Chicago Unbelievable

Iroqouis Theatre "Ghouls"

2012-02-09T03:59:00.000-08:00

No one ever got in legal trouble for the fire at the Iroquois theatre that killed around 600 people. One judge ruled that while Will Davis, the manager, may have been "morally responsible," he could not be held "legally responsible" due to some technicalities. The only people who got in trouble were a tiny fraction of the many who robbed the dead bodies of money and jewelry as they lay in the morgues - or even as they lay in the theatre, still smoldering. The press dubbed them "ghouls" or "vampires," and most of them got away with it.

Rumors circulate that one man, sometimes said to be the owner of the restaurant next door, was sent to jail for stealing gold fillings from the teeth of the dead bodies. This doesn't seem to be true (in fact, Mr. Thompsons of Thompson's restaurant went out of his way to help the sick and the dead, shutting down his restaurant for some time in the process), but a lot of similar stuff was going on. The day after the fire, papers were full of stories of "ghouls" being chased off by the police, and the coroner's office estimated that $100,000 worth of valuables were lost in the fire - much of it stolen.

One report said that half a dozen people were arrested, but it looks as thought just a few ever went to trial. One Louise Witz, who ran The Illinois Saloon at Randolph and Dearborn, is probably the source of the "gold fillings" story; he was a saloon owner arrested for grave robbing, but he didn't take any gold fillings. He carried the charred body of one woman into his saloon, where he robbed it for $210 and a watch; much of the cash was spent hushing witnesses. He and a few others were brought to trial the next month, and Witz and two more men were convicted. These may be the only three people convicted of wrong-doing related the fire. I'm not sure what the sentence was.

A sort of "near miss" involves a man named John Mahnken, a b-rate con artist who claimed to be related to a victim in order to claim $500 found on her person. Mahnken confessed the deed, begged for a chance to live a clean life, and gave his address as 907 Amsterdam Avenue, New York (which was actually the address of a public school). He was arrested, and, when brought to court in May, acted hysterical and claimed to be seeing ghosts in the courtroom. This was probably a ruse he concocted so the jury would find him insane. It didn't work.

Ten years later, a man named Harry Spencer was arrested for murder. While in custody, he told the police that they could add grave robbing to his crimes. At the time of the fire, he said, he had assisted in carrying bodies into a morgue. One was charred beyond recognition, but he noticed she had a lot of jewelry on. With help from a female accomplice, he returned to the temporary morgue later and "identified" the body as "Nellie Skarupa," a name he just made up, and took $2600 worth of cash and jewelry. "I guess she's still buried under the name Skarupa," Spencer mused. Coroner's records did show a woman by that name, but said nothing of any valuables found on her, and didn't list Harry among the witnesses. Authorities at the time thought he was making the story up (he confessed to a LOT of crimes that were probably just opium dreams). In any case, though, Spencer was hanged for murder in 1914, and the name "Nellie Skarupa" does not currently appear in lists of victims. More on Harry Spencer in a future post.

Still another gruesome tail suggests that one man got away with ghoulish activity, but lost a hand in the process. When volunteer rescue workers found one man cutting off a dead woman's fingers to get her rings, they attacked him with a razor and cut off his hand. Two weeks later, regional papers said that a severed hand - the ghoul's - had been found in the rubble.

Reading over these reports, it's a bit jarring to see just how much cash people were carrying on them - $500 was roughly the equivalent of 10-15k in today's money. Who goes to the theatre with that kind of scratch?

Charles Dickens and Chicago

2012-02-07T03:29:00.000-08:00

Charles Dickens, whose 200th birthday is today, never visited Chicago. Everyone in town assumed he would come on his 1867 reading tour of the United States - his no-good brother, Augustus, had been living died in Chicago the year before, and his widow was still living on Clark Street. "Dickens is surely coming to Chicago," the Tribune wrote. "He would as soon think of dining without saying grace as to come to America and not visit Chicago....one of the principal reasons for Mr. Dickens' coming to the United States, we are assured, was to visit the (unmarked) grave of his brother."

above: Augustus Dickens of Chicago looked a lot like his brother

And, indeed, Dickens did INTEND to come to Chicago on tour, but his health during the trip was poor. Making a rail journey that far west probably would have killed him (indeed, the tour itself probably took a few years off his life; he died just two years later, already an old, old man even though he was not yet 60. He looked at least ten years older than he was).

