Est. 1912 · 1918 Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus Train Wreck · Mass Burial Site · Showmen's League of America · Circus History
In the early morning hours of June 22, 1918, the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus train was stopped on a siding near the Hammond, Indiana town of Hessville when an empty Michigan Central Railroad troop train, driven by an engineer who had fallen asleep, plowed into the rear four sleeping cars. Up to 86 people were killed in the collision, with fire killing additional victims who survived the initial impact but were trapped in the wreckage. The circus had been en route between performance dates.
The Showmen's League of America arranged the mass burial at Woodlawn Cemetery. A mass funeral service on June 27 — five days after the wreck — drew more than 1,500 people. Between 56 and 61 of the wreck's victims were interred in the Showmen's Rest section. Many of the dead were roustabouts and seasonal workers whose full names were never established. Their headstones bear the names they were known by in the circus: 'Smiley' and 'Baldy' identify two victims whose legal names were never recorded. Other stones read 'Unidentified Male No. 44,' 'Unknown Female,' or a job title — '4 Horse Driver' — in place of a name.
Five elephant statues mark the Showmen's Rest section: four smaller figures at the corners of the plot, and a fifth larger elephant at the center bearing the inscription 'Showmen's League of America.' All five have trunks lowered, the traditional circus symbol of mourning. A persistent but inaccurate local legend holds that actual circus elephants are buried beneath the statues — they are not.
The Showmen's League of America continues to maintain the section and bury circus and carnival performers in the remaining plots. A historical marker at the cemetery honors the 86 people killed in the 1918 wreck.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showmen%27s_Rest
- https://oakparkandbeyond.org/blog/showmens-rest-forest-park
- https://the-line-up.com/showmens-rest
Phantom soundsElephant callsCircus musicGround vibrations
The paranormal reputation of Showmen's Rest is bound to the 1918 mass burial and to the five elephant statues that mark the site. The most-cited phenomenon is sound: visitors report hearing elephant calls, distant circus music, and the sound of laughter at night near the plot. An Oak Park police officer's account describes the ground physically vibrating beneath his feet as though a large animal were passing, with no visible source.
The accounts are widely reported enough to appear in regional paranormal literature and on at least one television series examining haunted American cemeteries. Woodlawn Cemetery and the Showmen's League of America do not officially endorse the paranormal claims, presenting the site purely as a historical and memorial space.
The underlying conditions that generate the folklore are documented: dozens of victims were buried under names they had used only in performance, and several are interred under no name at all. The scale of the 1918 disaster — 86 dead in the space of hours, five days from wreck to burial — compressed the grief and identification work into a period too short for many families to participate. That combination of mass death, anonymity, and the inherently theatrical world of circus life has sustained the Showmen's Rest legend for more than a century.
Notable Entities
Unidentified Hagenbeck-Wallace performers
Media Appearances
- Haunted Cemeteries of Illinois (regional paranormal literature)
