Livingston County's Isolated Burial Ground and Hatchet Lady Legend
Streator, IL
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free to visit. The cemetery is accessible during daylight hours.
Access
Limited Access
Rural road access, uneven grassy cemetery ground
Equipment
Photos OK
The land takes its name from Jacob Moon, who settled along the winding creek in Livingston County around 1830. The creek and the point it described became known as Moon's Point, and the cemetery that grew up alongside them carried the same name. Civil War veterans are among those interred in the grounds, their graves now over a century and a half old.
The transformation from burial ground to local legend site happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Teenagers looking for an isolated place to gather after dark — to tell stories and play pranks on each other — settled on this isolated rural cemetery. The darkness, the seclusion, and the presence of old graves provided ideal conditions for the elaboration of local lore.
Local historian M.A. Kleen's documented research traces the Hatchet Lady legend through its multiple iterations: an older sibling's scare story about a real person who lived nearby and threatened cars; a Civil War-era widow who watched over her son's grave and appeared carrying a hatchet; a grief-maddened mother who lost her daughter. The legend accreted new details with each retelling, as such things do.
The cemetery has suffered from the attention. Local news reports have documented ongoing damage to the historic headstones from trespassers, with some century-old markers broken or toppled.
Sources
The Hatchet Lady exists in several incompatible versions, which is itself evidence of folkloric evolution. In one telling, she was a local woman who really lived nearby and would emerge from her house to threaten cars that stopped at the cemetery — an older sibling's scare story. In another, she was a Civil War widow who kept vigil at her son's grave until her own death and simply never left. In a third, a daughter's death drove a mother to violent grief and nightly wandering.
Kleen's research, drawing on historical records and oral history, concludes that the most likely kernel of truth is the simplest: a woman who watched over the cemetery. The hatchet, the full-moon appearances, the specific legends about her origin — these are accretions from the late-60s teenagers who made the site a gathering spot.
Other reports from the same period describe a ghostly boy seen among the headstones, colored orbs of light, and what some accounts characterize as colored mists. Vehicles are said to lose power at the cemetery entrance — a motif that appears consistently enough across independent accounts to suggest it has been experienced by multiple visitors, though its cause remains undetermined.
Notable Entities
Moon Point Cemetery, adjacent to Moon Creek south of Streator, is one of the older rural burial grounds in Livingston County with graves dating to the 1830s. The isolated wooded setting that generated the Hatchet Lady legend in the 1960s and 70s remains largely unchanged. Visit during daylight hours. Night visits have historically drawn trespassers who have damaged historic headstones.
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