The Mystery:
Was The Girl in Glass at Graceland Cemetery really a victim of parental neglect?
Is George Pullman really buried under steel and concrete? Was Walter Newberry buried in a rum barrel? And who is the Girl in Glass? Geoffrey Baer explores with Adam Selzer.
At Graceland Cemetery on Chicago’s North Side, there is a sculpture of a little girl named Inez that sits in a glass encasement. While the sculpture itself is the subject of some spooky local lore, the story of the little girl’s death has also been rooted in fiction. Adam Selzer, a local historian and author who has a podcast episode about the topic, told Geoffrey Baer that many people believed that Inez died when her mother locked her outside in a lightning storm. “The legend goes that whenever there’s a storm here at Graceland, the statue will vanish, and her ghost will run around the cemetery,” Selzer said. He looked into old records and discovered that Inez’s mother, who was herself very young, was abandoned by her alcoholic husband. Selzer found that Inez actually died of diphtheria around age 7, not in a lightning storm, abandoned by her mother. “We should really let her poor mother off the hook for that one,” Selzer said.
