5
By YADIRA SANCHEZ OLSON yolson@shawmedia.com
Yadira Sanchez Olson—yolson@shawmedia. com
ABOVE: The gravestone of Lila May Herman who died due to a gasoline lamp accident is located at Grass Lake Cemetery in Antioch. LEFT: Lakes Region Historical Society Museum Director Ainsley Wonderling looks at Lila’s gravestone next to others belonging to the Herman family. another woman came into the society and said the building where the resort once stood was haunted. She and her husband owned a business there. They sat and talked and Wonderling said even though she’s heard many a creepy story, this one by far is the creepiest. The woman said, “things were moving by themselves in a dining room,” Wonderling said. Kerosene lamps that were left on a counter were found on the floor the next morning, she said. But perhaps the most unexplained of all events was when the woman inexplicably woke up in the middle of a freezing winter night and told her husband frantically that they needed to get to their business. “She didn’t know why, she just knew they had to go there,” Wonderling said. They drove out to the place on that cold winter night with the snow blowing in the air to find all the gas jets were on in the kitchen. Wonderling gave a photo of Lila to the woman who said
she was experiencing these strange occurences. She said the woman put it up on a wall and began to accept that Lila was around. “She said she would just talk with her as if she was in the room; make casual comments as you would to anyone.” Now, some may think that ghosts and spirits roam around to spook and haunt the living. But Wonderling said that after an encounter in 2009 with McHenry County Paranormal Research group founder Tony Olszewski, she now believes “Lila just wanted to be recognized.” The research group visited the Lakes Region Historical Society and found what Olszewski calls a residual haunting. Wonderling said she feels as if she is part of something special because she was able to be a connecting force to Lila’s story. “There’s no such thing as a coincidence,” said Olszewski. “It’s a domino theory. Everyone is some part of it.” Olszewski has led his team of paranormal investigators
for nine years to any place he believes is being haunted by what he said is energy of bodiless souls trying to find the light and cross over . He said his investigations are not a joke and they rarely resemble what people see on TV. He doesn’t know what to make of Lila’s story but what he does say is that everyone drawn into that story is part of a puzzle Today, the property where Herman’s Resort once stood is a verdant, hilly piece of land that was turned into a housing subdivision called Newport Cove in 2011. Olszewski said Lila may still be there. “Maybe in one of those homes now,” he said. If he’s asked, he said he’ll gladly go with his team to see if she needs help crossing over. “That’s what we do. We seek to help those who have passed, and those who are still here,” Olszewski said. When his group was at the historical society’s meeting house, they took a photo that shows a beam of light where one of the team’s mediums
Haunted Lake County We hope you enjoyed our series on spooky places in Lake County. You can find all the stories on line at www.lakecountysuburbanlife. com. Have a scary story you’d like to share? Email us at editorial@ lakecountysuburbanlife.com and you might see your story in print in our Halloween issue, Oct. 31. was pointing. “I was standing right there looking at where she was pointing, there was nothing there,” Wonderling said. The photo is archived in her computer. Those who choose to see it, may do so and then make their own conlcusions, she said. There is one more piece of information found about Lila’s life among the records of the historical society — another obituary of a woman who would have been Lila’s step-grandmother. It’s from 1911 and reads: Mrs. Barbara Herman of Grass Lake died from the effects of severe burns, on Monday morning at the Elgin State Hospital for the insane ... she developed a mania for starting fires...it developed that her particular mania was setting fires to homes belonging to her husband, Andrew Herman...who owns the hotel property known as Hunter’s Home. Wonderling said Herman’s Resort was also known as Hunter’s Home.
• Thursday, October 24, 2013
ANTIOCH - The body burned frightfully. That sentence drew Lakes Region Historical Society Museum Director Ainsley Wonderling’s eyes to the three-colum obituary she discovered. Six years ago, she had been digging into an album that contained hundreds of clippings of obituaries and marriage announcements from long ago. The obituary was for a 14-year-old girl named Lila Herman. It described how a gasoline lamp exploded in her home and badly burned her. She died a few days later from those burns in 1901. “It was really tragic and poignant,” Wonderling said. She couldn’t get that tragedy out of her mind. Then three weeks later, a woman in town from Florida brought into the historical society a box of photos she said she found that were related to Antioch’s history. One of the photos was of funeral floral arrangements and wreaths. Wonderling spotted and recognized the name, Lila Herman. “Now I had the obit and the photo,” Wonderling said. She began to dig for more information on this young girl. Lila Herman was the daughter of one of the owners of a place called Herman’s Resort on Petite Lake in Antioch. The resort was used in the summer as a getaway by families living in Chicago who would take the train and spend a week or a long weekend at the resort. “Like all the resorts back then, once the [train] track was laid, that brought the people,” Wonderling said. Within two months of Wonderling’s findings, she said
Lake County Suburban Life | LakeCountySuburbanLife.com
Spooky stories come from historical society archives