Mass Grave of the 1918 Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus Disaster
Woodlawn Cemetery, 7600 Cermak Road, Forest Park, IL 60130
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free; Woodlawn Cemetery is open to the public during daylight hours.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved cemetery roads, grass burial section
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1913 · 1918 Hammond Circus Train Wreck · Showmen's League of America · Mass-Grave Memorial
The Showmen's League of America, founded in Chicago in 1913 with Buffalo Bill Cody as its first president, purchased 750 cemetery plots at Woodlawn Cemetery in Forest Park, west of Chicago, as a final resting place for circus performers and workers. The section is marked by five life-size stone elephant statues, each rendered with its trunk lowered — a traditional mourning posture in circus iconography.
On June 22, 1918, near Hessville, Indiana (approximately five and a half miles east of Hammond), an empty troop train operated by Michigan Central rear-ended a stopped Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus train. The engineer of the troop train had fallen asleep at the controls. The collision and subsequent fire killed 86 people and injured 127 more, ranking among the worst rail disasters in American history.
The Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus was performing without insurance at the time. The Showmen's League of America accepted the burial responsibility, and between 56 and 61 of the circus dead were interred at Showmen's Rest. Many of the victims were itinerant workers without next of kin or identifying documents. Only five of the dead were positively identified; the remaining graves bear markers reading "Unknown Male," "Unknown Female," or stage names such as "Smiley," "Baldy," and "4 Horse Driver."
The section continues to accept burials of circus performers, carnival workers, and other showmen. A Memorial Day ceremony is held annually to honor those interred there. The Hammond Circus Train Wreck Historical Marker, installed in Indiana near the wreck site, identifies the connection between the disaster and the Forest Park memorial.
Sources
The most-circulated piece of Showmen's Rest folklore is the long-running claim that area residents and overnight visitors have heard elephants trumpeting from within the cemetery on still nights. The story is rooted in the visual prominence of the five elephant statues marking the burial section.
No elephants are buried at Showmen's Rest. The Hagenbeck-Wallace circus elephants survived the 1918 wreck and continued performing afterward. Atlas Obscura, Cult of Weird, and several Chicago-area paranormal-folklore catalogs note that the elephant-trumpeting story is essentially urban myth without supporting witness documentation, while continuing to circulate widely.
A more grounded thread of lore concerns the unidentified-burials section, where many graves are marked only by descriptors. Visitors have reported a sense of melancholy and occasional sounds resembling distant calliope music. These accounts are individual and anecdotal rather than the subject of formal paranormal investigation.
The section's emotional weight comes from the documented industrial-disaster history rather than from paranormal claims. The annual Memorial Day ceremony treats the site as a memorial to working people lost in a catastrophic accident.
Walk the 750-plot Showmen's Rest section of Woodlawn Cemetery, marked by five life-size stone elephant statues with their trunks lowered in mourning. Headstones include the burials of unidentified circus workers from the 1918 Hagenbeck-Wallace train wreck — markers read 'Unknown Male,' 'Unknown Female,' 'Smiley,' 'Baldy,' and '4 Horse Driver.'
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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