Chicago Unbelievable

Julia Buccola: The Italian Bride - new findings, photos, and podcast!

2013-06-13T15:33:00.000-07:00

Following a long research project, today I've published an article on The Order of the Good Death about Julia Buccola-Petta, the "Italian Bride" of Mt. Carmel cemetery.

Most Chicago ghostlore fans know the basics: at Mt. Carmel stands a statue of a woman, Julia Buccola, in her wedding dress. Beneath the life-sized edifice is a photograph of the Julia in her coffin. Though she appears not to have decomposed much, an inscription below states that the photo was taken when she had been dead for six years.

Legend has it that her mother, Filomena, had nightmares in which Julia demanded that her body be disinterred, and, though there are various scientific explanations, some say the well-preserved state of her body is a sign of holiness. I've been researching the story heavily for the last few months, including conducting interviews with Filomena's great grandchildren, who provided a few photographs that have never been in circulation before. Much of what I found came too late to be added to my new Ghosts of Chicago book, so I'm publishing it online, both here and in a new article for Caitlin Doughty's Order of the Good Death.

Photo by Hector Reyes

The Order of the Good Death

presents:

The Italian Bride of Chicago

by Adam Selzer

And for you Chicago Unbelievable followers, I'm presenting here a new podcast on the subject (our first in over a year!), and, below, a detailed timeline of the Buccola and Petta families, as pieced together from records and interviews, with never-before-seen photos:

AN "ITALIAN BRIDE" TIMELINE:

1909 - Enrique (Henry) Buccola arrives in Chicago from Palermo Italy. His brother Giuseppe (Joseph) appears to have already been in Chicago; his widowed mother Filomena and sisters, Rosalia and Guilia (Julia) remain in Palermo, Italy.

Joseph and Henry Buccola. Henry
paid for Julia's exhumation and the
new monument. Courtesy of
Antony Edwards, used by permission.

1910 - According to the census, Henry is living in Chicago with Joseph Buccola and his wife Anna in Chicago (per the census). Henry is working as a tailor, Joseph is a designer. Both are going by the "Americanized" versions of their names in records.

1911 - Rosalia Buccola emigrates to Chicago from Italy and marries Mariano Lunetta

1913/01/24 - a Sadie Lunetta is born to Mariano and Rosalia. She appears in some records as Lynn Sadie, and in most census forms under the name Rosaline.

1913/08 - Filomena Buccola, (Joseph, Henry and Rosalia's mother), and Julia Buccola, (their sister), arrive in New York from Palermo en route to Chicago, where they'll eventually move in with Henry in what is now the West Ukranian village.

1913/09 - The famous "Devil Baby" rumors swirl around Hull House. Filomena and Julia didn't live in the Hull House neighborhood, but I've always liked to imagine that one of Filomena's first acts as an American might have been to join the crowd of other old world women who went to Hull House demanding to see the (non-existant) devil baby.

1915/09/15 - Joseph Lunetta is born to Mariano and Rosalia.

1917 - Henry Buccola, working as a tailor and living on the 2200 block of W. Erie, lists Filomena as solely dependent upon him financially in a draft card. Julia presumably lives with them, as well.

1917 - Joseph's draft card shows he's working at the same place as Henry, though living a mile or two north.

1920, May - Julia is licensed to marry Matthew Petta.

1920, June 6 - Julia and Matthew marry at Holy Rosary Parish on Western Avenue (which still stands). They establish a home a couple of blocks away in an apartment building on West Huron Street, a block or two from Henry's house (it, too, is still standing today). The apartment is pretty much in shouting distance of the house on Erie where Henry and Filomena are probably still living.

Filomena and Flora, her granddaughter,
in Chicago, a year or two before
Julia was exhumed. Courtesy of
Antony Edwards

1921 - March 17 - Julia dies giving birth to a stillborn son, just over nine months after the wedding. Her funeral is held at Rago Brothers, next to the church, and she is buried at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside two days later.

1922 - Joseph Buccola serves as witness to Mariano Lunetta's naturalization as a U.S. citizen.

1923/04/08 Henry Buccola marries Anna Covolo in Chicago. Anna was born to Italian parents in Venezula and spoke Spanish.

1924 - Henry and Anna's daughter, Flora, is born.

1925 (or so) - Matthew Petta, Julia's bereaved husband, marries Margaret Collins, mother of a young boy named Eugene Miles. Eugene's father is listed in the 1930 census a Missouri man; more info on him is unknown. Margaret is an Iowa woman of Irish descent.

1926/03 - Henry's son Gaetano ("Guy") is born in Chicago. Around this time, Henry and Joseph both move to Los Angeles, where the climate is closer to that of their native country. Filomena will spend the rest of her life going back and forth from Henry and Anna's house in Los Angeles to Rosalia and Mariano's in Chicago. She appears to have made the move with Henry and his family.

1926: According to the family, it was after the move to L.A. that Filomena began to have nightmares about Julia. The exact content of the nightmares is not known, though folklore in Chicago states that Julia was demanding to be dug up, or that Julie was still alive. If nightmares weren't involved, it may be that Filomena wanted Julia moved out of In any case, Filomena begins to lobby for Julia to be disinterred. If this is really when they started, it was a fairly quick process.

the monument

1927 - Julia is exhumed from her grave. Records do not indicate that she was moved; she seems to have be re-interred in the same plot. No primary sources or records regarding the circumstances have ever been uncovered, or of how in the world they got permission to do it, but a photo of Julia in her coffin is taken, establishing that it happened. Her face is still recognizable.

1927-8? - An elaborate new monument is commissioned at Henry's expense - the current version with the life-sized statue, two messages from Filomena, two photos of Julia in her wedding dress and the one of her in her coffin, well preserved after six years in the grave. The name Filomena Buccola appears twice on the gravestone: the front reads "Filomena Buccola Remembrance of my Beloved Daughter Julia Age 29 yrs." An inscription on the back says (in Italian)
"Filumena (sic) Buccola I offer this Gift to My Dear Daughter Guilia."

The seldom-noticed inscription on the back

Notably, Julia's married name, Julia Petta, appears nowhere on the monument.

There is no record as to what the original monument (if any) looked like or said.

The immense cost of the new monument creates a great deal of friction in the family - Henry Buccola's wife is said to be furious, and Henry himself apparently isn't happy about it, either. But the monument is built. No one knows now what the cost is, but family lore speaks of Henry lamenting that if they just had that ten thousand dollars, they'd be set for life.

1928: Flora, age 4, is unable to speak. A doctor says it's merely confusion based on the fact that four languages are spoken in the house (English, Italian, Spanish, and Filomena's thick Sicilian dialect). Anna, her mother, decrees that only English will be spoken in the house. Flora will eventually be able to understand Italian as an adult.

Filomena in the 1930s with Rosalia, her daughter
(Julia's sister). Courtesy of Antony Edwards

1930 - In the census, Filomena is listed as being back in Chicago, living with Rosalia and Mariano and their children, Rosaline (Lynn Sadie) Lunetta (17) and Joseph Lunetta (14).

The same census shows Henry Buccola in Los Angeles with his wife and two children, Guy and Flora. He is now working as a designer for women's clothing. Joseph Buccola is now in LA, as well, doing the same work.