When it was announced that he wasn't coming too town, Chicago was FURIOUS. The Tribune fell all over itself calling him a hypocrite.

Many believed he was deliberately avoiding having to see his brother's widow's and his nieces and nephews, so he could continue to shut his eyes to their plight. Charles was obliged to defend himself, claiming that August's only legal wife was living in England. This was sort of true; Augustus had abandoned a wife back in England. Charles, though, was financially supporting both of them.

Reading through modern and contemporary sources to get to the truth of the matter only deepens the mystery. Most modern sources say that Dickens was supporting his brother's widow financially, most of the sources at the time say he was not. She was still living in the North Clark Street cottage where Augustus had died (roughly 1400 N, in between Division and North), and, only months after the furor, was found dead in her bed there on Christmas Day, 1868, of an overdose of morphine. Records as to whether or not she was truly being supported were destroyed in the fire a few years later.

She was buried in the same unmarked-grave at Graceland as Augustus; it remained unmarked until 2004.

What kind of guy Augustus was is also in question. Some remembered him as a jovial man who hosted lots of artistic discussions and sing-a-longs at the house on 568 North Clark (which would be roughly 1413 today, going by the renumbering guide from 1909, though the fire might have messed with this a bit). More seem to have remembered him as a hapless drunk.

Here's his gravestone at Graceland, with Augustus on one side and Bertha and three infant children on the other. In 1865, presumably shortly after Lincoln was assassinated, the pair had a child named Lincoln. Ophelia and Violet were the other two.

They pair left behind three living children, Bertram, Adrian and Amy, whose own children grew up believing that "if anyone knew they were related to Dickens, they'd have to sit on the porch with a bag on their head," according to one still-living descendent quoted in The Reader in 2004. That article is probably the best source on Augustus and his family that I've ever seen.

The Lost Storey Mansion

2012-02-04T15:35:00.000-08:00

It's always fun to read old newspaper articles with hindsight and see who really had a grasp on where the world was heading and how was out of his mind. Falling firmly into the latter category was Wilbur F. Storey, editor of the Copperhead (anti-Lincoln/Union) journal, The Chicago Times. His paper was practically a celebration of racism at various times. Among his more notable accomplishments:

- He once described the president's latest speech as "flat, silly, dishwatery utterances" that should make "the cheek of every American tingle with shame." That speech was the Gettysburg address.

- He may have invented the story that Mrs. O'Leady was responsible for the Chicago fire. In fact, in his earliest stories, he claimed that she did it on purpose. He was extremely anti-Irish.

- After his paper was shut down by the Union Army (and re-opened at Lincoln's own order), he posted a ghastly parody of "The Battle Cry of Freedom" that championed fighting for "white rights."

In one of his more famous articles, he claimed that Lincoln was getting advice on how to run the war from dead people through the aid of spirit mediums. But as he grew older and lost what grip on sanity he'd had in the first place, he began talking to spirits himself.

In particular, he claimed to be speaking with an Indian maiden who was called "Little Squaw" and called him "White Chief." At Little Squaw's direction, he began to build a sparkling marble palace for himself on 43rd and Vincennes (ironically, in what would later become Bronzeville). To his face, people called it The Storey Castle. Behind his back, it was known as Storey's FollyThe cost of the materials alone for this "wigwam" was estimated in the $200,000 range, and the cost of rebuilding it as the spirits directed him doubled the price. Far gone from his senses (but still running the paper), he would go inside the unfinished building, and freak out over the "snakes" coming up through the floors (pipes, most likely) and order everything redone. The drawing at the right is the only image I've found so far, but mid-20th century articles show that lived on in the imaginations of people who saw it. It was sort of legendary around Chicago for quite a while.

