Aerial survey · USDA NAIP · public domainLivingston County's Isolated Burial Ground and Hatchet Lady Legend
Streator, IL
Research updated May 2026
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
Civil War Veterans · Illinois Rural Cemetery History · Regional Folklore
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.
Author Michael Kleen, who wrote about the site in 2018, found no historical evidence for the Hatchet Lady. Local tellings give her more than one origin: a mother driven mad by grief over a lost child, or a widow who lost a son in a war. 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, a mother driven mad by grief after the death of a child wanders the cemetery on nights of the full moon. In another, she is a widow who lost a son in a war and is said to guard her child's grave.
Author Michael Kleen, who wrote about the site in 2018, found no historical evidence for the Hatchet Lady and notes that the site became an object of folklore in the late 1960s and 1970s, when teenagers gathered at the isolated cemetery after dark to tell stories and play pranks.
Other reports from the same period describe the sound of children laughing, colored orbs of light, and whispered voices. 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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