I went to Graceland!

Not the one where you can see legions of fans poking around the grounds to see if maybe Elvis Presley is still alive and disguised as a groundskeeper – I went to the famous-maybe-haunted-Chicago-cemetery.

Here’s a statue of a little girl, Inez Clarke,  said to have been struck by lightning on a family picnic in 1880 or so. The glass box around the statue was erected to protect the monument from the elements. It’s said that the statue sometimes disappears durning thunderstorms. And that children brought to tour the cemetery with their parents have reported making friends with a little girl in old fashioned clothing near the spot.

(Honestly – don’t parents watch their children better than that? Especially in graveyards? Have we learned nothing from Night of the Living Dead, people?)

The story of Inez Clarke is wonderfully spooky, but evidently wonderfully made up as well. No one can find documentation that such a little girl even existed, let alone was buried at Graceland.

Which is kind of too bad, because I love a good ghost story.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

Kristin Elizabeth Clark lives and writes in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Northern California. She hikes with her dog and reads to her cats… but she’s not one of THOSE people. Really. She has worked as a child advocate within the juvenile justice system, as a children’s theater producer, and is a proud volunteer at Project Outlet in Mountain View, California. Freakboy, her debut novel, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR) on October 22nd, 2013.