1932 - Henry's family (probably including Filomena) move into a new house in L.A. The family still owns the house today.

1930s: In the new house, Flora shares a room with Filomena. Later in life, she'll tell her children stories about Filomena loudly praying the rosary at all hours, prompting her to shout "Shut up, Nonna!"

1934/06 - A son - with the same name as Julia's stillborn child - is born to Matthew and Margaret Petta in Chicago.

Filomena with grandchildren Gaetano (Guy) and Flora
in California. Courtesy of Antony Edwards.

1940 - The census states that Filomena is now living with Rosalia and Mariano in an apartment just around the corner from Julia's old place. By now, their daughter, Rosaline / Lynn Sadie is in Los Angeles.

Matthew Petta is operating Matty's Inn, a tavern, on Clark Street, near Division. He and Margaret also have an infant daughter (who passed away in 2013 while this article was being prepared). Eugene is 16 (his father is now listed as Matthew, not a missouri man), their other son is five.

1943/01/16 Mariano Lunetta dies at 61 - burial at Mt. Carmel.

1943/05 Lynn Sadie Lunetta, age 30, is licensed to wed Arthur Golluscio (b 1891) in Los Angeles. They are married 5 days later in a ceremony at which the officiant is a minister of the "Temple of Light Institution of the Masters." Henry Buccola, her uncle, serves as a witness.

1944/09/23 - Henry Buccola dies in Los Angeles.

1945/03 - Rosalia Buccola-Lunetta dies in Chicago; Filomena moves in with Jospeh Buccola and his wife in Los Angeles.

1945/05 - Matthew Petta dies in Chicago, age 55, and is buried at All Saints. His widow moves the children to Iowa.

Filomena's burial plot (space 8), a few feet to the left
of Julia's (space 5), at Mt. Carmel Cemetery.
The Muscato family plot is between the two.

1945/10/ Filomena dies in Los Angeles. She is buried in Chicago, a few feet away from her daughter's grave. Her space is unmarked, but only a few feet away from the massive monument that bears her full name twice.

2006 - Flora Buccola-Edwards, Julia's niece and Filomena's granddaughter, dies in Los Angeles, in the very house where she once shared a room with Filomena. Described in her obit as a "fierce liberal" and "staunchly pro-labor," the family suggests donations to the United Farm Workers of America in lieu of flowers.

note: I've left out a handful of exact dates, addresses, and the name of one person still living.

Note: I'm grateful for the family and children of Flora Buccola-Edwards for the photographs and information, especially Antony and Mariana Edwards.

Again, for the full story, see the article on The Order of the Good Death.

Podcast audio with slideshow:

C lick to view in iTunes
All episodes are free!

Coming in September:

Podcast Update

2013-06-12T13:53:00.002-07:00

C lick to view in iTunes
All episodes are free!

We had a buttload of problems with the podcast - the feed seems to have gotten broken in a server migration, and no one's subscription was working. So, we've gotten to work and started from scratch with Chicago Unbelievable: The Podcast 2.0 . It's back on iTunes with working links - and a whole new episode to entice you to re-subscribe!

Tomorrow, we'll be posting TWO major new articles about The Italian Bride of Mt. Carmel - one here, and one on The Order of the Good Death. There's a lot of new info and never-before-seen photos. As a preview, there's a new episode of the podcast in which we journey out to Mt. Carmel and talk about the recent findings and news.

June 12: THE ITALIAN BRIDE at MT CARMEL
We discuss new findings about a famous piece of Chicago Folklore: Julia Buccola-Petta, the Italian Bride!
Hear it (w/ slideshow) on Youtube
Download via archive.org

Pictures, Buccola Family timeline, and more (coming Thurs)
Order of the Good Death Article (coming Thurs)

Check back tomorrow for TWO of the biggest articles in Chicago Unbelievable history!

The Spinning Grave at Mt. Carmel

2013-06-11T03:11:00.000-07:00

In section 19 of Mt. Carmel cemetery stands a monument sometimes known as The Family Group - an elaborate, and beautiful, statue that serves as a gravestone for Angelo and Rosa Di Salvo:

The carving is elaborate and remarkable. Though worn with time, one can distinguisht the grains in the woods, the jewelry on people's hands, and the folds of the dresses. On its own, it's perhaps the finest statue in a cemetery full of wonderful carvings.

But the most fascinating thing about it is that it moves! The statue actually spins on its base. It's not that easy to move (it's heavy, and I kept feeling awkward about what part of the statue on the left's body I was putting my hand on), but it does turn. Here's Hector turning it:

Little seems to be known about the Di Salvo family. The monument states that it serves as the burial place for Angelo and Rosa Di Salvo, who died in 1932 and 1927, respectively. Though there are photographs of them included on the monument, almost nothing has been found about them in the public records. Unlike many other mysterious statues and graves (see our upcoming podcast an article about their Mt. Carmel neighbor, Julia Buccola), we don't even seem to have any hearsay or legends about the family in this case. What we DO know is that the 1920s were apparently very good to them (well, if you don't count the fact that Rosa died in 1927).

As of 1920, Angelo and Rosa lived with three children, Anthony, Clementine and Cecilia, as well as Clementine's five year old daughter, Lena (Clementine and Lena had a different last name, De Lucco; perhaps her husband had died). They rented their house at 255 De Koven at the time, and Angelo did some sort of work in a factory while Clementine waited tables. Angelo and Rosa had come to the United States from Italy some twenty years before.

By 1930, however, circumstances appear to have been very different. Rosa had died by then, and Angelo was no long working at all, but he and Anthony were living in a $15,000 house (a very nice house at the time on Edgemont Avenue (near near what is now Roosevelt and Canal).

Also absent, even from folklore, is what the statue is supposed to be OF, exactly. While many have noted that it looks like a 19th century family photo of some sort, what family is it? Are both Di Salvos buried here depicted among the five figures in the photo? Who are the others? And whose idea was the spinning monument, anyway?

More information on the family and how their circumstances came to change so much in the 1920s would be appreciated!

1914 Shipwreck Visible from 49th Street

2013-06-10T06:28:00.000-07:00

Chicagoist has a fascinating article about a ship wreck visible from the shore. There are hundreds - if not thousands - of shipwrecks in the Lake.

Paranormal Talk on the Radio

2013-06-06T05:41:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of appearing on Paranormal Radio, talking about opera, silent film, history, and, of course, ghosts. Listen to me trying to weasel out of answering the "do you believe in ghosts" question! Here's the whole thing, via youtube.

Congress Hotel Strike Over

2013-05-30T08:06:00.001-07:00

The 10 year strike at the Congress Hotel is over.

FINALLY! I was always upfront with the UFCW on what I was doing there - I never told people to stay there. I took people in, but it was to talk about the history, look at their stuff, and use their bathroom. I've always felt that promoting the fantastic history of the hotel was important if management was ever to decide that it was worth saving the place at all.

But I still felt bad going past the strikers, and there's no getting around the fact that people probably WERE staying there after reading some of my writings about the place or going on one of my tours of the old ballrooms.

