Bloody Lake

camping at Blackhawk Memorial Park

I stumbled across Blackhawk Memorial Park after a thorough Googling of where to camp near Chicago. A mere 2.5 hours away from home, this secluded park and the surrounding community was everything I was looking for. Namely, it was a perfect balance of desolate, beautiful and downright creepy.

not so urbex

There are 30+ camp sites at the park. Maybe 3 of them were being used when we were there. We drove around to scope out the best spots and came across an abandoned camper that I had to explore. It was like 8/10 on the creepy scale, with children’s clothes, monopoly money and broken glass littering the floor.

the battle of bloody lake

After scouting camping spots, we picked this one almost entirely because of the ominous “BLOODY LAKE” sign right next to it. It turned out the bloodiest thing about the lake was the insane mosquito population. Also it wasn’t really a lake, more of a swamp but whatever, totally worth it.

Nearby there’s a memorial commemorating the battle that happened here in 1832. I wasn’t too thrilled to read that 11 Kickapoo people were brutally killed here to make the land more “habitable” for settlers (this is according the memorial, Wikipedia has a more detailed account.)

GHOST FARMS AND BONE BARNS

The building below looked like it used to house livestock. The floor was littered with bones of (presumably) animals, which was pretty disconcerting.

There were several vacant farm properties in the vicinity of the park that I wanted to check out. As far as I could tell they were all for sale, which made me wonder how often people “move out” of their farms and how often new people come around looking for farms on the market. It seemed like many of the properties had been uninhabited for quite some time.

where next?

I like creepy, abandoned things. If you know of somewhere that seems cool, please shoot me an email at ellie@elliepritts.com!