For one dark and stormy night only, several of McHenry County’s tragically departed returned Oct. 9 to Union to describe the dramatic details of their – or other’s – demise.

The McHenry County Historical Society presented its popular Historic Halloween, Return of the Dead,” starting at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 9. This year’s quartet of quietus includes the case of a young child who drowned in the icy Kishwaukee River, the 1939 killing of a Riley Township farmer by a 14-year-old parolee from the St. Charles School for Boys, a fatal farming accident in 1922 and the infamous Billy Hamilton murder the subsequent, painstaking investigation by Sheriff Lester Edinger that dominated the headlines in 1939.