Lake Forest Legend: Marion Lambert, The Ghost Of Sheridan Road

LAKE FOREST, IL — Nearly 105 years after her body was found in the frozen woods off Sheridan Road near Lake Forest College, the fatal poisoning of Marion Lambert continues to inspire ghostly accounts of roadside apparitions. Whether the 18-year-old Lake Forest woman's death was a homicide, suicide or accident has never been conclusively determined.

Lambert, a senior at Deerfield-Shields Township High School in Highland Park, died of cyanide poisoning, according to archival reports. Her onetime paramour, Will Orpet, was charged with her murder but acquitted in a closely watched trial. The Waukegan court proceedings were covered by newspapers from as far as California and New York.

The pair began dating in high school before Orpet, son of the caretaker of the Cyrus McCormick estate, headed off to college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. They exchanged letters that would have been considered quite salacious, and, in the fall of 1915, they had a physical encounter in the woods near Sacred Heart Convent. The nature of that encounter became the subject of some dispute.

Lambert claimed to have become pregnant, according to their correspondence, while Orpet was convinced — based on his knowledge of human biology — that he had not impregnated the teen. He attempted to end the relationship.

The Los Angeles Herald suggested Lambert knew that she was not pregnant but tried to convince Orpet, who was said to be involved with at least one other girlfriend in Madison, that she was in order to stay with him.

"It was a ruse that is used by only the most callous and world-worn of women to lay claim upon the honor of the men who have tired of them and to whom they can appeal in no other way," it said. "How did this simply country-reared girl ever know of such a thing? How did she ever have the nerve and hardihood to do such a thing. Surely it is the strangest and most ungirlish act a young girl ever did."

Orpet's efforts to break up led to a Feb. 8, 1916, meeting in Helm's Woods, at the time part of the estate of Edith Rockefeller McCormick, daughter of John D. Rockefeller, and now a backyard in the Villa Turicum subdivision.

According to the New York Times account of the trial, Orpet tried to keep the meeting a secret from his parents, spending the night in a garage on the McCormick estate before arranging to meet Lambert on her way to school.

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Though he did not believe that Lambert actually was pregnant, Orpet offered her a "medicine" he said would induce a miscarriage — although it is not clear whether it was more of a molasses-based placebo than any home-made abortifacient. She declined it, according to his testimony. She called out again as he started to leave, he said, asking if he would continue to send her letters. There seemed to be no use, he responded, and began to walk away.

"Something made me look around — I don't know what — and I saw Marion lying in the snow," Orpet testified. "I returned, knelt over her for maybe a minute. I noticed the moist powder in the lines of her hand. Her eyes were glazed. Then a kind of fog came into my brain, and I don't remember much after that except that on reaching the road I threw away the 'medicine' and made my way on foot to Highland Park, caught a train and that evening arrived back at Madison."

Orpet headed back to Madison but was soon tracked down by reporters and police. He told a series of conflicting stories about what happened and relied heavily on the response "I don't remember" during three days of cross-examination, according to the Times.

The prosecution's theory held that Orpet killed Lambert because of her perceived pregnancy after producing a cyanide solution at the estate. The defense argued that Lambert had taken cyanide herself, either to kill herself or as an accident intended to win Orpet's affection.

"The State was unable to persuade any witness to come from Wisconsin, and repeatedly hinted that a sinister influence of the defense was at the bottom of it," according to the Times.

One of the prosecution's key witnesses, a friend of Lambert, changed her story and testified that Lambert had been depressed and discussed committing suicide if Orpet broke up with her.

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But it was the physical evidence of the cyanide that appears to have been decisive at trial. Following five hours of deliberations, the jury found that Orpet did not administer the poison.

A key piece of evidence: experts testified the form of cyanide that killed Lambert was potassium cyanide powder — the type kept at the Deerfield High School science lab, where Lambert had been the day before her death, in violation of school rules — and not the type that Orpet had access to, of which Lambert would have had to either drink two quarts or eaten two pounds.

Motorists on Sheridan Road have reported sightings of ghostly apparitions, including one strikingly detailed story of a young girl with a damaged mouth. However, a professional ghost hunter toured locations associated with Lambert's death a decade ago and found no evidence of anything supernatural, the Chicago Tribune reported.

According to newspaper archives, Sheridan Road south of Lake Forest had acquired a ghostly reputation well before Lambert and Orpet's ill-fated romance.

"No well-regulated country house is complete without its ghost, or at least without the shadow of a [gruesome] story beneath its eaves. Now it is barely possible that there are some families living between North Evanston and the furthermost bounds of Winnetka which are not 'old' enough to have a family spook," according to a grandiloquent 1896 Chicago Daily Tribune report. "But there is not one family, whether old or young, within the limits named which cannot have its wandering spirit or cannot sit beneath the rooftree, and, pointing through the window, either to the shore or to the woodland, designate some spot round which lingers memory of a crime, and perhaps about which, according to local tradition, there wanders the uneasy ghost of some victim of the murderer's hand or of the mania which leads one to self-destruction."

A 1901 Daily Tribune report goes a bit further.

"It is doubtful if there can be found anywhere in the United States outside of the great cities a bit of country of the same size limitations that has had within its borders so many mysterious murders and so many crimes of various complexions as has the little section of the lake shore country just north of Chicago and within the given confines," according to the paper.

Sheridan Road's reputation of haunting was taken seriously even by otherwise serious people, according to the Chicago Inter Ocean newspaper, which dubbed it Chicago's "Road of Mysteries" in 1902, and described accounts of ghostly apparitions along the windy lakefront street.

"So firmly is this believed that there are hundreds of people who cannot be tempted by any amount of money to travel the Sheridan road late at night," it said, "and some of them are hard-headed men of affairs."