This is good news for ghostlore fans - I sometimes say that if that place ain't haunted, NO place is. Built to accomodate World's Fair visitors in 1893 (though stories that HH Holmes was ever there are totally unsubstantiated), dozens of people have died in the hotel, including the sloganeer who coined the phrase "safety first" (it would've been funny if he fell down the stairs, but it was a heart attack). The list of murders and suicides there is a long one. In the early days of prohibition, members of several different gangs lived there. Tony Genna lived in a luxurious suite. Theodore Roosevelt announced he was leaving the Republican Party there in 1912.

There's a long section on it in my upcoming GHOSTS OF CHICAGO book. Really, stories of that place could be a book unto themselves. Some of our venerable posts on the place:

Ghostly piano?

Ghostly Piano # 2

The Hand of Drywall Dave - Update!

Florentine "Shadow Ghost" analysis! (possibly the best picture ever taken on one of my tours - I like to imagine tat this is me with Teddy Roosevelt)

See all posts with the "congress hotel" tag

Yahoo's Ghost Ghirls on a Chicago Hauntings tour

2013-05-28T15:49:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago the Ghost Ghirls, who have a Jack Black-produced comedy series starting on Yahoo soon, came on Chicago Hauntings tour a few weeks ago. I always worry they'll edit me to look stupid in these things, but this came out okay, I think. When I'm talking about the floating pant leg, the punch line there is "So, that means their BUTT would have been right in my face." The Ghost Ghirls and their crew were really nice and fun to work with. I'm MUCH happier doing stuff like this in comedy bits than being in "real" ghost hunting shows.

Talkin' H.H. Holmes on Fox 32

2013-04-30T07:12:00.001-07:00

Here's me on Fox32 last night, talking about the infamous "Murder Castle" of H.H. Holmes.

Chicago News and Weather | FOX 32 News
More info on the post office and my expedition there can be seen in our Murder Castle Audio/Video page.

I probably should have shaved for the - the stubble looked more "ruggedly handsome" in the mirror than it did on TV :) . When I do a show like this, I'm usually just pleased not to look like a jackass in the end. I thought they were going to have me be "Local Skeptic #1."

The Skull of Del Close at the Goodman Theatre

2013-04-17T15:08:00.001-07:00

It's pretty well established now that the skull in the artistic director's office at the Goodman wasn't really the skull of comedian Del Close when he was alive, but it's his now! He donated his skull to the theatre so that he could play Yorick, and the skull they have serves as his, at least symbolically. A fundraiser once offered to show it to me if I donated enough cash, and I finally got to see it over the weekend.

I have an article up today on The Order of the Good Death about it:

THE ORDER OF THE GOOD DEATH
presents
"Wanna See a Famous Skull?"
by Adam Selzer

New Book Available for Pre-Order

2013-04-11T06:00:00.002-07:00

My new book, Ghosts of Chicago, will be published by Llewellyn in September. It's a down-to-earth critical examination of what we really know, and how we know it, about some of Chicago's most famous ghost stories from a historian's perspective, including TONS of never before published information.

PRE-ORDER NOW!!

Barnes and Noble.com
Indiebound

Amazon.com

Llewellyn.com

INCLUDING:

- New information about the famous "woman in white" photo at Bachelor's Grove cemetery, including an interview with the photographer.
- A database of recorded Resurrection Mary sightings, some lost since the 1930s, with some fascinating analysis. Is there any reason to think it's a girl named Mary?
- Fascinating new data about Julia Buccola-Petta, The Italian Bride.
- Tales of hauntings at the H.H. Holmes murder castle site and his north-side "body dump."
- A separation of the fact and fiction surrounding Hull House ghostlore.
- Chilling new stories about the Congress Hotel's ghostly past and present.
- Never-before-published historical ghost stories from Chicago's dark past. What was the ghost in the old city hall that captured national interest in the 1860s? Could it be a ghost from Lincoln's funeral, or from a botched early hanging?
- Ghosts of the gallows.
- New information about the tomb of Ira Couch, including (for the first time) photographs of the inside.
- Newly uncovered first-hand sightings and primary sources. - Suggested places to investigate.
- Gruesome Chicago grave robbing tales.
- An analysis of various gangster ghost stories that have circulated over the years.
- Many never-before-published photos.
- Something new for even the most dedicated Chicago ghost hunter!
- and so much more!

Pre-order today and be ready for Halloween and the upcoming Ghost Conference at the Portage Theatre!

Tumbling along

2013-03-19T07:44:00.001-07:00

Hi, folks! Tours are picking back up again for the Spring Break season, so I'm doing more per week lately. We've had some good times!

The big news over on my regular page is that my new novel, WHEN IOWA FREEZES OVER, sold to Simon and Schuster a few weeks ago. That announcement led me to do some house-cleaning there and to start thinking more about doing some more social media stuff. I don't think that that sort of thing actually helps sell books, but it's fun.

So I've started taking more pictures on tours, then posting them on instagram and tumblr. You can follow along and look at only the "tour" and "ghost" shots by looking here! This will all tie in to my upcoming GHOSTS OF CHICAGO book.

Some samples:

Some recent "ghost" shots from the tours

2013-02-25T08:05:00.000-08:00

Kiersten, a tour passenger on Friday night, snapped this cool shot - it was the hit of the tour when shown off on the bus! While I'm generally inclined to think of these "stairs" shots as reflections and smears (reflected ears are a common culprit), this is a really nifty one appearing to show two vaguely humanesque forms. I've adjusted it just a tiny bit to make it more visible:

Cool! As I always say, there's no such thing as good ghost evidence, only cool ghost evidence. But sometimes I don't even care about the fact that there's probably a more "rational" explanation, because the photo is cool enough on its own terms, even if it IS just an optical illusion.

As far as "women on the stairs" at Hull House go, there was a woman on the tour recently who told me she was a clairvoyant, and that there was a ghostly woman who came to the stairs to say hello to me every night. I always take these things with a grain (if not a whole shaker) of salt, but stories about a woman haunting the place go back well over a century; Millicent Hull died there around 1860, and a number of other women quite likely did during the 1870s, when it served as a home for the elderly run by the Little Sisters of the Poor.

While we're on the subject of recent Hull House shots, a number were taken like this recently:

On phone screens, in particular, it can look like a feminine form in the window. Having seen a few lately, I took this one myself in attempt to reproduce the effect, and confirmed that it was just the fireplace. A picture frame on the mantel forms the "head."

Elsewhere in town, we've had a number of nifty shots at the "alley of death and mutilation" behind the site of the Iroquois theatre. There was one woman on my tour on Saturday who said that she felt like a hand was touching her face in the alley, and in one picture of her, it does look as though there's a handprint on her face. This calls to mind all SORTS of folklore motifs, like the story of the "banshee's hand" leaving permanent marks on people's faces, or stories of handprints never fading away, which show up all over the world, including Chicago's Frank Leavey story.

Now, one thing worth noting is that sometimes it's been said that women or are pregnant or new mothers feel as though a kid is holding their hand in the alley. If the woman in question now finds out she's expecting, that'll be one heck of a story!

Chicago's Magnetic Well

2013-02-23T07:43:00.000-08:00

Throughout the 19th century, and into the early 20th century, there were occasional claims of "magnetic wells," wells that dredged up water said to be high in "magnetic" content that contained mysterious medicinal properties.

