Bad Boss: Legend of The Demon Butcher of Palos Park

PALOS PARK, IL — Nowhere in the Southland are the shadows murkier or more mysterious than Palos Township, an area shrouded by forest preserves and where some sections still feel as if you’re stepping back into the 19th Century.

During a recent conversation with Graveside Paranormal founder Neal Gibbons, he told us a grisly little story about Hermann Butcher, a late 19th-Century resident of Palos Park, whose last name was derived from his family’s long-held occupation.

Times were hard in the 1890s as the nation was gripped by a depression. Hermann was one of many businessmen who set up shop in Palos Township on Chicago’s outer fringes following the 1893 Columbian Exposition.

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Hermann was a rather explosive fellow and had a reputation for bullying the young apprentice he was mentoring in the fine art of cutting meat. Their loud arguments spilled outside within earshot of the Palos farmers and other villagers.

One day, a large shipment of beef was delivered to the shop. Hermann told his apprentice to take it into the basement.

“Unfortunately, the apprentice tripped and fell down the basement stairs while carrying the meat,” Gibbons said. “He broke his neck.”

Worried that none of the nearby neighbors would believe that the apprentice died in a freak accident, not to mention it being bad for business, Hermann hung the unfortunate lad on a meat hook to deal with later.

Eventually, Hermann disposed the apprentice's body by butchering it and selling it to other meat-starved community members. He is even said to have roasted some of the apprentice’s flesh at home, and found that it tasted a lot like beef.

“Business boomed,” Gibbons said. “People said it was the best meat they ever had.”

When there was nothing left of the apprentice's body but bones and hair, Hermann wondered how he was going to keep up his supply.

“He started luring hobos with alcohol. When they were drunk and passed out, he’d murder them,” Gibbons said. “But people loved the meat.”

When the hobo camps started emptying out because their friends were disappearing, Hermann moved on to the local children. People soon noticed an uptick in local kidnappings.

“They figured out that it was the butcher stealing the kids,” Gibbons said. “When people went down to the butcher’s basement, they saw the kids’ dismembered bodies.”

Community members meted out their own form of pioneer justice. Herman was dragged out on his lawn and decapitated. The butcher’s head was buried in Indian Hill Cemetery, and the rest of him across the road in Oak Hill at 131st Street and 90th Avenue in Palos Park.

“As the legend goes, the head gets together with the body and the butcher starts looking for another victim,” Gibbons said.

According to author and historian Ursula Bielski, founder of Chicago Hauntings, a former Palos Park resident told her that Hermann Butcher’s shop was housed in the 1893 farmhouse where the Plush Horse ice cream parlor is located today. The butcher’s decapitated body was buried somewhere on the property of The Children’s Farm at the Center.

A 1985 article in the Chicago Tribune states that the building was once used as a butcher shop, as well as a general store and antique shop before it became an ice cream parlor.

“We can’t know if the Plush Horse was the site where the Butcher of Palos Park committed his dastardly deeds.” Bielski writes on her Chicago Hauntings blog. “Nor if any such deeds were committed at all.”

An employee at the Plush Horse said to her knowledge, the building wasn’t haunted, and had never heard the story about the Butcher of Palos Park.

The butcher’s headless remains in Oak Hill were reportedly marked by a gravestone that said “Butcher.” His body was relocated to be closer to his head, but the graves have vanished.

“A lot of people make it bigger than what it was,” said Gibbons, who is convinced that the whole Resurrection Mary story was made up by the Catholic Church as a deterrent to keep young girls from running around drinking and dancing. “As with any story like this, it starts with the truth.”