With a colorful past that includes long-lost towns, determined hog thieves, and cemetery lore, Morgan Township in northeastern Coles County is one of the area’s most interesting destinations. The township is around nine miles long, four and a half miles wide in the north and a mere one and a half miles wide in the south. The Embarras River valley and timberland lay along its eastern border, and the familiar prairie lay along its western border.
Morgan Township was named after David Morgan, a Kentuckian who arrived in Coles County in 1834, but that part of the county was heavily populated by American Indians prior to his arrival. Today, it is home to the communities of Bushton and Rardin, as well as acres of pristine, natural wilderness.
According to the History of Coles County, 1879, a number of Indian burial grounds are scattered around the township, although none have been excavated by archeologists. In 1877 or ‘78, a man named Henry Curtis dug up a human skull, as well as a few other bones, while looking for bait worms. The skull possessed a bullet-like hole in the back. Curtis, shocked by his discovery, quickly reburied the skeleton and covered the site with rocks. It was never determined to whom the skeleton belonged.
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St. Omer Cemetery and the small, defunct village of the same name probably would have been forgotten a century ago had it not been for one unusual family monument and a misprinted date. As is often the case in Coles County, these peculiar circumstances gave birth to an obscure but enduring legend. According to local lore, Caroline Barnes, one of four people buried under the massive stone, was put to death for practicing witchcraft. It is said that no pictures can be taken of her monument, and that it glows on moonless nights.
The legend of Eastern Illinois University’s Pemberton Hall is, by far, the most famous ghost story to come out of Coles County. A variation of a well-known folktale called “the Roommate’s Death,” it has been passed down by generations of young women at EIU and has appeared in dozens of books. One night, it is said, a deranged janitor attacked and killed a student on the fourth floor. Her ghost, or the ghost of the dorm mother who discovered her body, now haunts the hall. Over the years, Pemberton Hall’s own history contributed to this story, creating a unique tale beloved by students and alumni alike.
It was September 1, 1944, the fifth anniversary of the opening salvos of World War 2. American GIs had been fighting their way across northern France for three months. Across the nation, the press churned out lurid accounts of Nazi rocket attacks on London, and comic books depicting Nazi thugs battling super heroes with space age weapons were sold at dime store counters. In Peoria, Illinois, the search for a German prisoner of war who had escaped from nearby Camp Ellis ended that afternoon in a local tavern.
It is a legend so obscure that its only press has been the first half of a sentence in an article published in 1977, and a cemetery so little known that it only appears on a county cemetery map dating back to 1980. It is a place that might have been forgotten entirely had it not been an ideal proving ground for fraternity and sorority pledges. Lafler-Ennis Cemetery is surrounded by woods and the Charleston Stone Quarry, near the banks of the Embarras River, and accessible by way of a gravel path announced by a hand-painted sign. It even contains the grave of a Mary Hawkins, only this Mary Hawkins died in 1851 in infancy, and was therefore not the Mary Hawkins of Pemberton Hall fame.
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