Around 1869, there was considerable media attention given to some "magnetic wells" in Michigan. Now, from the articles, it seems that people had tried a LOT of experiments throughout the 19th century to add electricity to water and found that, though it could conduct electricity, it couldn't maintain an electrical charge or any magnetic powers, even if they pumped it full of "a powerful current sufficient to magnetize a bar of railroad iron," as a writer for the Chicago Times claimed to have tried once. But the water in these Michigan wells seemed to have magnetic properties.

In Chicago the next year, one David A. Gage, who seems to have been something of an inventor, discovered a magnetic well of his own in the suburbs, on a farm two miles north of Riverside (right around Forest Park, I'd say).

According to a statement by the farm's manager, they had brought in a man named Mr. Ross who had experience in digging "artisan wells," and he found that the ground he was drilling down was different than any other ground he'd seen - the rock was much harder than most. Water was struck when he reached 613 and a half feet down, and after drilling down 11 more feet they were pumping out 100,000 gallons per day (this may have been a typo; other sources put the figure at 1500). And the farm manager found, quite by accident, that if he put steel tools into the water, they turned into magnets. A chisel dunked in the water and set up on a block of wood floating in water started pointing north, like a compass.

Scientific men were called in, and a cask was sent to the Sherman House hotel. According to papers, scientists were baffled by the stuff. I've been unable to find out much more about magnetic water, though claims of such wells came up now and then over a fifty year period. I can imagine that in this era of "electrolyte water" and vitamin water, magnetic water would go over like gangbusters. Indeed, just googling "magnetic water" shows that a number of people are claiming health benefits for things like this.

In those days, even in such a notable era of fake medicine, it doesn't seem to have done so well, at least in Chicago. In other cities whole resorts were built around magnetic wells and claims were made that the water could cure diseases, but the story of the Chicago one petered out pretty quickly. The New York Herald reported that visitors to Gage's farm reported that the water tasted oddly medicinal, and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, always ready with a snarky comment, said that the people of Chicago tested the magnetic water and decided that they preferred whiskey.

I'm assuming this is the same David A. Gage who later served as city treasurer and wound up owing the city half a million bucks, but articles from that big scandal don't seem to mention anything about the well. Looks like another research rabbit hole for me!

The New Booze, 1920

2013-02-14T06:45:00.000-08:00

In 1920, "new" illegal booze hit the market as soon as the old stuff was prohibited. Before the gangsters got all their ducks in a row and started brewing regular old beer in the same breweries that had operated before, the market was flooded with terrible "bathtub" spirits.

In September, about eight months into prohibition, a "roving reporter" for the Tribune asked a few people on the street what they thought of the new stuff, which was obviously not that hard to get. Their responses are priceless.

“There’s a fight in every pint and a murder in a gallon. I used to drink the old stuff, but I’ll tell the world I leave the new alone.”

—J. W. Gibson, salesman

“I liked the old stuff better. It was much cheaper and you didn’t feel so bum the next a.m. The only difference I see is that they’ve raised the price of headaches.”

—J. W. Johnson, chief vault clerk

“You could take a half dozen shots of the old stuff and never feel it. If you take two drinks of the new booze, it’s good-bye, George.”

—Harry Brown, broker

“The effect is altogether different, judging by the stories I read in the papers. I would say the new booze excites a man to do things he never would have done under the influence of the old.”

—John Schmidt, investigator

“Because they can’t get it they want it all the more. The new stuff is causing more deaths every day. It knocks you off your feet, and after taking a half dozen shots you want to climb a tree.”

—M. Winsberg, saloon proprietor

It's probably worth noting that only the investigator said he only knew about it from reading it in the papers, which comes off like saying, "Well, I haven't tried it, but my friend has, and he told me...."

This article was uncovered by William Griffith while researching his new book for Globe Pequot Press, American Mafia: Chicago, due out later this year!

Wonderful Snapshot of Chicago Fifty Years Ago

2013-02-07T08:07:00.001-08:00

I was hipped to this by the wonderful Samarov tumblr. Wonderful 12 minute color film of Chicago in 1962 with narration by someone trying his best to be Nelson Algren. The el DOES make endless circles around my heart as the city sings me a lullaby of lunatics and lovers.

The Hitchhiking Flapper Ghost of Waldheim Cemetery

2013-01-26T07:26:00.002-08:00

Resurrection Mary isn't the only "vanishing hitcher" in the world; she's not even the only one said to haunt Chicago. The south side has a vanishing girl who appears on CTA busses around Evergreen Park, for instance.

And Forest Park is home to vanishing "flapper" who was said to hitch hike from the Melody Mills ballroom to Jewish Waldheim cemetery, where she vanished. Some versions of the story say that she tells drivers that she lives at the caretaker's house before disappearing at the gates.

Unlike Resurrection Mary, there aren't many first-hand accounts of this, and there's a bit of confusion as to whether the vanishing "Flapper" and the ghost who hitched rides from Melody Mill are even the same ghost. It seems to me that there are two different stories here that got conflated into one single one over the years.

The story of a hitcher at Melody Mill (a now defunct ballroom) have been circulating since at least 1938, and possibly earlier: in 1984, Dave Hoekstra of the Melody Mill told the Sun Times about a story that had happened in the ballroom fifty years earlier in 1934: a young man named Wally met a blonde woman in a snow-white gown who asked for a ride home, and who then asked to be dropped off at Wood Lawn Cemetery. By then, though, they'd made a date. A week later, Wally went to her address, where the woman at the door said that the woman Wally described sounded like her daughter, but that she'd died three years before. How much of this is an accurate description of Wally's tale is tough to guess - Dave heard it second-hand from Ben Lecjar, Sr, the former owner, making it a third-hand account.

The story is, almost to the letter, a textbook retelling of the "Vanishing Hitchhiker" urban legend, featuring just about all of the major motifs except for finding a sweater on her grave the next day. One reason that the Resurrection Mary sightings are compelling is that, while details like going to her home the next day and meeting her in a ballroom are common in retellings of the story, they're generally absent in first-hand accounts (there's a bit of a distance between the story that you get from reading reported sightings and the version you usually hear when the story is retold). This Melody Mill story lines up neatly will all the motifs of vanishing hitcher legends that folklorists were identifying in scholarly articles a decade later.

The Melody Mill story got a big boost in 1938 when Tiny Hill, the leader of a band playing there at the time, told the story of a vanishing hitcher live on a WGN radio show. Tiny's story may have been inspired by the story of "Wally"and changed a bit for dramatic purposes, or it may be the actual source of the story, if Hoekstra was wrong about 1934 being the date when the story began.

According to the radio show, three young men met a woman in white at the ballroom. She asked them for a ride home, then got out of the car at an unnamed cemetery and ran inside. Two of the young men followed her. The next day, the police found two "raving maniacs" in the cemetery, and the third man was dead at the wheel of his parked car. Investigators went to an address they found in a purse that was left in the car, and the woman at the door told them that it was her daughter's purse, but that she had died three years before.

The Daily Northwestern wrote that "It was a good publicity stunt - and how!"

So we can see that the story of a vanishing hitcher was common at Melody Mill in the 1930s, though it's hard to be sure it wasn't invented outright by Tiny Hill. Whether anyone ever really thought it was a true story in the 1930s is probably an open question. Had "Wally" really been to her home, they would know the ghost's name, but this doesn't seem to have been a part of the story.