At his death, the massive structure was still unfinished, and it sat empty until around 1892, when his heirs finally gave up on trying to sell it. It was torn down, and 400 tons of iron beams and girders were sold off. There remained about a million and a half bricks, and a whole heck of a lot of marble. Much to if was used to build new houses around 43rd, Vincennes and Vernon - builders estimated that at least 50 good-sized houses could be built from the rubble.

Some of these houses may still be standing. Anybody know?

Hangman's Death Certificates

2012-02-02T05:59:00.000-08:00

My, the things one finds on genealogy sites! More and more records come online all the time. Death certificates have never been THAT hard to get, but you normally have to pay to get them from the state archives, and I'm pretty cheap. In cases of hangings, I already know the cause of death, after all. But it's still interesting to see the records on some of these:

Here's one for Nicholas "The Choir Singer" Viana, who was on his way to choir practice when he first wandered into Sam Cardinella's pool hall and committed his first murder a week later. He was hanged on his 19th birthday, and, according to legend, was briefly revived after being taken down. Cardinella was a guy who seems to have read Oliver Twist and thought it was a how-to manual. He'd lure kids into his pool hall, then teach them to commit crimes and send them out to rob and kill.

Cardinella himself was hanged sometime later. he had lost a ton of weight, and collapsed on the scaffold - they had to hang him tied to a chair. All this was a part of his own grand plan to escape! Low weight and a shorter drop meant it was less likely that he'd break his neck, meaning that, in theory, they COULD bring him back to life. His friends took possession of the body and loaded it into an ambulance, where authorities found a team of doctors trying to resuscitate him. A similar ambulance carrying Viana had been allowed to drive away, though how successful they were in attempts to wake him are strictly the stuff of rumor. The certificate above indicates that they couldn't have gotten THAT far, but the story was always that they'd simply gotten him to start groaning a bit before stepping back and letting him die.

Fun fact: no two records I've seen spell Cardinella's name the same way! Some go with Cardenelli, or Cardanella. This one goes with Cardinale.

Read more about it here:

Resurrection Mary: Other Marys at Resurrection

2012-01-20T05:38:00.000-08:00

One day soon I need to put up a proper database of all the possible "candidates" for who Resurrection Mary could be the ghost of. The internet is just LITTERED with pages that get a lot of the information wrong. Multiple people having the same name tends to create some confusion, and maybe just having ONE of these posts would cut back somewhat on the rambling, incoherent emails I get about Mary. When you get into the ghost busting business, you know that you're going to be meeting some weirdos.

One candidate whose name is mentioned now and then, but whom I've never mentioned here, is Mary Rozanc, whose gravestone is visible at Resurrection. She was 16 years old when she died in 1930, but little else is known about her. She comes up as a possible "candidate" on web sites now and then, though. From death index records, we can see that she was born on Feb 26, 1914 and died on December 30th, 1930. Her father, John Rozanc, was born in Yugoslavia and died in 1953 at the age of 75 in Kalamazoo. Her mother's maiden name was Jennie Intihar (also spelled Antinher in some documents). I couldn't find an obituary or cause of death.

However, a brief look at the death index indicates that there are LOTS of Marys about her age and who died around the same time at Resurrection - about 500 from a rough check of the records. A great many, perhaps even most, died as babies or toddlers (looking this stuff up gets pretty depressing); many were in their teens or twenties, but most of those for which I've seen a death certificate died of various diseases (pneumonia is a particularly common culprit). Mary Roznac probably succumbed to something like this. Had it been a car wreck, there would probably have been a mention of it in the papers. That doesn't seem to be the case here.

For a while I was trying to collect records on every Mary between the ages of 15 and 25 who died from about 1910-1935 and was buried at Resurrection, but the list is just too big. Now, I'm trying to narrow it down to single girls who died of some trauma, such as a car accident, which is traditionally given as Mary's cause of death (even as a skeptic, it's worth noting that a majority of ghost stories seem to concern people who died very suddenly and traumatically, usually due to trauma to the head or spine).

