The History:
"Our hope is to achieve eternal life," quotes Father Joseph Trapp, parish leader of Saint Joseph's Catholic Church in Benton IL. The current church is on Main street in Benton proper, dedicated by Bishop Albert Zuroweste, of the Catholic Diocese of Belleville, on June 22, 1952. But before that, Sacred Rites were performed in a basement church on Webster street, and even before that, at a church in West City. I could not find a picture or even location of the old church, unfortunately, but we did find the cemetery, established Feb 21 1914, (thanks to our Harrison Cemetery friend Carol Sloan) so that is where we chose to do our first cemetery investigation of 2014.
The Pre-Investigation:
We actually did our daytime pre-investigation back in November 2013. This is a pretty small cemetery, and while there seem to be quite a few names listed on the sign, the graveyard itself seem to have less than thirty stones. Likewise, many of the names listed on the sign (an Eagle scout project, apparently) do not seem to match up with many of the names on the stones. I had the same problem when uploading stones to findagrave.com (to which I am a constant contributor.) I am not sure if the names have been anglicized or what, but I still have a hard time knowing what belongs to who.
The Investigation:
We got back to Saint Joseph's May 10, 2014. It had stormed several times since we had been there last, and the sign had been very nearly blown over.
From the beginning, St Joseph's just felt different. Harrison Cemetery was calm, peaceful, welcoming. St Joseph's was far from creepy, it just didn't feel the same. Lonely, maybe. But if we thought it was in any way abandoned, we were wrong. While no spirits seem to linger here, people obviously still do. It happened to be the beginning of Mother's Day, and there were quite a few new flowers, wreaths, and trinkets about. The grounds were immaculate, and while there are in fact several broken stones, nothing was in disarray. This is a lovingly tended graveyard.
We didn't need to spend any length of time here to know everyone was at rest. Everyone who was buried here, anyway. Not far into our walkabout we both heard something walking near the edge of the surrounding woods, right ahead of us. Not being overly fond of woods at night to begin with, I was immediately spooked. After it rustled several more times, we decided we weren't getting any responses or feelings, so we high tailed it out of there. I can handle spirits, and I can handle people, but unseen wild animals? No thank you.
Thus we finished the evening without evidence or incident. But to be fair, this wasn't a cemetery in which we were told was paranormal goings-on and decided to investigate, it was simply an old, interesting graveyard with a lot of old stones with foreign names.
The Conclusion:
This is a nice, quiet, out of the way, well tended cemetery. The names are foreign, the causes of death are unknown, but the people here are not forgotten, as evidenced by the flowers and trinkets left regularly upon the graves. The people here are clearly at peace, and rightfully so.
