(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — A Chicago tour guide and author has a new book out featuring the stories of some of the people buried in Graceland Cemetery.
Walking through Graceland Cemetery, reading gravestones, or paging through Graceland’s interment book — that’s how Adam Selzer got the names, to tell their stories.
“One of my favorites is a guy named Jeremiah Price, who has a grave that’s completely illegible now, but it’s under a gorgeous old tree,” he explains.
“Forty years after this guy died, people were still swapping stories about how boring he was. One guy said that if he had any imagination at all, it didn’t extend beyond the alphabet and the multiplication table.
“He died of cholera after refusing to see a doctor. He insisted on just taking some peppermint lozenges. And when they found him the next morning he had $20,000 in cash and bonds strapped to his body like he was trying to take it with him.”
Selzer’s new book, Graceland Cemetery: Chicago Stories, Symbols, and Secrets, is filled with stories of people buried in the 150-year-old cemetery on the city’s North Side. He often refers to these Chicagoans during his walking tours of the site.
For instance, there is the Getty Mausoleum designed by famed architect Louis Sullivan.
“But they almost never talk about the people inside of it. It was built by Henry Getty, who was a lumberman,” Selzer says. “But his daughter Alice was a composer, archaeologist and an expert on Buddhist art. She could’ve starred in an Indiana Jones movie. She had a manuscript that is thought to have been burned by the Nazis before it could be published.”
Also featured, Selzer says, is “the girl in the glass box,” Inez Clarke, who died in 1880 at age 6. Her gravesite features a statue of her encased in glass.
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