While most Chicago ghostlore studies have assumed that the vanishing flapper who is said to disappear near Waldheim and the Melody Mill hitcher were one and the same, it seems to me that we're dealing with two different stories that simply got conflated over the years. The sightings of the ghost at Waldheim have generally concerned a young, dark haired Jewish woman in a flapper outfit. The Melody Mill hicher is said, both in reports of sightings and the fictionalized version, to be a blonde in white. Which cemetery Tiny Hill mentioned (if he mentioned one) is not recorded, but people from Melody Mill actually specified Wood Lawn.

So it seems that we're really dealing with two different stories here. There are records for several young women who died around the 1920s at Waldheim, but unlike Resurrection Mary, no theory for who she's the ghost of have emerged. Frankly, no good theory for Mary exists, either - I never found a reliable account where "Mary" actually gives her name, or any hint of how she died. There are 60+ young women named Mary who were buried at Resurrection around the right era, and we've identified plenty who died in car wrecks, but stories of her being the ghost of a girl who died coming home from a dance are really pure specuation; there's almost nothing in first-hand accounts to suggest that she died this way. From what we can actually tell, she could just as easily be one of the many, many girls in the cemetery who died of pneumonia or tuberculosis.

There's a whole LOT more data analysis on Mary sightings in the new book below:

Some More Couch Tomb Info

2013-01-20T11:01:00.002-08:00

The "Couch Tomb" in Lincoln Park absolutely haunts me. I have dreams about going inside of the thing all the time (in my dreams it's usually bigger on the inside). Newly discovered info is making it even MORE intriguing. In a recent post, we noted that Ira J. Couch, grandson of Ira, the man for whom the tomb was built, said in 1911 that two of his brothers were in the tomb.

Now, this was sort of a shocker, since all available evidence was that Ira J. Couch didn't have any brothers. However, newly discovered info in his grandmother's probate files have him giving sworn testimony that his parents had two stillborn babies who died unnamed. He also indicated that his grandparents (Ira himself and Caroline) had three such unnamed children in addition to Caroline, their only known child.

This isn't necessarily a smoking gun - those babies would both have been born well past the age when it was actually legal to inter bodies in what was, by then, Lincoln Park, and Ira was probably not old enough to remember the only one of these that was born in his lifetime. However, between Ira J's comments and some gossip in newspapers of the day, I do tend to get the impression that the city and the family had different concepts of what could legally be done with the old crypt, so for there to be two stillborn babies in the tomb is not fully out of the question.

And here's something new for me: I recently located a copy of Caroline Couch-Johnson's death certificate. Caroline was Ira J's mother, and Ira-of-the-tomb's daughter (and, yes, the number of people named Ira and Caroline in this saga can make things a bit confusing). As expected, the death certificate indicated that she was buried in Rose Hill, where the Couches were being interred by the time of her death in 1885, at which point her mother was still alive.

But there was one thing I was shocked to see: the birth certificate mentioned that she was born in the Tremont House, the hotel that her father owned:

It's awfully unusual to see things like this on a death certificate; they seldom make any comment unless there's something to note about the cause of death, like when the specify that it was a death by legal execution, or a drowning in Maple Lake, or if the gun-shot that killed the person was an accident or suicide. Most of them are very matter-of-fact, and I've never seen a detail like this added into the birth information. Neat!

However, Caroline and her mother (Ira's wife) are both certainly at Rose Hill, not in the old tomb. Her mother's probate file contained some interesting info, like the itemized receipt for her funeral, which indicated that she was buried in an $80 coffin - very nice by the standards of the day.

My upcoming Ghosts of Chicago book that Llewellyn will put out this Fall will have a section on the tomb and the occasional bits of ghostlore that have sprung up around it, as well as a photo or two of what's behind the door (don't get too excited - it gets us no closer to solving the mystery!) Pamela Bannos, author of the Hidden Truths website about City Cemetery, is preparing a book, as well, which I can't wait to see!

Human Heads at O'Hare

2013-01-15T09:42:00.001-08:00

A package of more than a dozen severed human heads is currently being holed up at O'Hare. Officials are acting like this is no big deal, but I would have loved to see the TSA agent's face when the coolers containing them went through the x-ray.

See more from the Chicago Tribune.

What can I say? I'm a sucker for headlessness. Here's statue from Graceland Cemetery:

Meanwhile, Back at the Body Dump

2012-12-27T08:41:00.002-08:00

December 27th and there still hasn't been any snow in Chicago, other than something like 1/10th of an inch at O'Hare a week or so ago. Here and there you see little patches on cars, but that's about it so far.

This made it especially odd to pull into the "H.H. Holmes Body Dump" site on the tour the other night find it covered in a thin, but measurable, layer of snow and ice. Every other tour stop was completely devoid of the stuff!

One runs into odd things here - early on in my trips here was the night when the street was occupied by large birds with dead smaller birds in their mouths. Another night there were chickens crossing the road (and here I thought they only did that in jokes!). To find snow there, when there was no trace of it anywhere else on the tour, was a bit of a shocker. Obviously I'm not going to claim this as evidence of anything supernatural, but sometimes this place seems just plain weird!

Who's Buried in Ira Couch's Tomb? Some new info.

2012-12-18T20:35:00.003-08:00

One of my favorite topics - one that pops up in my dreams all the freaking time - is the Couch Tomb, the mysterious vault that stands at the south end of Lincoln Park, the most visible reminder that the place was once City Cemetery (we spoke of the tomb in a podcast some time ago). It was built in 1858 after Couch died in Cuba (the Tribune once joked that he was among the first Chicagoans to go south for the winter) and was set up to hold about a dozen bodies; estimates often say that it's about half full (or, uh, half empty). It cost $7000 and was made of several tons of Lockport stone (reports vary between 50-100)

Odds that there's anything in there now always seemed slim to me - it's not exactly air tight, so most anything that was ever there has probably rotted away by now. I was never persuaded, though, that the bodies would have been moved. This was a really, really expensive crypt, after all - $7000, the cost of it, was about the same amount spent on the Republican Wigman a year or two later.

But I just ran across a thing in the Chicago Examiner archives from May, 1911, when the tomb was set to be opened for reasons unclear. This is a few decades beyond the last time the thing was known to have been opened - one later article said that the family had been unable to get it open without dynamite in the early 1890s (this would probably be the case now - it's awfully well sealed on all four sides of the door).

But in May, 1911, locksmith William McDougald was notified that he was to bring the proper tools to the vault and opened it - an order that made the Examiner. The park commissioners would not say WHY it was being opened - the paper dramatically stated that they maintained "a deep silence."

The order appears to have been a prank. The next day, the park commissioners said they knew of no such orders, and placed a policeman on guard. A.S. Lewis, the superintendent of the park, stated at the time that the tomb had not been opened since 1880 - and when it was opened then, all the bodies were removed. John Lindroth, a civil engineer who worked for the park board for years, concurred, stating that "I was in it ten years ago. There were no bodies in it at that time."

Meanwhile, though, the paper sought out Ira J. Couch, grandson of the original Ira Couch, who stated that "My grandfather, his father and mother and two of my brothers are buried in the tomb. I have heard, also, that four other people are buried there. The bodies have never been removed. We hold the title to the vault and can open it if we want to, but we do not want to."

