Cemetery Deer With Crooked Antler Brings Early Christmas Miracle

CHICAGO — It all started during the pandemic. Residents bored from quarantining and working at home started visiting the deer at St. Casimir Catholic Cemetery along 111th Street for a breath of socially distanced fresh air.

Standing apart from many deer roaming among the headstones and wetlands of St. Casimir was a peculiar buck with a crooked antler and a slight limp.

Karen Medina, of Oak Lawn, discovered the buck driving around with her young children, Natalie and Daniel, when they ended up in the cemetery. The fact that there were deer was a bonus.

“His right antler was upside down and every year when he’d shed his antlers before winter, it would grow back upside down the next spring,” Medina said. “He had a limp a few years back. It was so sad but inspiring to see him the following year back at it.”

Even without his antlers, the buck was still distinctive. His front legs were white, and the rear right left leg was slightly turned in. He had a halo effect where his antlers were and a white ring around his snout.

“I became a deer enthusiast,” Medina said.

It soon became part of Medina’s weekly routine during the pandemic to bring her children to visit the deer with the lopsided antler in St. Casimir.

Special has captured the hearts of many St. Casimir visitors.

“Half the time we would run into him in weird and random places,” she said. “He’d stand in the middle of all four intersections inside the cemetery. He was always alone and strange.”

Other people began noticing the strange buck. They claimed he recognized their vehicles and would trot to take whatever treats they brought that day – apples, carrots, lettuce – even though it is illegal to feed wild deer in Illinois.

“He’d gallop toward us, and he’d follow our van,” Medina said.

Eventually it would turn out that everyone had their own special name for the buck: Clyde, Jeffrey, Randy, Wonky.

The first time Medina spotted the buck, he was standing near a headstone with the name “Marcus” on it. Medina’s kids started calling him Marcus.

While the buck was called many names, to the cemetery staff he is known as “Special.” He is the only deer out of the 200 living at St. Casimir that longtime gravedigger and groundskeeper Mike Nommensen ever named.

“He’s seven years old. I know because I have the last four pairs of his antlers,” Nommensen said, who believes Special may be inbred, hence the funky antler. “Deer can live up to 12 years old, but most of them go around 7 or 8.”

Special likes to visit the garage where the mowers and tools are stored. Special has been known to peek through the windows or wait by the garage door for Nommensen.

“Everyone here who knows him will say, ‘Mike, your deer is here to see you,’” Nommensen said.

Nommensen’s wife did not believe the special bond he had formed with the deer.

“She came to meet Special. He was standing in a section 50-feet away. I said, ‘Special, come on down here.’ He comes down, and she says, ‘that’s incredible. That deer knows you.’”

“I told her that’s nothing. I said, ‘Special, take two steps back,’” Nommensen recalled. “He takes two steps back. My wife goes, ‘there is no freaking way.’”

“Then I said, ‘Special, meet me at the garage in five minutes,’ and he was there looking right into the garage,” he said.

So, the weekend after the presidential election when Special took off running across 111th Street presumably chasing after a doe because it was rutting season, the community understandably freaked out when he did not return to St. Casimir.

People began posting sightings of a limping deer with a crooked antler on social media. Some said they saw a deer running with his tongue hanging out of his mouth down Harlem Avenue. Medina went out looking for him.

“Someone posted about an injured deer on someone’s lawn,” she said. “I was crying my eyes out. I didn’t know how to help him. I needed a pickup truck and a tranquilizer gun.”

Ring cameras captured video of a deer wandering around Oak Lawn, Burbank, Bridgeview and Hickory Hills, bedding down in residents’ yards, or suddenly appearing behind people and scaring the crap out of them as they got into their cars.

Special was spotted in the Scottsdale neighborhood on the Southwest Side of the city, where someone reported an injured deer near 85th Street and Kolmar Avenue – four miles away from the cemetery. Chicago Animal Care and Control was reportedly on its way to assist.

Nommensen was spending the weekend in Florida celebrating his birthday when he heard Special had left the cemetery.

“I was sad, but I know he’s a wild animal,” he said.

But by the following Thursday, a trusted couple, who regularly walk the cemetery and visit the deer, spotted Special. They texted a picture of Special in St. Casimir to Nommensen in Florida.

“I knew instantly that it was him,” he said.

The weekend after Special’s return, Patch went looking for the celebrity deer at St. Casimir. A family was gathered in front of the new Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine, celebrating the life of their mother on the first anniversary of her death. They offered us a shot of tequila. We didn’t find Special, but we did see his lover.

Not everyone appreciates the deer, however, who are not only proliferate in St. Casimir, but in other urban cemeteries throughout the Chicago region, where there are frequent complaints about deer poop found on graves. The herd at St. Casimir, an estimated 200, is likely to get even bigger after rutting season.

With winter coming, it’s the toughest season for deer. Think Bambi and his mother eating bark off of trees. Anyone caught feeding the deer faces stiff fines of up to $500 from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. Visitors have been cracking pumpkins in half and leaving them out at the entrance to wetlands to feed upon.

“It’s okay to feed squirrels and birds and possum and coyotes, but I can’t feed the deer,” Nomenssen said, who has found 100 pairs of shed antlers over the years. “It doesn’t make sense.”

We checked with Nommensen this week, who told Patch that Special is still safe inside St. Casimir after his big adventure outside the cemetery walls.

“It’s a Christmas miracle,” he said.