On a country road outside of Springfield, Illinois there are sightings of two different ghosts that have not been widely reported.
The first one I heard about eight years ago doing ghost hunting and looking for a particular cemetery. After knocking on doors of a few houses around the cemetery, I realized that I had been given wrong directions, but also stumbled upon another ghost story.
The person started to tell me about a strange encounter with a little girl. They were driving late at night along the hilly country road that they live on when they saw what appeared to be a little girl dressed in a dirty t-shirt, dirty, and barefoot crying. They pulled the car over and went around the car to the little girl. "What's wrong?" They asked, and she looked up, tears rolling down her face still and she asked, "Do you know where I am?" Before they could respond the girl started to fade and disappeared into thin air.
They said they hadn't told many of their friends or family about the encounter before because they were worried about what they would think and dismiss it as them dreaming or just being tired.
The second story I heard from a few locals when I was running a small tour of ghost tours of some of the more obscure haunted sites in central Illinois.
Along the same stretch of road several people say they have seen a man walking down the side of the road dressed in a black suit and a bowler hat. Any time that people pull up near him and ask him if he needs a ride, he turns to look at them revealing a gaunt face, pale skin, and eyes that are solid black. He always asks, "Do you know where I am?" before turning and walking away.
The odd part of the story is that there is a little cemetery located on the road. When I first saw it I drove by several times before even realizing that it was a cemtery. There is a single tree located in roughly in the middle of the cemetery and the remains of the stones stick up from the ground like broken bones. The remains of the tombstones are all sitting in piles around the tree in the middle. There is no gate, just a chain link fence surrounding the cemtery. Many people have started to theorize that the two ghosts that are seen along this road are two people who are buried in the cemetery who are just looking to find their tombstones.
If you are ever driving along a hilly road outside of Springfield and see either of them, when they ask, "Do you know where I am?", you may be able to show them the cemetery....
