Peak: #14 on the Hot 100
Streams: 220,000
This song was requested by Bernadine, a Lost Songs Project reader and paid subscriber. YOU can request a song right here!
When I figured out what was happening in “Laurie (Strange Things Happen),” I yelped with delight. If you don’t know this song, then take a minute to listen before you read any further.
SPOILERS BELOW!
The song tells a story about a teenage boy who goes on a walk with a pretty young gal named Laurie… only to discover she’s a ghost. (This is a good week for ghosts around here.) He gives her his sweater because she says she’s cold, and when he returns later to get it back, he discovers it’s draped on her grave.
This is precisely the plot of a campfire tale that kids in my neighborhood told each other, along with the one about the hook in the car door and the one with the killer hiding in the back seat.
I had no idea we were all rehashing the plot of a so-called “splatter platter” from the early 60s. (That’s my favorite nickname for the group of teen tragedy songs that includes “Teen Angel,” “Leader of the Pack,” and “Last Kiss.”)
And while my friends and I were apparently inspired by “Laurie,” the song itself was inspired by several sources. Songwriter Mitt Addington was composed the tune after reading a similar tale in a Memphis newspaper that was written by a teenage girl named Cathie Harmon. (He even shared his royalties with her.) And Cathie Harmon may have been thinking of a Chicago-area legend about a ghost named Resurrection Mary.
See, in the 1930s several young Chicago men reported meeting a woman with very cold hands while they were out dancing at local clubs. She’d always ask to be driven home to the Resurrection Cemetery, and in 1939 a guy named Jerry Palus swore he met Mary’s mother, whose daughter had died years before. When the mother showed a picture of her deceased child, it was the very girl that Jerry had met at a dance. SPOOOOKY!
You can learn more about Resurrection Mary at this site for Chicago history. Or you can watch this vintage episode of Unsolved Mysteries, which dedicates a segment to her various hauntings. After the part where Jerry Palus discovers that Mary died five years before her danced with her, Robert Stack says, “The revelation naturally cooled Jerry’s interest in the mysterious beauty.”
Yes, I suspect my romantic interest in a mysterious beauty would indeed be cooled if I discovered she was a poltergeist.
Anyway… Dickey Lee had bigger hits. He sent “Patches,” another teen tragedy ballad, all the way to #6 on the Hot 100, and he reached number one on the country chart in 1974. However, “Laurie (Strange Things Happen)” is the only song in his catalog that extends a resilient bit of American folklore. Thanks to his record, the persistence of Resurrection Mary, and kids’ boundless need to freak each other out after dark, this creepy tale will surely live on for decades to come.
Thanks to Bernadine for a fantastic suggestion!
Thanks for the wonderful write-up! I grew up in Chicago and Resurrection Mary was famous. There used to be a Chicago Ghost Tour and the bar by Resurrection Cemetery was a stop (one might be surprised how many Chicago ghost legends involve a bar). Steve Goodman also does a fun “splatter platter” (that is now MY favorite name for this genre) medley on the Live section of his Anthology album/CD that includes Teen Angel, Tell Laura I Love Her, and Laurie.