Well, folks, this is a veritable treasure trove of primary sources! For one thing, we have a first-hand account of being inside of the tomb around 1901 - certainly the only such account that I know of. However, Lindroth saying it was empty isn't necessarily proof positive that there were no bodies in it - it could simply be that they had all rotted away by then. For a coffin to rot away the twenty or thirty years it would have been since the last interment would not be impossible. Also, I'm not sure he was telling the truth; this might have just been Lindroth's way of getting people to leave the thing alone. I really wish he'd said more about how he got in, as it was generally said at the time that one couldn't get in without blasting it open (it's not just locked, it's sealed), or why he would have been inside, or how he got the legal clearance to open the tomb without Ira J. Couch knowing about it.

After all, of course, we can't discount the testimony of Ira J, who presumably would have been in a position to know whether or not the bodies were moved. He may have been mistaken, but I can imagine that this was the sort of topic that came up around the Couch family dinner table occasionally. Particularly given the fact that his brothers were there - if they had been moved in 1880, he should have known, and he should certainly have been informed if the tomb had been opened in 1901 (the Couch family was still prominent in Chicago then). He had been in charge of the family's estate since 1899, when his grandmother died; some have pointed to the fact that Mrs. Couch is at Rose Hill, not interred in the tomb, as an indicator that the bodies had been moved, but the cemetery was long out of use by 1899 (I had no idea she died so late until today - the park hadn't been a cemtery in decades by then, and that would have been years after the supposed incident when they couldn't open it without dynamite to put Ira's brother in). Incidentally, Mrs. Couch's obituary states that her husband and father-in-law are in the tomb; a 1936 article on the family in the Trib said that Ira J. and his son, Ira L, made an annual custom of visiting the tomb. Ira L eventually moved to Omaha, and said as late as 1960 that there were seven bodies in there. In a 1993 article the family no longer knew for sure.

So, we have some fine new information here from 1911, but still no proper closure! I wish Lindroth had explained why he would have been in there ten years earlier. For much more about City Cemetery, see Pamela Bannos's "Hidden Truths" As a minor update, Pamela tells me that, even having traced all of the Couch family genealogy, this would be the first she's heard or Ira J having any brothers. Perhaps they were stillborn? Furthermore, Ira Couch's parents died well after the era when it would have been legal to inter them in Lincoln Park. However, if they died within Ira J.'s lifetime, one would assume that he knew where they were interred. Curiouser and curiouser!

The Woman in Red at the Drake Hotel

2012-12-18T06:34:00.000-08:00

Let me just share a bit from the Trib's report on a burglary and murder from the Drake Hotel in 1925, when a group of drunken men in Lone Ranger-style masks burst into the place with guns blazing: "(the bandit) flourished his guns and expressed himself in some choice profanity calculated to impress his victims with the desirability of obedience." I love that.

The Drake in 1920. Cap Streeter had JUST been kicked out of
"Streeterville," so much of the area was still oddly empty.

The Drake, like any old hotel, has some gruesome stories behind it. There was the story of "The Woman in Black" who murdered Adele Born Williams there in 1944 - a bizarre case that was never solved. Leopold and Loeb were interrogated there. Their victim's father later died there. A baroness was found dead in a bathtub there in 1962.

But the main ghost story about it, the one that everyone in the building seems to know, concerns a "woman in red" who mainly haunts the tenth floor. According to legend, it's the ghost of a woman who caught her husband cheating at a New Year's party in 1920, just after the hotel first opened, and threw herself from a tenth floor window.

If this suicide truly happened, it doesn't seem to have made the papers - I've never seen anything to back it up. There was a former model who jumped from a tenth floor window, but she was an older woman (the kind papers back then described as "once beautiful"), and it was decades after the hotel opened.

But there's a chance that such a suicide WOULDN'T have been reported in 1920; the hotel was presenting itself as the finest in the world, and probably would have gone to great lengths to keep such a suicide out of the press. Had the woman landed on the sidewalk, there probably would have been no way to stop the story from leaking. However, if she landed on the roof of the setback, they COULD have possibly had the body removed without any reporters finding out. But some mayhem from the New Year's party did make the papers - one woman lost (or was robbed of) a $5000 necklace during the party. A week before another woman had lost a $1000 pearl and emerald ring in the washroom.

My team's recent investigations at the hotel have not yet turned up anyone who knew anyone who had actually seen the woman in red, so where the story came from seems to be, like so many ghost stories, anyone's guess at this point. There are many other places around the hotel where the staff is known to get spooked, but there aren't as many specific ghost stories there as I would frankly expect from such a historic hotel.

The Woman in Black at the Drake Hotel

2012-12-16T06:56:00.001-08:00

This story was published on the blog in several parts four years ago; this is a "collected version" to replace the multi-part story:

In January, 1944, Mrs. Adele Born Williams, a 58 year old society "matron," walked up to her eighth floor apartment at the Drake Hotel with her daughter and found the door unlocked. Inside, they found a gray-haired woman in a black persian lamb coat who had been hiding in the bathroom. Without a word, the woman pulled from her purse an antique pistol and fired two shots at Williams' daughter. She missed, then left the bathroom and fired several shots at Mrs. Williams, eventually hitting her in the head, causing a wound that would prove fatal within hours. The fur-coated woman then walked out of the room and was seen by a couple of men before Williams' daughter cried for help. "I could have tripped her," one of them men later said, "but I'm not in the habit of tripping strange women." Later reports said her daughter chased the woman down the stairwell, yelling "stop that crazy woman, she shot my mother."

And so began a case that got stranger and stranger. Among the twists in the tale:

- Police launched a massive search of the hotel and found nothing. However, four hours later, the murder weapon was found, shattered, in a stairwell, apparently having been dropped from a high floor. Police had search that place - then gun had apparently been returned to the scene of the crime!

- Similarly, a spare key to Williams' room was reported missing from the front desk at the time of the murder. Mysteriously, it appeared back on the desk at 10 o'clock that evening.

- Mrs. Williams had $100,000 in cash in a safety deposit box for reasons unclear.

- Mrs. Williams herself seems to have been a bit odd; a commenter on the original version of this story remembered being a small child and living nearby her, and seeing her running out of the house the family rented in peach-colored pajamas; the word at the time was that she had mental problems, but this may just be a rumor.

- No jewelry or valuables were taken, leaving the motive somewhat unclear.

- Just before the murder, a phone call had been placed from Mrs. Williams' room to a fish and ale house two blocks away.

- One woman who worked the desk at the hotel at the time was a convicted hold-up girl with a bizarre past - much more on her below.

THE MYSTERY OF THE YEAR

The mystery remains unsolved. There was never a suspect, and though various motives were suspected, none of them really held up. It was a huge story in 1944, and mentioned at least once a year on the anniversary in newspapers for at least a decade later (interestingly, as of the late 1950s, the Trib was still spelling "clue" c-l-e-w.). Today, it's been almost totally forgotten.

One of the theories to emerge was that there had never been a woman in a fur coat, but that Mrs. Wiliams' daughter, then known as Mrs. Goodbody, had shot her mother herself in the midst of a fight over the gun. One police lieutenant, Lt. Quinn, was sure that this was the case, and alleged that no call for help had been made until 10 or 15 minutes after the shooting (this was refuted by witnesses).

