Rosehill Cemetery Walking Tour - Peak Leaf Time!

5800 North Ravenswood Avenue,Chicago IL 60660

05 November, 2022

Description

Rosehill is full of fascinating heroes, innovators, and pure eccentrics - as well as some of the city's most stunning artwork. A few names are known to any Chicago history buff, but many of the best stories are hidden deep behind ordinary headstones, or even in unmarked graves.  There are strange eccentrics, pioneers, actors, statesmen, artists, and even a few regular villains. So many that we can't fit it all in one route! There are tales of a pop song writer who became a big name in politics, an actor who became mayor, a man rumored to be the origin of the term "okay," and a woman Orson Welles called "the most fascinating person I ever met," a guy who owned a tavern when he was 12, people with connections to the city's earliest and most notorious murders... so many! Though we can't make promises about the weather, most years we find that the leaves just about hit their peak in early November, so this should be the ideal time for a tour! Tour guide Adam Selzer of Mysterious Chicago Tours is the author of several published books on Chicago history, Including Murder Maps USA, Mysterious Chicago, the Amazon Best-Selling HH Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil, Ghosts of Chicago, and the new Who's Who book for Graceland Cemetery. His research has been featured in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and more. He's a regular on the History and Travel channels, appearing on such shows as American Ripper, Haunted History, Mysteries at the Museum, I Was There, and many others.  His Rosehill cemetery tours are incredibly informative, surprisingly hilarious, and endlessly fascinating. Believing that "a great story is more interesting than a familiar name," his tours often focus on figures who somehow slipped through the cracks of history. Drawing on years of deep research, Selzer tells the stories, including information that has only recently been discovered, and shows how the Rosehill residents' lives interesected with each other and with American history. WHAT TO KNOW: - Meet just inside the gates off 5800 N. Ravenswood a bit before 11am (NOT the gates at Western and Bryn Mawr - the big stone ones on the other side). Adam will be checking people in. Look for the guy with the headset mic. - We run a couple of different routes at Rosehill; this one will probably mix them up a bit! - You won't need a paper ticket, just the name on your eventbrite order. -The tour runs roughly 75-90 minutes, sticking mainly to the older part of the cemetery on the Eastern side. Much of the tour is on the paved portions, but the route does require a great deal of "off road" walking to get to some of the featured graves. - There is no bathroom mid tour. Cemeteries don't generally have facilities set up throughout! - There is some parking available right inside the gates, or tons of free street parking nearby on Ravenswood.   - Tour runs rain or shine. The cemetery has a "no dogs or bikes" sign that we can't overrule.