Chicago Unbelievable

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 Melody Mill, 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 e-single linked 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 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 their two 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.

Julia Buccola-Petta: The Italian Bride of Chicago

2012-12-01T12:48:00.000-08:00

Note: there will soon be more posts on this one, as I've found a LOT more information on Julia's mother and her life.

Today I was out on a "cemetery safari" getting shots of various gangster graves for an upcoming project, and decided to check out the grave of Julia Buccola Petta, the "Italian Bride." Julia died in 1921; for some reason I had it in my head that she died in Schaumburg, but her death certificate states that she lived on the 2300 block of West Huron in the west Ukranian Village. She died of eclampsia - a complication due to pregnancy.

The story is fairly familiar in Chicago folklore circles - her mother began to have dreams in which Julia demanded to be dug up, and eventually her mother, Filomena, had her exhumed. The baby she was buried with had rotted away, but Julia herself was still "incorruptible" - in perfect condition. A photograph of her un-decomposed remains are now on the gravesite, with a carved motto saying the photo was taken six years after her death.

Finding primary sources to back the story up has proven difficult. The basics - that she was dug up and appeared to be in good shape - are perfectly evident from the photo and caption on the grave, but I've never found solid info about what motivated them to dig her up, exactly, though the markings and words on the stone sure fit in with the story.

One wonders what the body would look like now, nearly a century later, or what a mortician or chemist could do given a few minutes with the remains. Most bodies will be down to nothing but bones in a lot matter of weeks, but there are a LOT of x-factors out there; an archaeologist I told the story to sniffed and said "it's called grave wax." Another was impressed simply that this exists - there are lots of photos of people on gravestones, and for them to take pictures of the dead was far from uncommon back then, but a picture of a dead person taken years after being plastered onto the tombstone is very, very unusual, and possibly unique.

I'm inclined to agree with scientific explanations; I'm not one to think that the state of decomposition of a body is an indication of holiness one way or the other, but that's just me, I guess.

I have to wonder if anyone ever interviewed Filomena about this, or how the story began to circulate. I've never found a newspaper story about the whole thing from less than about half a century after the fact. Anyone have any more primary info here? Records do give some of the facts of her life - like that she was married at the Holy Rosary church at 612 N Western Ave in 1920, and her body was prepared at a funeral home a few doors down thirteen months later. She and her husband lived right nearby in an apartment building that is still standing. Curiously, her married name does not appear on the gravestone.

I didn't smell roses, as local ghostlore says you can, but I can't imagine smelling roses is all that unusual at a cemetery.

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.

Early Street Names in Chicago

2012-11-12T07:27:00.000-08:00

Lonely Ol' Charles Carroll. Early Chicagoans
didn't forget you, Chuck!

John Adams, one of our founding fathers, died on July 4, 1826. His last words were something like "Thomas Jefferson survives" (though the last word was indistinct; it might been "smells" for all we know). However, Jefferson had died himself only a few hours before. Perhaps neither knew, nor cared, that another signer of the Declaration of Independnce, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Georgia, was also still alive. When I was doing The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History, I had a lot of fun with ol' Chuck Carroll, just because his portrait makes him look so dour.

But people in the midwest hadn't forgotten Ol' Chuck; the early settlers in Chicago even named a street after him. According to an early Chicago history, the first streets were given the following names for the following reasons:

Dearborn Street, for General Dearborn
Clark street, for George Rogers Clark, the "conqueror of the Illinois country."
LaSalle Street, for the great explorer
Wells Street, for Captain William Wells, who died in the Battle of Fort Dearborn
Franklin Street, for Benjamin Franklin
Clinton Street, for DeWitt Clinton, New York Governor
Randolph Street, for John Randolph of Roanoke, a prominent statesman of the day
Carroll Street, after Lonely Ol' Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Fulton Street, after the inventor of the steamboat
Kinzie Street, after John Kinzie, an early settler

"The names of State and Market," the 1912 text states, "were doubtless chosen from the general stock of names in use by cities in other parts of the country."

The Haunted Coffin Handle of Graceland Cemetery

2012-10-29T05:27:00.002-07:00

In 1907, the Trib asked for readers to send in accounts of paranormal experiences. One anonymous guy sent in a second-hand story of an man in the Austin neighborhood, a "stalwart Norseman" who had experienced something that had "transformed a skeptic into an ardent believer in the occult."