The theory Quinn had arrived on was that the killing had either been an accident in the midst of a struggle after her daughter announced her intention to kill herself, or that it had all been pre-planned by Mrs. Goodbody and her father and that the reason the gun wasn't found (right away) was that the father/ex-husband (who certainly did hear about the shooting before the police did - he was the daughter's first call) had smuggled it out. According to this theory, Mrs. Williams was annoyed at her daughter for some reason and was planning on writing her out of her will.

At one point in the investigation, when Quinn demanded, rather harshly, that she "tell the truth," Mrs. Goodbody allegedly said "Well, I'll tell you..." then stopped. Some said she was withholding evidence, others say she had been ordered to say nothing about anything by her father's attorney, who was already present.

Quinn (who comes off as a real jerk in the story) was convinced within minutes of investigating the scene that there was never a woman hiding in the bathroom, and that there couldn't have been room for her, since an ironing board attached to the door would have taken up too much space. More investigations, however, showed that there was plenty of space for the "woman in black" to hide.

One major piece of evidence in Mrs. Goodbody's favor was the testimony of the victim herself. The shot in the head didn't kill Mrs. Williams right away, and she was still able to talk to two people who came into the room to help. Though she repeated the name "Goodbody" a few times, she said that shooter was a woman in black with a rose in her hair, and that it was no one she knew. She was later quoted as saying that the shooter had said "I will get you yet!" and that she thought the woman was firing blanks. Other witnesses also described a mysterious woman in black with something red in her hair fleeing the scene.

Naturally, Mrs. Goodbody herself was royally ticked off about being accused of being her mother's REAL killer. Eventually, Capt. Harrison, one of the main detectives, determined that there was, in fact, a third party in the room: the mysterious woman in black. Mrs. Goodbody was never charged.

THE MURDER WEAPON

The best evidence in the case was the murder weapon - an antique pistol. The serial number was traced to a fellow named Walter Brown, who said that he stole the gun in Bloomington during a hold-up in 1939 - but turned it into the police. Brown was certainly not a suspect - he was in prison at the time, serving a life sentence for the murder of a McClean County deputy sheriff. According to his story, the gun had been in police custody for five years. How the serial number connected it to him is a mystery to me, since the police never believed he ever really owned it.

The police denied his story, although the officer he had given it to admitted that he'd received other guns from Brown, who was a lifelong friend. The police felt that there was no evidence that Brown had ever legally owned the gun - in fact, Brown's insistence that he had owned it was the only real thing tracing it to him.

By way of proof, Brown could only say that he had used it to fire several shots into the ground outside of a Hwy 51 roadhouse five miles north of Bloomington one time. The police dug up the whole area and found several bullets, but they were the wrong caliber for the gun in question.

But there was something else to connect Brown to the case - the police officer wasn't the only person who had ever received a gun from Brown. His sister had, some time before, borrowed one and used it in an attempted hold-up, for which she was on probation.

And at the time of the Woman in Black murder, she was working the front desk at the Drake Hotel.

THE MYSTERIOUS ELLEN BENNETT

Ellen Valanis Bennett Larksworthy Welch

So the claims of an Indiana convict that he had owned the murder weapon couldn't be verified (how the serial number connected it to him is something I'm a bit confused about), but it did lead the police to his sister, who was on probation after using one of his guns in an attempted hold-up, and was, at the time of the murder, working the key desk at the Drake Hotel.

Actually, he had TWO sisters at the Drake, Ellen, a desk clerk, and Anna, whom the Tribune described as a "hotel prowler."

To say that Ellen Valanis Bennett Larksworthy Welch, alias Ellen Murphy but generally still called Ellen Bennett in the press at the time, had an interesting past barely hints at the matter. A sixth grade drop-out, she married Acott Bennett, a 57 year old, when she was 15, and bore him a son, who sort of disappeared (he was once reported to be a marine). They were divorced after six months of marriage, and Ellen enrolled at Norhtwestern University using a high school diploma that actually belonged to a friend, Eva Soloway, whose name was was using - you might say she was a sort of low-rent identity thief. In 1939, Ellen, who was still formally known as Mrs. Bennett, had borrowed one of her brother's guns, plus some tape and cords to tie people up, and attempted to hold up a woman in Park Ridge. At the time, she was wearing a blond wig over her red hair, and was driving a car owned by a state senator (who was dead by 1944). When caught, she pretended to be a "night club entertainer" named Peggy Ryan. She was put on probation.

Anna, Ellen's sister, the "hotel prowler"

In 1941, she was living on the near-west side under the name Ellen Larkworthy, wife of a guy named Vere H. Larkworthy, whom she had married in Milwaukee, where she was living as a barfly while her sister worked as a call girl. She bought several jewels with his money, insured them, and then reported them stolen in a case so fishy she was put on a lie detector test. Larkworthy, apparently another old guy, was murdered shortly therafter, and Ellen was questioned, but not charged. Before his death, he described their courtship as "I came back from the races and met Ellen at a hotel.....we drank, and the next thing I remember I was in Dubuque and married." They were married only a few weeks before Ellen left him - by then, she had taken him for all he had. His murder was never solved.

Ellen then married for a third time, to a guy with whom she lived for only a few days. At the time of the Drake murder, she 41 years old and was was working as a desk clerk, living in the hotel under the name Ellen Murphy. Both friends and the police described her as cold blooded and with a real penchant for diamond and jewels - which Mrs. Williams had in abundance. She would have been the one to give the woman in black the spare key used to break into the room - and which mysteriously turned up on Ellen's desk that night. She was, at the time, occupying a suite in the hotel with her latest lover, Patrick Murphy, whose brother, Francis, was at one time the state labor director.

Two weeks before the murder, a call was made from Ellen's room at the Drake to The Pub, a fish and ale house a couple of blocks from the hotel. A mysterious call from Mrs. Williams' room was made to the same location a couple of hours before the murder.

Under questioning, Ellen DID admit to owning a black fur coat, but said she did not own a wig and had never been in Mrs. Williams' room. She went back and forth on whether she was in the hotel at the time or the murder or in a nearby restaurant, and voluntarily submitted to (and passed) several ie detector tests. Both Ellen and her sister were arrested twice in connection to the murder, but were freed on a writ of habeus corpus. Despite extensive investigations, charges against her never quite stuck. I've never found out what became of her; she would be well over 100 today, but I like to imagine her still hanging around in hotel bars in the 1980s, flirting with much younger men; a wealthy widow with a terrible secret.

The murder of Adele Born Williams was never solved; the woman in black was never identified. I've not been able to determine why, exactly, Ellen Bennett was let off the hook; they probably never had anything but circumstantial evidence on her. To me, it seems pretty likely that she was in the room, trying to steal the jewelry, and freaked out and started shooting. But the police had other theories besides this one, even years after the case dropped from the public eye. It was the story of the year in 1944 (besides, you know, world war 2), but has barely been mentioned in the last half century.

BUT - there is a ghost!

THE GHOST?

The Drake is not one of the more notably haunted hotels in the city, but there are a couple of ghost stories floating around - one about a woman in red on the tenth floor, and one about a woman in black on the eighth. This story would be an odd way to back that one up - the woman in black was the murderER, not the murderEE.