Just a few of the other young Marys who are buried at Resurrection:

Mary Slezak (died 1927 at the age of 16)
Mary Demko (died in 1922 at age 15 of tuberculosis)
Mary Wlekinska (died 1918 at the age of 16 of pneumonia)
Mary Greis (died 1919 at the age of 19, pneumonia)
Mary Janiszewiki (died 1921 a the age of 18)
Mary Geirut (died 1921 at 19)
Mary Mikos (died 1919 at 20)
Mary Kuruc (died 1926 at 16)
Mary Macko (died 1928 at 19)
Mary Bialas (died 1927 at 18)
Mary Polasz (died 1927 at 19)
Mary Kovacic (died 1931 at 20)
Mary Ladonski (died 1931 at 21)
Mary Wroblewska (died 1930 at 16)
Mary Poradylla (died 1931 at 22)
Mary Theresa Rezek (died 1931 at 17)
Mary Marcisz (died 1930 at 16)
Mary Ciesielcyzk (died 1934 at 16)

I don't know the cause of death on most of these - surprisingly few had obits in the Tribune. "Pneumonia" is a safe bet for any of them, though.

Check out our recent "Resurrection Mary Roundtable" podcast and see our other posts on Mary and the various theories surrounding her.

Iroquois Theatre on Celebrity Ghost Stories

2012-01-15T06:43:00.000-08:00

I had never seen this program before, but watching this episode cracked me up. The stories are fairly run of the mill, but they ham them up MERCILESSLY - even by ghost TV show standards, which is really saying something. In this segment, Ana Gasteyer, who played Elphaba in the Chicago run of Wicked at the Oriental Theatre (which was built on the site of the Iroquois Theatre) discusses her experience seeing ghosts one night during her run, as well as her feelings about "The Alley of Death and Mutilation:" "The alley that the Oriental opens to is one of the worst environments I've ever...intuited... in my.... (unintelligible)...always had the gloomiest, darkest, most dismal...it was a terrible, terrible alley. It really was, it felt...terrible."

A few notes:
- The alley they show is not the real one - the garbage and bums make it look like an alley from a 1980s movie about New York.
- That said, the alley WAS gloomier in 2005, before they revamped it and added lighting around 2007. THis was when they tore up the blacktop - and the original brick underneath - and re-paved it with new bricks. People still get that "terrible" feeling, but it gets a lot more foot traffic now (really, it's had heavy traffic for years - like Dillinger's Alley, stories that "no one ever uses the alley anymore" are greatly exaggerated).
- In a fairly common issue with these shows, the ghosts look pretty goofy and seem to come from the wrong period. In this case, they sort of look like pilgrims.
- Clearly, the Oriental didn't let them do any filming. She talks about the decor a lot, but they show stock footage of brick walls and stuff.

All that said, they get the history pretty well right. They don't go into MUCH detail about the fire, but, unlike most of the footage, the shots they show of the burned out theatre are real.

The segment starts at around the 4:50 mark. This'll likely be pulled from youtube eventually, so get it while it's hot!

Ghosts at the H.H. Holmes body dump?

2012-01-11T10:13:00.000-08:00

My, but there've been a lot of ghost shots here, lately, haven't there? I'll have to get some historical stuff going soon just to balance it out!

I started taking people to the HH Holmes "glass bending factory" site (click for podcast and more info) in 2008 as a historical curiosity on Holmes tours - but so much weird stuff went on there that I had to start adding it to the ghost tours, too! Chris Hannigan, a recent tour passenger, sent these shots taken by Erin Brink. What do you think? There's SOME motion blur in the first one, but I don't think it's enough to account for the stuff on the center right that looks like a humoresque form, or the smaller one in the second shot.

