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(Date Posted:01/24/2006 12:56 AM)
If those of you that were at our last meeting recall, the ladies from the McHenry County Historical Society noted that a home was trying to be built up on what was believed to be a cemetery in Lakemoor. Actually a friend of mine lives right down the road and I am going to try to contact him to get me some further info so we might be able to get an interview perhaps, and possibly an investigation down the line. There have supposedly been sightings and other activity reported from this parcel of land by neighbors, who actually did contact the historical society in this regards as well! Here is the article from the Northwest Herald.Cemetery may bury house planPublicationNorthwest HeraldDateOctober 24, 2005Section(s)Local NewsPageLAKEMOOR - A psychic reportedly saw a ghost in a long 19th-century topcoat pacing in front of her yard near the historical Snyder Cemetery about five years ago.Vandals destroyed or removed the headstones decades ago, but about a week before Halloween, the cemetery is haunting another property owner who wants to build a single-family house at the northeast corner of Lily Lake and Wegner roads outside Lakemoor.The Illinois State Preservation Agency is looking for information to see whether property owner Jerry Shaber can build there without violating the Human Skeletal Remains Protection Act, said Anne Haaker, deputy state historic preservation officer.The agency sent Shaber a letter Oct. 17, telling him that it wanted information about the property before Shaber continued building. McHenry County issued Shaber a building permit Oct. 3.Shaber declined to comment for this story."Apparently, after we had issued a permit, neighbors began to call, saying there was a cemetery," said Sue Ehardt, McHenry County's planning and development director, and code-enforcement officer.Locals have speculated about whether bodies remain in Snyder Cemetery since at least 1981, when some of the headstone bases still remained, said Nancy Fike, the McHenry County Historical Society's administrator. The graveyard does not appear on county maps, but this is the first time the county has issued a building permit there, Fike said.At least six people were buried there in the late 1800s, although their bodies were removed later, according to a cemetery history book compiled by the county's genealogical society. Area residents might have started the graveyard before its namesake, farmer Anthony Snyder, bought 420 acres close to the county's east border in 1846, according to the book.Longtime residents in the 1980s said at least five children still were buried there, Fike said.Getting to the bottom of the matter could be a long process. The Illinois State Preservation Agency investigates about two dozen historic cemetery cases a year, Haaker said.If state officials think that there might be bodies buried there, a forensic anthropologist will visit the site and make a recommendation about whether to let the property owner disturb them, she said. The agency usually allows disturbances when they are unavoidable, such as an instance when researchers could not find descendants of partial American Indian remains found in an Illinois Department of Transportation right of way.If the agency learns that there are remains at Snyder Cemetery, the property owner would have to try to find the descendants of the people buried there and hire a professional archaeologist to remove the remains, Haaker said."We're looking into it," she said. "There is a state law; we'll ensure the law is followed."By JILLIAN COMPTON
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