My guess is that this is a case of a mistaken history. Most likely, when some employee was asked if there was a ghost story, he or she remembered that there was some story about a "woman in black" attached to the hotel, and thought it was a ghost story, not a murder. We'll cover "The Woman in Red" ghost in the same hotel later on this week!

"Miracle" on Ashland Blvd, 1931:

2012-12-04T10:36:00.001-08:00

In 2005, traffic was ground to a standstill when a salt stain said to resemble the Virgin Mary appeared at the Fullerton Underpass.

This wasn't the first time such a thing had happened - and another time it not only attracted what may have been an even bigger crowd, but turned out to be the result bouncing off the window in the home of a former gangster!

In mid July, 1931, a man walking down Ashland noticed a glowing image that resembled Mary and the Baby Jesus on a brick wall at 1105 S. Ashland, just near Roosevelt Road. He fell to the ground in devotion. Another guy nearby though he had fainted and ran to help, then saw the image and knelt down himself.

Within hours, the crowd had gotten so big that 400 police officers had to be brought in; some papers say that 50,000 people filed past to see the mysterious image, including several hot dog and ice cream vendors. There's some newsreel footage out there someplace, and a lot of shots of the crowd, but I don't think the image photographed well; all I could find in the newspaper archives down at the library was some pictures of the wall space where it was supposed to appear.

above: images from the American and the Herald

The newspaper men seemed, to a man, not to think there was anything holy about it, and most just saw dim light, not something that looked like Mary unless you were really looking for it (not unlike the salt stain - I couldn't never tell what they were looking at there myself), but were still unable to figure out what the source of the light could be. On the second day, they were scraping it with knives trying to see if it was just phosphorescent paint - but to no avail. The image remained, glowing brighter as the night got darker, and the "miracle" was reported in newspapers around the country.

On the second day, though, the mystery was solved - the image a street light that was bouncing off a window across the street, being distorted into its odd shape by a lace curtain on the window. To what must have been everyone's great surprise, the police knocked on the door of the flat where the window was located and found it was the home of Sam Genna of the Genna Brothers, the gang that had controlled Little Italy until three of Sam's brothers were killed in rapid succession a few years before.

"I don't know nothing about any miracle," Sam said. "Get out." One can only imagine what he'd been thinking of the crowd on his lawn up until then; another named, a grey haired man known as Dr. Stoll, was particularly annnoyed at the whole thing. "Terrible, terrible it was," he said. "I told 'em it was all a crazy humbug or something, but I couldn't stop 'em. Neither could the police. They just trampled into my yard, broke into my house, sat on my back steps and watched that silly light on the wall."

The police, no longer afraid of the once-notorious Genna Brothers by 1931, pushed right past him, despite Sam's protestations that he had company, and despite the fact that such an unwarranted search was not remotely constitutional, and firmly established that moving the curtain up and down could make the "apparition" appear and disappear. The police announced to the crowd that it was all a "big fake," and the crowd dispersed. Sam Genna lived relatively quitely for the next twenty years until his death of natural causes.

At the left here is the Tribune's shot of the crowd, which they estimated to be around 7000 at the time the photo was taken.

I'm not sure that providing a rational explanation like that would make so many people disperse so quickly these days - the shrine around the spot where Our Lady of the Underpass appeared is still there today, going on eight years later. At least a large handful of such a crowd now would probably stick around saying unkind things about scientists and skeptics. Lt. Joseph Pierott's announcement that everyone should go home and go to bed or he'd "run them in" would surely be seen by some as anti-Catholic suppression. The talking heads and pundits would have a field day.

BTW - here's the inside of the Genna Brothers' tomb at Mount Carmel; Tony Genna's crypt is on the lower left; he was shot at Grand and Aberdeen in 1925, at a grocery store that stood where the pest control place is now.

New Book: Speaking Ill of the Dead: Jerks in Chicago History

2012-11-21T06:03:00.002-08:00

Twenty-five profiles of notable jerks from Chicago history who are too dead to complain that I'm making fun of them - available now from Globe Pequot Press.

Includes profiles of:

John Kinzie, our first killer

Bathhouse John, our worst poet

Kitty Adams: The Terror of State Street

HH Holmes, our first serial killer

Al Capone, the most famous mobster of all

Wilbur F. Storey, the racist newspaper editor

Thomas Hines, the rebel spy

Captain Streeter, the last pioneer

Adolph Luetgert, Sausage King of Chicago

Harry Spencer, opium fiend killer

Charles Comiskey, cheapskate

Tillie Klimek, the Black Widow

Johann Hoch, the Black Widower

Big Bill Thompson, the Buffoon-in-Chief

and more!

Available now from:

Hamilton Book

Amazon

indiebound

and the other usual suspects

Abraham Lincoln in Chicago: Ebenezer Peck's House

2012-11-19T05:56:00.002-08:00

In 1860, just after the election, President-elect Abraham Lincoln came to Chicago, where he'd been a regular visitor for years, to meet Hannibal Hamlin, his running mate, for the first time. They met up at the Tremont House, the hotel at Dearborn and Lake where, a couple of years before, Lincoln had made a version of his "house divided" speech from the balcony. Now, a public reception was held for well-wishers to greet the president elect at the same hotel.

But perhaps the most momentous event of that Chicago stop was the day the party met at "Lake View," the mansion of Judge Ebenezer Peck, and had a long discussion about who would be in Lincoln's cabinet. Here's the mansion:

The house stood at the northeast corner of Clark and Fullerton. It survived the fire, being just a couple of blocks north of where it ended, and was still there as of the early 20th century, but seems to have been torn down some time before 1920. When it was built, it stood on seven acres, through Judge Peck's daughter noted in 1900 that it was now surrounded by so many buildings that it would be hard to see from the road; this would put it around the spot where the fullerton plaza hotel stood as of 1923.

"They had hardly become seated in the parlor," Peck's daughter recalled, "before a curious crowd gathered before the low windows, which reached to the floor. Mr. Lincoln was greatly upset by the people peering at him. He never could beat to keep people waiting...to get out of the difficulty Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Hamlin went to a bedroom in the southeast part of the house on the second floor and there they secured at last a chance for uninterrupted conversation. They were together many hours, and there the first cast of the Cabinet was made up."

Peck's daughter saw Lincoln off and on in Washington, where her father moved during Lincoln's term to be a judge in the U.S. Claims court. One particular night, she said he saw Lincoln at the White House, where he found him walking up and down in the deepest agony, lit by a single gas jet. "This is Friday, hangman's day," he said. "I had to sign the death warrants by which five poor boys were shot today." He paced about, saying "Shoot a farmer's boy for going to sleep!" He remarked that the generals said these executions were necessary for military discipline, but "he had and idea that it was a good thing for military discipline to have his own way once in a while about shooting farmer boys for going to sleep."

I believe that this is as close as Lincoln ever was to what is now Lincoln Park; he probably would have passed by it on Clark en route to Peck house. In 1860, the tower window would have quite likely given you a view of the green area that would soon bear Lincoln's name, but which was, at the time, the City Cemetery. It's tempting to imagine Lincoln standing in the tower, looking out at the graves and contemplating the Civil War that was looming ahead of him.