Graceland Cemetery Tour with Author Adam Selzer

People are more than what they owned and who they married. Not all of the residents at Chicago’s historic Graceland Cemetery were famous, in their own time or beyond, but most of them went on adventures, sang songs, told jokes, and fell in and out of love. Though Graceland is home to such famous Chicagoans as Marshall Field, Ernie Banks, and Bertha Palmer, some of the best stories can hide in surprising places; there are unmarked graves for fiery abolitionists, and hidden in family plots of industrial titans are their wives and daughters who set the city on fire in their crime. They say that everyone has a story, but the truth is that most people have many of them.

Tour guide Adam Selzer has made a career of uncovering those stories, poring over microfilm newspapers, crumbling paperwork, and old ladies’ diaries (just, a lot of old ladies’ diaries), with an aim not just to identify interesting people in the cemeteries where he works, but to find out what they were like, what it was like to know them, and how the interacted with each other and with history.

Nearly all of his 90 minute Graceland tours include the famous Inez and Eternal Silence statues, but each one is a little different; routes may include the first sportswoman to grace the cover of Time magazine, the only confirmed revolutionary soldier buried in Chicago, people who inspired some of literature’s most colorful characters, firebrand feminists and abolitionists, a man so comically dull that people were still poking fun at him decades after his death, or victims of the city’s earliest serial killers.

Adam is the author of Graceland Cemetery: Chicago Stories, Symbols and Secrets (University of IL Press, 2022) (and the upcoming second volume), as well as Graveyards of Trinity Church and St. Paul’s (Arcadia 2025), HH Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil (S&S 2016) and the brand new Chicago’s Serial Husband: The Marriages and Murders of Johann Hoch (Arcadia 2025). He is a regular on the History Channel, and host of the new Tomb Snoopers podcast.

Praise for Adam's Graceland Book:

"Tantalizing... A prolific and stylish writer, tireless tour guide, and passionate researcher." - Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune

"A truth-seeking research glutton....(the book is) an adept melding of the tours, the research, and the writing." - Chicago Reader

"Emblematic of...hipster tour guides. Selzer goes beyond mere trivia. He turns up fascinating individual stories of cemetery residents without leaning too heavily on the big names." - Third Coast Reviews

What You Need to Know:

- Meet a bit before the start time inside the gates. We'll be at the newly renovated main entrance at Clark and Irving Park! Look for Adam with the white glasses and headset mic.

• There is parking in the cemetery, and more in the nieghborhoods nearby. Parking along Clark Street is harder now, as they've changed it to a bike path!

• - Tour runs rain or shine!

- The cemetery is near the red line (get off at Sheridan or Addison and it's a few blocks), the 22 Clark bus, and the Irving Park bus.

- The walk covers about 1.5 miles over the course of 75-90 min. Some of the walking veers off the paved paths. You'll get about 3k steps!

Host or Publisher Mysterious Chicago / Astonishing Chicago