The "norseman" was a widower with four children. One day, while visiting his wife's grave at Graceland, his oldest daughter found a gorgeous silver coffin handle lying around - one which had apparently broken off of a recently-exhumed coffin. It was said to feature "exquisite workmanship," and the daughter took it home with her.

That very night, as the man sat smoking in his library, he heard the vestibule door swing open and a mad flurry of feet charging in. But when he got up to investigate, there was no one there, and the door was still locked.

The incident happened again night after night, and the footsteps extended their reach from the front vestibule to all over the house. "The noises," the teller wrote the Trib, "increased until pandemonium reigned every night, and the family was panic stricken and nightly locked themselves in their rooms." Furniture began to moved around, and the piano opened and closed violently. The family, in the typical style of ghost hunting of the era, would charge downstairs with guns, but would find nothing.

They were just about to abandon their haunted house when the father, on a thorough search, found the coffin handle in a basket of curios in the fireplace. He took the handle and threw it as far into the alley as he could - and that was the end of the ghost.

This particular sort of "took an object from a graveyard" story (a pretty standard folk motif) always leaves me with a lot of questions. In this case:

- Why not return it to the cemetery?
- So, was the ALLEY haunted now that the coffin handle was there?
- Why make such an effort to throw it? You could get it further away if you just TOOK it someplace. I'd kind of expect it to crawl back, like the cat in "The Cat Came Back," if I didn't get it further from the alley.

At least it's not as bad as the "Golden Arm" story, in which a guy decides not to bury his wife with her golden arm and gets haunted by her. Who the hell gets a false arm made out of gold? Most of the variations on that story don't say how the woman died, but it was probably either of curvature of the spine or running out of money and starving to death because she blew all of the family money on a ridiculously impractical golden arm (and god knows what ELSE such a person was spending money on). I have no sympathy for anyone wanting to be buried with such an expensive item. Leave it up in the world where it can still do some good, why doncha? Also, gimme your organs.

The Headless Horseman of 49th Street

2012-10-26T10:55:00.002-07:00

Once again, I'm a sucker for a good headless ghost. Many "haunted Chicago" type books mention a headless horseman who has been seen riding down the railroad tracks on 49th Street near Loomis. If I were a headless horseman, this is exactly where I'd want to hang out. LOOK at it in the shot on the right!

According to legend, the ghost is the spectre of a cavalryman killed July 7, 1894 during the bloody riots that resulted when Pullman workers went on strike to protest their boss being, shall we say, a bit of an ass who lowered their pay, but not the rent in the company town.

Things did indeed get rough on 49th Street that day. All over the stockyards area, railroad cars were overturned, and at 49th street rioters tried (unsuccessfully) to destroy passing trains. July 7 was probably the bloodiest day of the strike; a couple of men were killed, and many more were wounded, some of them fatally. The rioters did some damage of their own (Chief O'Neill thought it wasn't nearly as bad as reports indicated), and members of the Illinois National Guard fired guns into the crowd, which some reports say numbered eight to ten thousand people.

above: the guards fire on the crowd at 49th, 1894.

However, though newspapers gave a detailed list of who had been killed or wounded and how, I haven't found any mention of anyone getting decapitated. There was one officer killed by a train at the end of the month - he appears to have tried to jump off the moving train while patrolling it near Damen. He was badly mangled and soon died, but apparently with his head still attached, and not while riding a horse.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that the ghost isn't real - just that the backstory isn't quite right. There were many other injuries, and it's likely that some didn't make the papers; in particular, reporters were only able to speculate about injuries among the strikers and rioters, since those who were hurt were generally afraid to seek medical attention, and several news reports indicate that many dead or dying rioters were being carried off by their friends. Certainly one can see how a legend of a man being decapitated during the riots would grow and thrive in the neighborhood.

And what if this ISN'T just the way that memories of the Pullman strike continued to survive in the neighborhood? Who's to say that the ghost is necessarily from the strike, or that it has to have happened at Loomis? A headless horseman is, by nature, in motion, and could really be the ghost of any number of people. There was a terrible accident at 49th and Halstead a year before the strikes in which a train crashed into a street car; three people were killed, including an man (identified as a plumber named Finn) who was cut to bits. What his ghost would be doing on a horse is a whole 'nother question - I would say that the number of people decapitated while riding horses is going to be awfully low in cities with no history of people firing cannons at each other.

