Exploring the lore of Munger Road

WAYNE – Kathy Tranchida bought her Munger Road home without knowing the ghostly lore surrounding the 3-mile roadway.

Now, five years later, she has witnessed many strange occurrences – flashes of light, doors closing while she’s gone and atypical behavior in her horses, for example – that she cannot logically explain.

“Anything spooky that happens, I refer to it as the children,” Tranchida said, alluding to an element of the Munger Road ghost stories.

Tales say children were killed at the railroad crossing.

Today, legends claim, cars parked on the tracks will be pushed onto the road, and children’s hand prints will be on the bumper. But that’s just one of the stories.

Wayne police Sgt. Tom Read said he heard many variations as he shooed away the droves of people – usually high school teens – who sometimes traveled from as far away as Chicago to test the legends. “

Now it’s died down,” Read said. “It’s nothing, nothing like it used to be.”

A St. Charles filmmaker, however, is reviving the tales with his movie, “Munger Road.”

Nick Smith said the film is about four teens trying to exploit the ghost story of the road but end up becoming the ghost story.

“The objective of the film is not to advertise or dispel any stories or legends related to the road, but rather to frame a plausible, engaging story within a realistic setting,” he said in an e-mail.

The origin of the Munger Road ghosts It’s likely we will never know the origin of the spooky stories surrounding Munger Road. And, it’s likely that they are just that – tales. Juel Ulven, director of the Fox Valley Folklore Society, said the stories fall under the category of ghost stories, a type of folk tale. These stories might have a valid start, but it is difficult to trace their source because most are said to have happened to a friend of a friend to give the tale more credibility, he said.

“The thing is people keep rediscovering them, and they crop up again,” Ulven said.

Folk tales can serve different purposes, such as acting as a cautionary tale or teaching people how to deal with life’s transitions, he said. Ghost stories seem to fill people’s desire to be scared, he said.

“Part of it is the thrill of who can tell the scariest story,” Ulven said. “Some of it’s competitive, and people love to be listened to.”

Munger Road’s thrill seekers Joe Wiermanski, 30, grew up on Munger Road hearing stories about a haunted tree that would eat people and a barn used for devil worshipping. Although he wasn’t scared, he said, the stories brought a level of excitement for kids in the middle of the country. Once in high school, classmates would ask Wiermanski to take them to Munger Road. He would.

“It was good to give them a good scare,” he said.

Although most of the visitors were good kids looking for adventure, some posed problems for the authorities, Read said. For example, he said, kids kept stealing the road signs as souvenirs and would trespass on residents’ property. A run-down house near the train tracks was especially popular, Read said, describing it as a “classic spook house.” He pleaded with the resident to keep his lights on to avoid trespassers.

“The kids were always, always messing with him,” Read said. “I was worried about them burning it down.”

Read would ask the visitors what they had heard about Munger Road. Many had been told that if they sat on the railroad tracks they would hear a train coming, but it would never come. Read would explain there was another set of tracks about a half mile west.

“It really ruins their day,” Read said. “They wanted the thrill of the mystery.”

The popularity of Munger Road has declined in the last decade, Read said, noting it is no longer a desolate country road. Many of the farmhouses and barns have been torn down, subdivisions have been built and Forest Preserve Drive has been installed, he said. The unexplainable Of the several Munger Road residents contacted for this story, Tranchida was the only one who had experienced unexplainable acts.

Tranchida first – albeit jokingly – suggested her 3-acre property was haunted after her two horses acted afraid of going in one corner of her sand arena, she said. Since then, she said, she has heard her front bay window cracking during cold nights without it displaying any damage and glimpsed the ghost of a girl in her home three different times. Initially, Tranchida wondered what she got herself into but now shrugs off the weird occurrences. Does she believe supernatural forces are at work?

“I live 90 percent of the time by myself,” she said. “I don’t want to know if it exists.”

But she entertains the idea. Her horses still avoid the corner of the sand arena. Maybe, she said, they can sense the supposed ghosts of the children killed at the train tracks.

“Kids like horses,” Tranchida said. “Maybe they’re by the rail watching the horses.”