Spooked! (Part 3)

Speaking in a cold monotone, Orpet, 21, admitted terrible things. He was a seducer, romancing and discarding a high school girl. He was a liar, denying the facts until they were thrown in his face. And he was a coward, abandoning his one-time sweetheart's body in a wintry forest rather than seek help.

Yet he remained steadfast that he was not a murderer. Marion killed herself when he told her they were through, he said. He had not given her the poison.

And in the end?

Ghost stories tempt us into thinking that buried questions can be answered, that long-ago tragedies can somehow be put right. Look deeper, though, and our assurance vanishes in a wisp of fog. Nothing remains but the mystery, haunting us like a shadowy girl in the middle of the road.

Spooked!

Scarlett Johansson...



...bears a striking and eerie resemblance to Marion Lambert, murdered in Lake Forest, IL, in 1916,

And the story gets weirder from there:

The girl in the road didn't move as the headlights swept over her.

She wore a long blue dress that was soaked from the rain, and her feet were bare. The approaching driver slowed and reached for her cell phone, thinking the girl might have been in an accident. But before she dialed, she took a closer look — and could scarcely believe what she saw.

Light seemed to pass through the girl, as though she were a figment from a disturbing dream. When the car pulled alongside her, she smiled, displaying blackened teeth in a deteriorating mouth.

Unnerved, the driver sped away.

I can't explain it," she recently told the Tribune, years after the incident. "It just wasn't real."

A chill runs through local historians when they hear this story. The driver had been traveling on Sheridan Road in Lake Forest, near the now-closed Barat College. That was close to the spot where, on a winter morning in 1916, a young woman's frozen body was discovered — the prologue of a drama that would consume the town and the nation.

Stay tuned for the rest of the story... which sounds like it would make a wonderful movie.