From Chicago historian Adam Selzer, expert on all of the Windy City’s quirks and oddities, comes a compelling heavily researched anthology of the stories behind its most fascinating unsolved mysteries. To create this unique volume, Selzer has collected forty unsolved mysteries from the 1800s to modern day. He has poured through all newspaper, magazine, and book references to them, and consulted expert historians. Topics covered include who really started the great Chicago fire, who was the first “automobile murderer,” and even if there was actually a vampire slaying at Rose Hill cemetery. The result is both a colorful read to get lost in, a window to a world of curiosity and wonder, as well as a volume that separates fact from fiction—true crime from urban legend. Complementing the gripping stories Selzer presents are original images of the crime and its suspects as developed by its original investigators. Readers will marvel at how each character and crime were presented, and happily journey with Selzer as he presents all facts and theories presented at the time of the “crime” and uses modern hindsight to assemble the pieces.

Cemeteries are in the metropolitan Chicago area.

When lights start flickering and temperatures suddenly drop, twelve-year-old Tessa Woodward, sensing her new house may be haunted, recruits some new friends to help her unravel the mystery of who or what is trying to communicate with her and why.

When it was founded in 1860, Chicago's Graceland was hailed as the most "modern" cemetery in existence and "the admiration of the world." Now known as the "Cemetery of Architects" because so many notable ones are buried there, Graceland remains a heavily visited attraction. This richly illustrated book uncovers how the influential and still beautiful landscape was developed over many generations, casting new light on the careers of several important landscape architects.

This volume invites readers to get up close and personal with one of the most respected and beloved writers of the last four decades. Carolyn J. Sharp has transcribed numerous table conversations between Walter Brueggemann and his colleagues and former students, in addition to several of his addresses and sermons from both academic and congregational settings. The result is the essential Brueggemann: readers will learn about his views on scholarship, faith, and the church; get insights into his "contagious charisma," grace, and charity; and appreciate the candid reflections on the fears, uncertainties, and difficulties he faced over the course of his career. Anyone interested in Brueggemann's work and thoughts will be gifted with thought-provoking, inspirational reading from within these pages.

Once maligned as a swampy outpost, the fledgling city of Chicago brazenly adopted the motto Urbs in Horto or City in a Garden, in 1837. Chicago Gardens shows how this upstart town earned its sobriquet over the next century, from the first vegetable plots at Fort Dearborn to innovative garden designs at the 1933 World’s Fair. Cathy Jean Maloney has spent decades researching the city’s horticultural heritage, and here she reveals the unusual history of Chicago’s first gardens. Challenged by the region’s clay soil, harsh winters, and fierce winds, Chicago’s pioneering horticulturalists, Maloney demonstrates, found imaginative uses for hardy prairie plants. This same creative spirit thrived in the city’s local fruit and vegetable markets, encouraging the growth of what would become the nation’s produce hub. The vast plains that surrounded Chicago, meanwhile, inspired early landscape architects, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jens Jensen, and O.C. Simonds, to new heights of grandeur. Maloney does not forget the backyard gardeners: immigrants who cultivated treasured seeds and pioneers who planted native wildflowers. Maloney’s vibrant depictions of Chicagoans like “Bouquet Mary,” a flower peddler who built a greenhouse empire, add charming anecdotal evidence to her argument–that Chicago’s garden history rivals that of New York or London and ensures its status as a world-class capital of horticultural innovation. With exquisite archival photographs, prints, and postcards, as well as field guide descriptions of living legacy gardens for today’s visitors, Chicago Gardens will delight green-thumbs from all parts of the world.

THE STORY: Chicago's oldest cemetery is the backdrop for GRACELAND, the story of four lonely Chicagoans whose lives collide one August weekend while the Blue Angels airshow is in town. As fighter jets buzz the skies from dusk till dawn, estranged b

Fifteen-year-old Creel is floored when her aunt suggests they sacrifice her to a dragon to attract the attention of a marriageable knight. But when the dragon appears, Creel bargains for her life - and ends up with an unusual pair of blue slippers. It’s not until the slippers are stolen by a princess that Creel learns a terrible truth: the slippers are made from the hide of a dragon queen, and enable the wearer to control all the dragons in the land. Now under the command of the princess, who is eager to start a war, the dragons begin to attack the city. Creel must join forces with the king’s son and others to break the slippers’ hold before the princess and the dragons destroy the city - or before the king’s archers kill the dragons - whichever comes first.

Everybody knows better. Yet from the days of ancient Greece, people have hurried their steps as they passed by—or, heaven forbid, walked through—a cemetery after dark. Indeed, over the centuries there have been countless stories of ghost encounters at churchyards, secular cemeteries, ancient burial grounds, and isolated graves. The second edition of Haunted Cemeteries exhumes more than 200 haunted happenings from restless graveyard ghosts in cemeteries across each of the fifty states and Washington, DC, including: Nevermore!: At least four entities, including the spectre of Edgar Allan Poe, haunt Westminster Burying Ground in Baltimore. And just who is the mysterious Man in Black that shows up every year on January 19, the writer’s birthday?. The Resurrection Apparition: A “hitchhiking ghost” outside Justice, Illinois, vanishes from the car she’s riding in as it passes Resurrection Cemetery—earning her the nickname Resurrection Mary. The Queen of Voodoo: The restless spirit of Marie Laveau, the nineteenth-century Queen of Voodoo, is said to appear in New Orleans’s St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in the form of a gigantic black crow or a phantom black hellhound—when she’s not walking through the French Quarter.