Another Ghost Pic From the Vaults

2012-01-07T07:25:00.000-08:00

Here's an odd shot from a July, 2009 tour by Christy Jackson - a shot from the Florentine Ballroom at the Congress hotel.

Doesn't look like much on its own. Here's a close-up, though, of the thing on the left. Dude with an old-timey mustache?

Odd, huh? My first though on seeing it was to make a crack about Buffalo Bill (who did, in fact, stay at the Congress and was probably in this ballroom at one time or another). But what about Captain Louis Ostheim, the Spanish American war vet who killed himself in the hotel in 1900?

Notes from the photographer:

"This is a photo I took on the Devil in the White City Tour in the Florentine Ballroom at the Congress Hotel. I didn't notice the strange figure to the left until about 3 weeks later when I finally got around to putting the photos on my computer. I don't remember any white haired colonial dressed men with us on the tour, so this is definitely freaky! As for you skeptics, I guess it doesn't really matter what I say, but I wouldn't have the slightest clue about how to fake this photo, nor would I have the time to waste creating it. Anyways, what fun would it be for me to know that it's not real?"
I was looking at the pictures I took afterword that I took with a flash, and there was a lady standing around but I can't see how that would be her. But I guess it could be proof enough for some people to say it's not real."

What do you think? Messing around with the photo makes me think that it's probably actually a woman on the tour, and the "mustache" is an optical illusion caused by motion blur. But, as I say, there's no GOOD ghost evidence, only COOL ghost evidence. This is pretty nifty-looking even if it's an optical illusion!

Ghost Pic from the Vaults

2012-01-02T20:57:00.000-08:00

While I was going through records and files from old tours today, I came across one from a girl named Anna Schultz from 2007 that I somehow never noticed before. Around that time (especially the summer before it) there were lots of reports of the ghost of a little girl at Hull House, who we nicknamed "Becky." We've no idea who this might be the ghost of, but if I made a list of the 10 coolest possible ghost shots I've seen, at least three of them would be "Becky" shots. Here's Anna's.

Anna noted in her email that no one was in the garden when the shot was taken. As always, I won't vouch for it as "authentically paranormal," but I sure can't explain this one!

Ghost Picture from the Alley of Death and Mutilation

2011-12-30T02:58:00.000-08:00

Only hours from the anniversary of the Iroquois Theatre disaster (which I just posted about a few days back), Brandon L got this nifty shot on one of my tours. He says there was no one there when he took the picture, and the person who was standing next to him said so, too; I wasn't watching at the time so I can't say for sure. But Brandon showed it to me at the next stop and had emailed it to me before the tour ended (probably setting a new record!)

Just looking at it, my first instinct would be to say the guy was photo-shopped in, but given the circumstances under which it was taken and sent, I don't see how he could have done it without leaving any traces (trying to do photoshopping on a phone with your finger while on a bumpy bus ride would be a unique and impressive feat by itself).

As always, I'm not saying that this is a real ghost - I can think of a few possible explanations (though they may not be the RIGHT explanation). It's a pretty cool shot either way! What do YOU think?

Update: a security guard who works in one of the buildings opening to the alley is fairly sure it's him in the picture. But the guard in question has a beard, so...

Of all the stops on my tours over the years, this is the one I've used most frequently. I have several routes that I switch back and forth between, and a repertoire of plenty of different stops. But this one has been on every route - I can't think of any period when I was skipping it.

Archer Avenue's OTHER "Woman in White"

2011-12-26T07:07:00.000-08:00

Resurrection Mary isn't the only woman in white reported along Archer Avenue. Indeed, as you can hear in our podcast, similar ghosts have been reported around the vicinity at various times, including Ray's story about a ghost at Fairmount Cemetery.

Long before stories of Mary began to circulate, the original vanishing hitch hiker was the raven-haired woman in white and her horse-drawn carriage that were seen around St. James of the Sag, further down Archer through the woods beyond Resurrection. The cemetery there long had an unofficial (but widely understood) policy of allowing anyone to bury a body for free, and throughout the 1800s, stories of drunken burials that turned into drunken brawls were common. Unmarked graves dot the sloping graveyard (which climbs up a hill towards the church - it's awfully spooky on a foggy night!).

