What happened to Marion Lambert, the Ghost of Sheridan Road?

Kate O’Donnell ‘28
odonnellkgr@lakeforest.edu
Staff Writer

As the first eerie chill of October descends upon us, many students may be looking ahead to Halloween and all the spooky fun that comes with it. To help us get into a paranormal mood, I thought I’d share my favorite ghost story from close to home. Throughout my high school years at Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart, just down the road from the College and where she took her final earthly breaths, she was a hallowed legend. Her name was Marion Lambert, and she is known as the Ghost of Sheridan Road.

In February of 1916, freshly 18-year-old Marion, a senior at Deerfield High School in Highland Park, seemed to have an idyllic suburban life. She was described by friends and community members as a bubbly, pretty girl, and she lived on the Baron Jonas Kuppenheimer estate in Lake Forest, of which her parents were gardeners. She was seeing a family friend three years her senior, Will Orpet, who was studying journalism at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their correspondence while he was at school was considered quite salacious. “I want to see you dearest, and want you badly,” he wrote to Marion on April 8, 1915. “If only I could get my arm around you now, and get up close to you and kiss the life out of you, I would be happy.”

However, with time, Will’s interest in her waned. The letters got shorter, and he began seeing other people in college. Distressed, in November of 1915 Marion expressed to Will that she was worried she may be pregnant–she was only in high school, what were they to do? Angry and panicked, Orpet sent her  a “potion” to relieve her ‘delicate condition,’” which were actually miscarriage-inducing pills procured by a chemistry major friend of his. Marion, madly in love and terrified of losing him to a supposed engagement to another woman, wanted to cling to him as much as she could and discuss the pregnancy in person.

This is where the mystery sets in. On Feb. 9, two days after receiving a phone call that her friend Josephine said left her very distraught, Marion did not take her regular train to school. The next morning, her father Frank set out to search for her after she did not come home that night. What he found, laid in the heaps of mid-winter snow in the woods of the Barat College campus (now Woodlands Academy), would haunt him forever. His little girl, cold and dead on the icy ground, her school books still tucked in one hand and white powder in the other. Her death was later confirmed to be cyanide poisoning. Behind her, leading away from the train station, were two sets of footprints—hers, and a man’s.

After being tracked down by reporters and police in Madison, Orpet confessed to being with Lambert the night of her death, although he did as much as he could to cover up the trip, even making his bed to look slept in. “Coincidentally,”Orpet had access to cyanide through his father’s greenhouse but so did Lambert. After a lengthy murder trial, the cyanide was identified as being from the Deerfeild High School chemistry department, and Marion’s death was ruled a suicide. Will Orpet was allowed to walk free.

We will never truly know what happened that fateful night in the snow, only that it left Marion’s spirit vengeful and unable to move past our charming little town. Ever since then, she has made haunting appearances along Lake Forest’s stretch of Sheridan Rd to remind us of her unfinished business. She appears in a long, blue dress, silent and smiling, her once gorgeous teeth stained black from the acidic bite of cyanide.

So, Foresters, if you find yourself driving down that winding road this All Hallows Eve and have a feeling you are not alone, know that you aren’t. You never are.

Sources Lake Forest Legend: Marion Lambert, The Ghost Of Sheridan Road | Lake Forest, IL Patch A century later, Lake Forest murder trial still fascinates – Chicago Tribune American Hauntings: The Girl in the Snow