pete reached a similar conclusion to me, I just didn't fully notice it until today -- maybe what we are seeing has something to do with the flow of time.
For this little thought train, I am going to focus on only one account from the Caretaker section of the paranormal guide - Cassie Scalise's doppelganger. There are several stories mentioned in the guide, I highly suggest you read them and watch the related videos. But this story connects with me much in the way Arvo's Disappearing House story and Pete's Yellow Man story did in my previous posts.
In 2020, Cassie sat down with Pete and told him about the time a few years prior when her friend saw her double in an area near the cemetery and considered part of the spooky bubble. They were going to the woods for a small fire and fun when Cassie realized they forgot the lighter and she returned to the car to get it. When she returned, her friend claimed that she had seen Cassie roughly 50 feet away, in an opposite direction from the one Cassie left in. This double called to her friend in an urgent-sounding voice that sounded very similar to Cassie's. The double was also wearing clothes that while not the ones Cassie was wearing, were ones she was known to wear (If I am recalling correctly, she briefly mentioned in the interview that said clothes were out of season.) It is not known if the double walked off, disappeared from view instantly, or if the friend glanced away and then looked back.
This story, along with Pete's personal experiences with Rick's possible double and people claiming to see Pete's double, sent me down the doppelganger rabbit hole of where they come from and what could be the cause of someone appearing to be in two places at one time?
Without boring y'all with a complete rehash of my research, I will hit the two highlights relating to doppelgangers that seem to fit here - they are us from another time or universe. Most notable (to me at least) is the case of Johann Wolfgang van Goethe, an 18th-century German poet who saw his doppelganger while visiting his lady love. Eight years later, Goethe realized he was wearing the same exact outfit his doppelganger had been wearing on the night they met. Goethe told his story in his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, or Poetry and Truth. It should be noted that he did write this with some exaggeration as we writers are known to do when it comes to crafting our own tales. But as someone who does this myself in my own non-lore writing, I know this doesn't mean it didn't happen, it just might have a slightly less catchy way about it.
Physicist Brian Greene says that we all have doppelgangers in the form of parallel universes. When we see them, we are actually seeing a moment in another universe. I thought I had his book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, but I have The Elegant Universe, so I haven't read over his thoughts beyond what I saw searching online. But that's not to say you have to dive deep into science to get behind a theory like this. If parallel universes exist, especially in the form of infinite possibilities, you, me, everyone, theoretically exist in those universes in some form. Now I am not smart enough to know the possible science behind two universes brushing up so close to each other we can touch our counterparts, but I am smart enough to know anything is possible in the realm of possibility.
Now all of this might seem like a bunch of nothing to the average person flipping through the YouTubes on a Sunday afternoon, and truth be told, I wasn't really expecting this thought path. Rick being in two places at once or vanishing without a trace didn't mean much to me when he is known for being a fast walker and taking off without a goodbye. Even Pete's story of a couple seeing him walk past only for him to be in a completely different part of the cemetery didn't do as much to make my mind spin as Cassie's telling. In the other versions, I can pass everything off as mistaken identity, not realizing how much time had passed, or even people playing tricks on a stranger. But Cassie's story hits me because this one included interaction to a degree and the other person knowing immediately that the person calling to them was not the person they arrived with. Additionally, and not mentioned in my research because I had forgotten it until I had a conversation with a friend, I previously had thought "What if ghosts weren't ghosts but we were connecting with people in another time?" while watching an episode of Ghost Hunters well over 15 years ago. I'm not kidding. I actually don't want to give too much information about this particular thought until I can find said episode, watch it again, poke around online to see if any known shenanigans took place during the filming of that episode, and do a little private research on the location in question. Additionally, I have some thoughts regarding my own personal experiences with repeating sounds that tie in, but I haven't yet gathered all those thoughts in full to share. So for now, my thoughts on everything is to stay tuned because the Lily needs to dig deeper...
Until next time, lore lovers, stay spooky💖
~Lily
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Sources
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