In 1897, a pair of Chicago musicians hired to play at a dance (dance halls do tend to figure into these stories, don't they?) awoke in the night to sound of galloping horses. Frightening, they looked out their windows (which afforded a view of the cemetery) and saw a woman in white with long black hair wandering around the area, moving without any apparent effort. A team of snow-white horses with "electric lights" on their heads approached, pulling a carriage behind them. The woman raised her arms, the lowered them, and sank into the ground. As she vanished, the horses did, too. The tribune, which ran the story with testimony from locals attesting to the sobriety of the musicians, ran this wonderful picture:

Traditionally, this has been said to be the ghost of a woman who died in a carriage accident while in the process of eloping with her lover. I'm not sure if anyone's noted that this all took place roughly a week after the Tribune ran a BIG article on the cemetery and it's "open door" policy for free burials.

It's also worth noting that only three monts later, in December of 1897, the New York Times ran an article stating that the skeletons of nine Indians had been dug up (in addition to several that had been dug up some years before, leading to a rash of ghost sightings). Most of the skeletons were re-buried, but others were taken to the Field Museum. The owners of the property where the bones were found said their house was haunted and that they would have to move.

The connections between this story and two other Archer Avenue legends - Resurrection Mary and the ghostly horse-drawn hearse that is reported now and then, are hard to ignore (not to mention the sobbing woman of Archer Woods, the Maple Lake ghosts, and so many others). Is it really all a part of the same ghost story, just evolving over time, or are there several ghosts along that spooky stretch of road?

Podcast: Resurrection Mary Roundtable

2011-12-19T06:17:00.000-08:00

New Episode!
Resurrection Mary
Roundtable Chat.

or archive.org

(itunes link will
start leading to the episode by the end
of 12/19)

More Podcasts

above: Mary Bregovy,

from the Trib. article

about her death.

above: the famous bent bars.

Last night I met with Ray Johnson, the Haunt Detective, and Dale Kaczmarek from the Ghost Research Society for a roundtable discussion about Resurrection Mary, Chicago's most famous ghost. Is she real? How old is the story? Who is she the ghost of? Get the free episode on iTunes (or right here) now!

Resurrection Mary is one of those vanishing hitchhikers; people pick her up on the South Side and give her a ride home - only to have her vanish as they drive past Resurrection Cemetery at 7200 S. Archer. We spent an hour talking about the story, its origins, and the various theories as to who Mary might be the ghost of (assuming she exists at all). There's some new information that we've recently uncovered - including stories of the cemetery gates, the night the police arrested "Resurrection Mary," what the cemetery's records say, and a whole lot more.

We discuss each of the major candidates:

Mary Bregovy, (above) killed in a wreck at Wacker and Lake in 1934. Though she's brunette, not blonde (as most sightings say), she's become the "classic" candidate. Some suggest that there are actually several ghosts in the cemetery.

Anna Mary Norkus, killed in a wreck on the south side in 1927 (the above is her original funeral record, which Ray brought with him - it indicates that she's buried at St. Casimir, not Resurrection).

Mary Miskowsik (Mary Miskowsky) , said to be killed by a hit and run driver en route to a costume party in 1930 (now disproven).

We also touch on Mary Petkiewicz, a new candidate that Ray discovered, and Mary Bojacz, (above) who was killed in a train wreck while en route to a funeral at Resurrection in 1921, and the poor young women named Mary who were buried at Resurrection after dying in the Eastland disaster.

Here's the Wade Denning's Ghost Story version of "The Hitch Hiker." Chilling (if a little goofy - how convenient that they have a grave yard in the back yard!)

"The Night It Rained" from In a Dark Dark Room by Alvin Schwartz - the Easy Reader that introduced my generation to the vanishing hitch hiker legend.