Finn probably wasn't the only one to lose his head on the Grand Trunk tracks, though - the tracks at the time were still grade-level, and fatal collisions at grade-level crossings were really, really common. When the tracks were raised up to their current place in 1891, it was noted that in the previous month there had been 18 fatalities at such crossings, including one at 49th and Ashland, right near 49th and Loomis.

The Murder Castle "Ghost Audio"

2012-10-25T05:22:00.002-07:00

It was about four months ago now that I went into the basement of the post office on 63rd street - the one built over a portion of the site where the H.H. Holmes Murder Castle stood. Pictures and video are available here.

I was officially just there as a historian, but naturally I did a bit of ghost hunting while I was at it. I had an audio recorder running as I sat in the old tunnel, which runs right into the castle footprint. For lack of a better idea, I started whispering the names of the known victims who likely died there (there are only a few known ones, really, not dozens or hundreds). I didn't hear anything at the time, but when I played the recording back, there was this voice - the sort of thing ghost hunters refer to as EVP ("electronic voice phenomenon")

I've no idea what that is - the only "logical" explanation is water running through the pipes, but it sounds awfully human for that. If it's a ghost, the most likely candidate would be Pearl Conner, who disappeared along with her mother, Julia, around Christmas, 1891. As near as I can transcribe it, she's saying "Sorry Beefalow," which sounds like the worst Chef Boyardee product ever. There's a recipe linked at the site above.

Others, however, have suggested that it's "buried deep below." Women, in particular, tend to hear "Why did she go," which would be presumably a reference to her mother, who had been carrying on an affair with Holmes (according to her ex-husband, to whom Holmes subtly bragged about it). Assuming it's a ghost, it could be any of these things; perhaps the lack of vocal chords makes it hard to form the sounds one intends to.

The three women whose names I'm whispering - Emeline Cigrand, Julia Conner, and Pearl Conner - are the three people I'm most confident Holmes killed in the castle. Anna Williams and Emily Van Tassel might have been killed on the north side, and the whole thing with Minnie Williams is just weird: alone among his wives and lovers, she seems to have had some idea of what was going on, and is the only woman he called his "wife" who vanished. That she killed Anna herself, as Holmes claimed, isn't exactly impossible, and the possibility that she ran away instead of being murdered isn't out of the question. Those are just about the only known Chicago victims. Most of the stories you hear about there being dozens or hundreds more come from 1940s pulps.

What DO you hear in the audio? "Why did she go?" A toilet flushing? I'm not normally one to get too interested in equipment readings; they usually require a of imagination to make you think they're ghosts, and most can be explained away without too much trouble. That's why I generally throw in a terrible recipe or something along with the "evidence" - as a researcher, this isn't the sort of thing I take too terribly seriously. But little imagination is required with this one. Here's a recipe for Sorry Beefalow!

A New Hull House Ghost Shot

2012-10-24T05:28:00.000-07:00

You know what I say, folks: there's no such thing as good ghost evidence, only cool ghost evidence. Well, here's a cool one for you. This was taken on one of my tours this past weekend, and shows what looks like a baby on the staircase at Hull House:

A close-up, with the contrast adjusted very slightly:

My first instinct when she showed it to me was to look for an ad at the bottom of the screen - usually, when someone shows me a picture that seems this clear, it turns out to be one of those "ghost capture" iphone apps that insert ghostly images into photos. It's always a bit of a dilemma for me, because you can't go around accusing your customers of fraud or anything, but the most logical explanation when you see one of those "too good to be true" ghost pictures is to assume that someone is trying to trick me. However, none of the "ghost apps" I have include a baby quite like this one, and I've no reason to think that the photographer, Jean Marie Andersen, was faking it. She seemed genuinely surprised by the shot; I think her friends noticed it before she did.

And it's not TOTALLY clear - there's a big missing chunk where the mouth and chin ought to be, and that won't usually be the case with fakes. Beyond that missing bit, though, it seems very well proportioned; our brains are wired to see faces in random noise (one usually uses the words "matrixing" and "simulacra" here), but one's brain sure doesn't have to put in much effort to make one see a baby's face - and possibly arms and body - in this one.

