Bachelor Grove
A Halloween I'll Never Forget
Sitting on the front porch, handing out candy to the little ghouls and hobgoblins as they walked up our front walk, I quickly thought back to the scariest Halloween of my life. It was ten years ago this very night, a night I will never forget and one that changed my life forever.
Angela Woolsey was always somewhat of a tease. We had dated a couple of times during our sophomore year of high school, but that was it. Nothing ever came of it, and after our third date ended with little more than a goodnight kiss, I gave up on her. All hat--no cattle, as my grandfather would have said.
For better or worse, her family moved away the summer after our sophomore year, and I never heard from her again. The story was that they moved to Chicago or someplace up that way. And you could say we both moved on.
I was fortunate enough to get an internship with the Chicago Board of Trade during the fall semester of my senior year of college. It didn't pay anything; my folks agreed to pay my living expenses. But what an opportunity! I was truly honored to have been selected.
For housing, I was put up at one of the Northwestern University dorms, and as I probably never would have been accepted as an undergrad at Northwestern, living in the dorm and taking a few business courses at one of the most prestigious universities in the Midwest was an honor enough. My internship was from seven in the morning until noon daily, followed by a lecture class Monday through Thursday. By late October, the excitement of the whole thing was beginning to wear off, and I was actually getting bored on the weekends. Oh, the work part of my day was the most exciting thing I have ever done. And I guess that's why I was so bored after I left the CBOT on Friday afternoons.
Sitting at a deep-dish pizza place not far from campus, I realized that the coming Friday was Halloween. As a kid, I always loved a night of Trick or Treating, and being alone in a city the size of Chicago was totally depressing. Then it hit me. Hey, hadn't Angela Woolsey moved to Chicago? I picked up my phone and started surfing for her. The best I could come up with was a Facebook account for someone by that name who lived in the Chicagoland area. Finishing my pizza and with a second beer in hand, I IM'd her. "Hi," I typed, "if this is the Angela Woolsey who attended Remington High School in Denver, this is Brad Holloman."
I put my phone down and picked up my beer. But before I could even swallow my first sip, my phone dinged. "Oh my God, tell me this isn't spam or something." I don't know how she typed a response that fast, and it didn't even look like there were any typos.
Well, five minutes later, we were talking. Yes, I had the correct Angela, and yes, she and her family had moved to the Chicago suburbs, as I had heard. After high school, she attended some small liberal arts college in Iowa that I'd never heard of and only lasted two years. She was back home, living with her parents and working for a local insurance company. And even more exciting was that she wanted to see me for an actual date.
The only issue was that she had apparently gone over to the occult side of the universe. I had my car, and she wanted me to take her to the Bachelor Grove Cemetery. I'd never heard of the place. So, as soon as I got off the phone with her, I Googled it. It's about twenty miles south of downtown, in a relatively remote and heavily wooded regional park. The cemetery dates back to the early 1820s. And the dearly departed rested peacefully until sometime around the 1950s. At that point, for some reason, the secluded graveyard had become a mecca for the mysterious, the supernatural, and the black arts.
After thinking about it and another beer, I figured, what the hell. If this is what turns her on, it may turn her on enough to make it my lucky night. I picked her up Friday evening, before dark, at her parents' house. Her mom and dad were happy to see me, but after only ten minutes of waltzing down memory lane, I could tell Angela was ready to go.
And as it was Halloween night, I found her dressed for the night. She was wearing black fingernail polish, and her eye makeup was certainly darker than I remembered her wearing in high school. She was wearing a black full-length dress, black lace-up boots, and a black leather choker around her neck, with some sort of satanic symbol dangling from the choker. But she had no visible tattoos or piercings, so I felt I was probably still safe. Once comfortably in my car, she gave me a tour of Lake Shore Boulevard and the Miracle Mile. As we waited for it to get dark, I took her to the Purple Pig for dinner, and I was glad to see she hadn't gone vegan on me.
Once it was good and dark, we headed south to the area where my Google map told me we would find the Bachelor Grove Cemetery. We parked on this unlit country road and walked about a quarter mile back into the woods. I admit it was creepy, but if this was her idea of a date, I was up for it. We found the gate, but it was locked. However, after a minute or two of searching in the dark, I found an opening in the chain link fence. I helped Angela through the opening, and as we stumbled from one tombstone to another, my hopes of scoring that night were getting better and better. I'd never had sex on a marble slab before, but if that's what she wanted, I was all in.