The famous Unsolved Mysteries episode. Did they embellish Jerry Palus's account? We aren't sure he ever claimed to go to her house the next day.

And here is a pdf of a 1942 article on vanishing hitch hikers - the first known scholarly work on the subject. It's interesting to note that when the Mary story is told, elements common to these (going to the house, finding a jacket on the grave) are a part of the story. However, in practically every version of the story any of us had heard first hand, Mary simply disappears out of the car, leaving the driver confused.

New Info Solves a Resurrection Mary Mystery

2011-12-19T03:16:00.000-08:00

Tonight, we'll be recording a podcast about Resurrection Mary - a roundtable discussion with some notable Chicago ghost hunters.

In the process of studying up and refreshing my memory, I found some new info on one of the most popular candidates for the "real" Mary: Mary Miskowski. According to info given to Troy Taylor, Mary Miskowski (or Miskowsky) lived on the 4900 block of South Damen, and was killed en route to a costume party by a hit and run driver in 1930. She was a blonde, and was buried at Resurrection Cemetery. Hence, she (and she alone) met all of the criteria we look for in candidates for the who Mary might be the ghost of.

However, though census data shows that there was definitely a 19 year old named Mary Miskowsky living on that block in 1930, we could never verify her death. There was no mention of the car accident in the papers, no obituary, no mention of her in the death index.

While looking a few things up, I came upon the obituary of John Miskowsky, who died in 1963 (and was interred at Resurrection). The obit gave the names of the same wife and children mentioned in the 1930 census, indicated that this was the same guy - and one daughter was listed as the "the late Mary (John) Sutko."

So, Mary Miskowsky of South Damen married a man name John Sutko. And from this, we could establish that she was dead before 1963. Just typing her name into the Trib archives didn't bring anything up, but a Mary Sutko was listed as dying in Cook County in March, 1956. Calling up all the obits from that week brought up the following:

I've blocked out a few names because I tend to get really unpleasant emails about Resurrection Mary and don't wish for her surviving family members to be hassled. The names of her kids and her sisters' married names aren't really relevant to establish that this Mary and the one who lived on S. Damen are one and the same.

I'm not sure why this wasn't more searchable (that's usually more of an issue when the text is less legible), but the parents and siblings have, again, the exact names of the ones in the 1930 census. So Mary Miskowsky of South Damen certainly didn't die in a car wreck in 1930; she died at the age of 45 under the name Mary Sutko.

For a whole lot more information, check out our Resurrection Mary Roundtable podcast episode!

The Iroquois Theatre Fire (or: How Bad WAS "Mr. Blue Beard?" )

2011-12-17T12:08:00.000-08:00

The Iroquois Theatre fire is the subject of a fantastic new play, Burning Bluebeard, now running at the Neo-Futurist Theatre. The fire in question took place on Dec 30, 1903, during a matinee performance of a spectacle known as Mr. Blue Beard. It just now occurs to me that, while I've written here about the ghosts associated with the fire, I've never put up a proper post about the fire that occurred only five weeks after the theatre was opened, during an over-crowded performance of a children's show about a guy who murders his wives featuring a song about "The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous."

In the new play by the Neo Futurists, many jokes are made out of just how dumb, inappropriate, and racist Mr. Blue Beard was. And it was all of these, all right. One paper wrote that, despite a new book and songs written for its American run (it had previously played in London), the show had never shed its "British stupidity."

Though reviews were known to go on and on about just how beautiful and spectacular the show was - with its cast of three or four hundred, its sparkling set-pieces and aerial ballet - and how gorgeous the theatre was. The Tribune wrote that only a few theaters in the country could possibly compare to the splendor of the Iroquois.

But as for the show itself, featuring such immortal classics as "Come and Buy Our Luscious Fruits, "Oriental Slaves Are We," and "A Most Unpopular Potentate," the papers struggled to find nice things to say.