So, COULD it be fake, or COULD it just be a light or smear on the window that happens to look a lot like a baby? Well, sure! That's ghost hunting for you; there's a MILLION possible explanations. That's why I always refer to things like this as "weird shit," not "paranormal activity." But in several years of taking people to Hull House, I've never seen another light or smear look so baby-like. Since this one was taken I've tried to figure out a place where you could stand that would get a street light to reflect on this spot, but I can't reproduce anything like this yet.

Now, there was at least one baby who died at Hull House - Jane Addams wrote about how upset the neighbors were when they found that they planned to have a newborn abandoned baby who died in the nursery buried by the state, not with a proper religious funeral, a case in which they misjudged the culture of the neighborhood and lost some trust with the neighbors for a while. That would have been about 1898. However, it was in the building next door (where the garden is now), and I think that baby was younger than the one in the picture above appears to be. If a baby died inside the house, it would be news to me (though not a surprise).

What do YOU think? Just a trick of the light? A real ghost? I often mention the baby story here, and of course this time of year there are 2-3 busloads of people hearing about the "devil baby of hull house" rumor from 99 years ago nightly. Have our brainwaves MADE a ghost on the spot?

For much more on the devil baby and Hull House:

The Headless Ghost of Winnetka

2012-10-22T06:03:00.000-07:00

I normally don't get into stories from the suburbs around here, but you'll have to excuse me - I'm a SUCKER for headless ghosts. Over on another blog I've reviewed several variations of Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Sheridan Road used to be known as a real hotspot for ghosts - occasionally local papers would run features on all the murder sites and haunted spots you would see driving along it; it even put you in spitting distance of H.H. Holmes' place in Wilmette, and one story told a lurid tale of a woman finding a skeleton buried near there after having a dream about someone being buried in the woods (more on this later - I'll check into it).

But chief among these was stretch of Hubbard's Woods near the ravines that was haunted by a headless man. As of 1902, the latest of the articles, residents still remembered the "headless horror" of 1881, when a headless corpse was found in the woods. Local legend had it that every night, on the anniversary of the murder, the headless ghost would wander through the woods, searching for its head.

In may, 1881, a twelve-year-old boy was going hunting for birds' nests in the woods when he came upon a headless corpse about fifty feet north of Green Bay Road. It was leaning as though the head "must have rested upon the swelling base of the tree as upon a pillow," and would have been face up, except, well, there was no face. The head was nowhere to be seen. The pockets had been turned inside out, suggesting a robbery. THe head-chopping was so cleanly done that some thought that a machine must have been used, like a guillotine. A bearded human head had been found upon the lake shore about six weeks prior, in a direct line from where the corpse had been found.

Clues came in fairly quickly. Cards from a hotel in BRemen, Germany were in the pockets. A new search of the area where the head had been seen yielded a high-crowned black derby hat with some human hair and blood in it. The clothing had bit slit lengthwise, as though the killer had intended to strip it all off, but then got nervous and left it. There were signs of a terrific struggle.

The city had the body buried in a shallow grave near the tree where it was found (to the consternation of residents), then hastily dug up to see if it could be matched to a body-less head that was exhumed from Dunning (I couldn't tell if this was the same head that had been found on the beach, which some reports say had washed away). When dug up, the body was no more than three feet down, and in a pool of stagnant water. The smell was about as one would expect, and the corpse, though only just buried, was barely recognizable as anything that had ever been human. The head, too, was in bad shape, but was found to be a reasonably good match - close enough, anyway. The two articles were put into one box and taken out to Dunning.

For a time the body was said to be that of Bernhard Polzig, but checking on the origin of the clothes yielded a theory that it was a missing Bohemian man named Ignaz Hopf, who had recently fled Bremen and was probably murdered in March, only weeks after arriving in the United States. Who killed him, and exactly why, were never exactly determined.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, the Trib occasionaly made mention of the belief among the locals that the headless ghost walked around the ravine, at least on the anniversary of the murder, looking for its head. Whether they actually believed this, and if anyone actually claimed to see it, were not mentioned. By the time these stories came out, the way the story was being retold differed a bit from the way it actually happened; in the retellings people usually said that a bunch of boys found the head after the body was found.