True Crime Site — Grimes Sisters Discovery Location
German Church Rd, Willow Springs, IL 60480
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free; public road and wooded area. Much of the land is private.
Access
Limited Access
Wooded, uneven terrain off a residential road; old gravel driveway partially overgrown
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1957 · Unsolved True Crime · Chicago Cold Case History · 1950s Chicago History
Barbara Jeanne Grimes was 15 years old. Her sister Patricia Kathleen Grimes was 12. On December 28, 1956, they left their Chicago home in McKinley Park to see a movie at the Brighton Park theater — reportedly one featuring Elvis Presley, whose fan club both girls belonged to. They never returned home.
The search lasted more than three weeks. On January 22, 1957, following a rapid thaw of recent snowfall, Leonard Prescott was driving along German Church Road in unincorporated Willow Springs when he noticed what he described as flesh-colored objects behind a guard rail. He initially thought they were mannequins. He returned with his wife Marie, who fainted. The objects were the nude, frozen bodies of the Grimes sisters.
Autopsy reports attributed both deaths to secondary shock from exposure to freezing temperatures, a conclusion that has been disputed by independent investigators who believed the finding obscured the cause of death. Both girls showed signs of injury. Police questioned approximately 300,000 people and conducted serious interrogations of 2,000 individuals. Multiple suspects were named publicly over the years; none was successfully prosecuted.
The case remains one of Chicago's most documented unsolved homicides. The site on German Church Road near Devil's Creek has carried the weight of that history for nearly 70 years.
The Shadowlands account attaches the haunting to a different specific location: an old house foundation approximately half a block off the side of German Church Road, reached by a barely visible gravel driveway, with a bog behind it. The account identifies the Grimes sisters by surname and describes them as haunting the wooded area. Whether the foundation corresponds to any property associated with the investigation is not established.
Sources
The paranormal account for this site names the Grimes sisters and describes a specific physical location: half a block into the woods off German Church Road, a barely visible old gravel driveway leading to an old house foundation, with a bog behind it. The account claims the bog is where the sisters were thrown.
This diverges from the documented historical record. The bodies were found beside the road's guard rail, not in a bog, and the investigation did not conclusively place the murders or the disposal of the bodies at this specific wooded location. Whether the account reflects a genuine local belief about the case's geography, or a folkloric elaboration that emerged from the broader community trauma of the case, cannot be determined.
What is documented is the emotional geography of the Grimes case in Chicago. The disappearance of two girls on a winter night in 1956 — with multiple apparent sightings of them alive in the weeks that followed, followed by the discovery of their frozen bodies — created a wound in the southwest Chicago communities they came from that did not close. The absence of resolution, decades of false leads, and the case's profile as one of the city's great unsolved crimes created the cultural conditions in which a haunting legend would take root and persist.
The site is treated here with archival distance. Two people died. The case is unsolved.
Notable Entities
Drive German Church Road in the Willow Springs area where, on January 22, 1957, a construction worker discovered the bodies of Barbara and Patricia Grimes — Chicago's most infamous unsolved double murder. The Shadowlands legend places the girls' haunting near an old house foundation off the road, approximately half a block into the woods. Much of the area is private property.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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