Title frame from 2009 video about Springfield High School’s supposed ghost. (SHS Student Film Club)
There is some truth to the folklore around “Rachel,” the supposed ghost that haunts Springfield High School.
- SHS was built on the former site of Hutchinson Cemetery, once the city’s largest graveyard. Hutchinson Cemetery covered five acres southwest of the intersection of Lewis and Washington streets, running almost to Parker Street on the west and Monroe Street on the south.
- After Hutchinson Cemetery closed in the 1870s, most of the remains interred there were moved to Oak Ridge Cemetery. But not all of them.
- During renovations at the high school in 1983, workers did unearth a mysterious tombstone.
That’s when things got spooky.
Researcher Erika Holst, curator of history at the Illinois State Museum, estimated in 2024 that about 1,000 people were buried at Hutchinson Cemetery between the 1840s, when John Hutchinson (1810-?), a cabinet- and coffin-maker, opened the graveyard, and the 1870s, when the city council closed it to new burials.
The city offered free plots at Oak Ridge Cemetery, on a lot-for-lot basis, to encourage people to move their relatives’ remains from Hutchinson to Oak Ridge. The effort was mostly successful, and relocations took place over the next 15 years or so. Nonetheless, Holst found, records exist for only about 700 relocations.
When the cemetery closed, the city created a public park, Forest Park, on the land. About 2,000 people, many of them children, attended opening ceremonies on June 17, 1891, and Forest Park became a popular spot for picnics and recreation. In 1915, however, the Springfield School District bought the property as the site for a new public high school, today’s Springfield High.
Knowing the history of the land, it appears no one was very surprised when, in the spring of 1916, excavating crews came across at least two leftover bodies. The first, found in March, consisted of “human bones and a part of an old coffin with rusting handles,” the Illinois State Register reported.
The second, revealed a month later, was more chilling. From the Register:
An iron coffin containing the skeleton of a baby was found in Forest Park site yesterday morning by workmen who were excavating for the new high school The casket, which had probably been buried for fifty years or more, was in a splendid state of preservation. A small hand holding withered flowers could be discerned through the glass top.
Neither body could be identified, and both sets of remains were reinterred at Oak Ridge. Those discoveries apparently prompted no reports of ghosts or hauntings after the new SHS opened on Oct. 4, 1917.
That’s where things stood until 1983, when the school was being updated; the renovations included a new heating system, roof insulation, new windows and a new elevator. In the process of excavating the elevator shaft, however, workers unearthed a small granite tombstone.
No remains were found, and, frustratingly, the stone, though well preserved, bore no name. “Our daughter,” it said on top; “Cut down but not destroyed” was carved into the face. The stone was cleaned off and stashed in custodians’ quarters in the school basement.
Tombstone discovered in 1983 (screenshot from “Rachel,” SHS Student Film Club)
Discovery of the grave marker was all it took for high school imaginations – presumably – to take over. Since 1983, SHS tradition has claimed that a young girl haunts the school’s corridors and darker corners. (A custodian named the apparition “Rachel,” apparently at random; it stuck.)
Rachel is said to particularly haunt the elevator itself, whose doors allegedly often open before a potential rider pushes the button – “Thanks, Rachel,” is the courteous response. Some elevator users also have reported feeling or hearing a ghostly presence with them as they ride.
Elsewhere in the school, Rachel is sometimes blamed for strange electrical phenomena, unexplained chills, and wispy apparitions.
The only extensive print reporting about Rachel seems to be an article, “Springfield High School and a Disturbed Cemetery,” in Haunted Springfield, Illinois, by Garret Moffett (originally published in 2011; updated and expanded, 2024). Moffett indulges in lots of third-hand and anonymous tales about the alleged haunting of SHS, but his account handles the verifiable history of the school’s connections to Hutchinson Cemetery pretty well. (Moffett is the proprietor of Springfield Walks and Tours, which includes the offerings “Lincoln’s Ghost Walk” and “Aristocracy Hill Haunted History Tour.”)
Moffett also was one of the commentators in an excellent, although 25-year-old, video exploration, “Rachel,” created by the Student Film Club at SHS in 2009 (you may have to drag the timeline to return video to its beginning).
Besides Moffett, the young filmmakers interviewed SHS teachers, custodians, students and others, and the video takes viewers into some of the areas Rachel supposedly frequents, plus the basement where the 1983 gravestone was stored.
The video understandably tilts to the idea that SHS really has its own ghost, but one of its most entertaining sections is when a couple of jokey interviewers question students and faculty about whether they’ve experienced any hauntings in the high school halls.
“Rachel? Huh?” one interviewee responds. “This must be a Chatham kid,” the interviewer says as he walks away.
The least convincing participants are three members of the Springfield Ghost Society, whose attempts to talk to the “ghost” return increasingly unlikely answers.
Its credulity aside, Moffett’s essay is a fair summation of the “Rachel” phenomenon.
“For the students and teachers of Springfield High School, Rachel’s ghostly lore has become an affectionate part of the fabric woven into the school’s history,” Moffett writes. “Others may have been forgotten, but not Rachel.”
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