Holy Week in Chicago always carried a special weight. In the neighborhoods near St. Matthew’s Cathedral, bells echoed through narrow streets lined with bakeries and flower shops. Families filled pews shoulder-to-shoulder, clutching rosaries, whispering prayers, and singing hymns that had been sung for generations. It was 1993, and for many in the parish, the tradition was not just about faith but about belonging.

Among those who gathered that year were five friends from the local high school: Anna Lopez, Mark Donnelly, Teresa Romano, Joseph “Joey” Carter, and David Nguyen. They were seventeen, caught between childhood and adulthood, restless but deeply tied to their community. For them, Holy Week was less about ritual and more about the warmth of being together.

On the night of Holy Thursday, April 8th, they attended the evening service at St. Matthew’s. Witnesses remembered them walking together after the mass, candles still burning in their hands as they wandered toward the riverwalk. It was the last time anyone saw them.

By Good Friday morning, their parents knew something was wrong. The friends hadn’t come home. At first, some assumed they had stayed the night at one another’s houses. But phone calls revealed the truth: none of them had returned.

The police were alerted. Search parties combed the streets. Flyers with their faces were stapled to light poles and store windows. Helicopters circled the riverbanks. Priests led vigils, their voices trembling with grief.

Days passed. Weeks. No trace. The police interviewed everyone: classmates, neighbors, the cathedral’s priests. No one knew anything.

The city began to whisper.

Some said the friends had run away, perhaps caught up in a plan no one knew about. Others believed something darker had happened, that the group had stumbled into danger. One chilling rumor suggested they had entered the cathedral’s basement after hours, following an old legend about tunnels beneath the church.

Whatever the truth was, it remained buried.

By summer, the investigation went cold. Parents clung to hope, but as the years stretched on, hope became a painful shadow. Every Holy Week, families gathered at St. Matthew’s with candles, standing silently in the pews where their children once sat. The city moved forward, but for those families, time had stopped.

Fifteen years later, in 2008, St. Matthew’s Cathedral welcomed a group of pilgrims traveling across the Midwest. Among them was a man named Daniel Harper, a teacher from Ohio seeking spiritual renewal. He was quiet, observant, the kind of man who noticed details others overlooked.

On Holy Saturday, while exploring the cathedral grounds, Daniel wandered into a side courtyard that had long been closed to the public. Overgrown vines twisted up its walls, and a rusted gate leaned against the archway. Something about it unsettled him.

He returned the next day with permission from a priest to explore further. Beneath a broken slab of stone, Daniel found a narrow stairway leading down. Dust choked the air as he descended, his flashlight beam cutting through the dark.

At the bottom, he found a sealed wooden door. It took the efforts of maintenance staff to break it open. Behind it stretched a forgotten chamber—brick walls, damp earth, silence so thick it felt alive.

And there, in the corner, lay the unthinkable.

It wasn’t bodies. Not in the way anyone feared. Instead, it was personal belongings. A necklace with a small silver cross. A varsity jacket with “Donnelly” stitched on the back. A rosary tangled in dust. A journal whose pages, though water-stained, still carried words written in a teenage girl’s looping handwriting.

The journal belonged to Anna Lopez.

The first entry was dated April 8, 1993—the night they vanished. It described how the group had been drawn to the cathedral basement by stories of secret tunnels. Anna wrote about the thrill of sneaking down stone steps, their laughter echoing off the walls, the feeling that they were on the edge of an adventure.

The final entry ended mid-sentence.

Authorities were called immediately. The discovery shocked the city. The belongings were confirmed by surviving family members, each item like a dagger of both sorrow and relief. At last, there was proof that the friends had been together in those final hours, that they hadn’t simply vanished into thin air.

But the bigger question remained: if they had gone into the tunnels, where were they now?

Investigators scoured the cathedral’s underbelly. They found collapsed passageways, rooms sealed by time, and evidence that the tunnels stretched far beyond what anyone had realized. But no human remains were ever found.

The discovery reawakened the pain of 1993. Parents, now older, returned to St. Matthew’s, their hands trembling as they touched the items once held by their children. Some wept openly. Others stood in silence. For them, the unanswered questions hurt almost as much as the truth would have.

The story spread beyond Chicago. News outlets revisited the mystery, and documentaries picked apart every detail. Conspiracy theorists argued about cults, secret societies, even supernatural explanations. But amid the noise, something else happened—something quieter, more powerful.

The community came together.

For years, the families of the five had carried their grief alone. Now, with the discovery, they carried it together. Holy Week services swelled with people, not just from Chicago but from across the country, all drawn to the story of five young lives cut short.

Daniel Harper, the pilgrim who had stumbled onto the courtyard, became a reluctant figure in the story. “I don’t think I found it,” he told reporters. “I think it was meant to be found. For them. For their families.”

In 2009, a memorial was built in the cathedral courtyard. Five candles burned there every Holy Week, their flames dancing against the night sky.

And though the full truth of what happened on that April night in 1993 was never uncovered, the discovery gave the families something they hadn’t had in fifteen years: a place to grieve, to honor, to remember.

For some, it was enough. For others, the mystery still gnawed. But one thing was certain: the Class of ’93, the friends who vanished during Holy Week, would never be forgotten again.

The silence had been broken.

And in its place grew a story that would echo in Chicago for generations—a story not just of loss, but of faith, memory, and the strange ways the past refuses to stay buried.