Foy himself seems to have been underused. "Of the company," the Trib wrote, " Eddie Foy is the chief and ablest performer. He has little that is amusing to do, but his personality is in itself so good-natured, his humor so infectious, and his cleverness at unmaking so great that he cannot wait to with the tribute of applause." He had two solo numbers, "I'm a Poor Unhappy Maid" and "Hamlet Was a Melancholy Dane."

Eddie Foy as "Sister Ann" in the show. He stayed on stage WAY longer than it was safe for him to do so, and was (rightly) considered a hero.

"Of story," wrote the Trib, "there is little or none - nobody expected there would be any, and nobody cared because there was none. There is the usual loving couple who have hard times getting their love affairs to running smoothly, there is the usual wicked persecutor of the maiden in this enamored couple - in this case he is Mr. Blue Beard - and there is, of course, the regulation good fairy and the magic horn which calls her to the hero's aid....the music of the piece of hopelessly common, save bits here and there which are flinched from the classics."

This was the first show to run at the Iroquois, which, like most theaters at the time, was a freaking death trap. The hallways leading down from the gallery lead to locked doors and accordion gates. The three lower-level fire escapes into the alley were kept locked by a new kind of French locking system no one could figure out in the middle of a panic. The ventilation had been nailed shut. They had saved $56 by using an asbestos fire curtain was actually a blend made mostly from wood pulp (a common trick - wood-pulp based curtains were cheaper and lasted longer than pure asbestos. The only trouble was that they were useless in a fire). There were no sprinkler systems installed. Doors opened inward, toward the lobby (contrary to popular belief, this did not become illegal after the fire - it had already been illegal for a good twenty years). It wouldn't have made a difference if they opened towards the street, though - the manager testified that they were also locked.

Above: a rare shot of the promenade

And fires were a problem from the start - as I understand it, the muslin drapes near the stage had actually caught fire a couple of times during performances when they caught fire again on December 30th. But this time the fire caught on the scenery. And when the backstage door opened, that created a backdraft resulting in a "balloon of fire" that shot out into the audience while Foy frantically (and heroically) tried to keep people calm. Of course, keeping people calm when a fire ball just shot out at them is not really possible.

And, of course, there was the gallery, where at least one of the fire exits was not yet connected to a fire escape. Stories that a teacher directed students out the door one by one are basically nonsense (the sheer idea that anyone would have formed a single-file line in such a riot is just nuts), but in the pushing and shoving, over a hundred people fell to their doom. Some were saved only when the pile of bodies got high enough to break their fall (I didn't believe this angle when I first heard it, but there WERE contemporary reports that described this, as well as a few of people making it into the alley below on the ground level only to be killed by people falling from above).

Above: the "alley of death and mutilation." As the overcrowded (or missing) fire escapes became useless, a ladder was extended from the Northwestern University building (the former Tremont House hotel that had been owned by Ira Couch, now the namesake of the alley) on the other side of the alley. It was useless, but soon replaced by more useful "planks." Only 12 people were saved by these, though.

Most reports today say that one only one performer, aerialist Nelly Reed, was killed. Exactly how she died is sort of an open question - some reports say she was still suspended in the air when the fire ball shot through, others say she died of burns in the alley. Another says she was afraid to use the elevator that led from her dressing room to the fire escape, and instead ran down a staircase right into the fire. I haven't seen a testimony from the time talking about her being suspended above the stage, and suspect the less dramatic versions are probably correct. A rather detailed 1904 account said that she was in her sixth-floor dressing room and had collapsed from inhaling too much smoke, and was carried out by an elevator boy named Robert Smith, only to die later.

In reality, though most early reports said that no performer had died, it seems that Reed and two other performers were killed: another aerialist who was either a man named Florine or a woman named Floraline (little is known) and a bit part player named Burr Scott. This, of course, is in addition to the six hundred or so spectators known to have died. A temporary hospital was set up in nearby Marshall Fields, and a morgue was created in a nearby saloon.

The stage door led into a vacant lot fronted by Dearborn Street - roughly where the McDonald's and the Oliver Typewriter Co. building are now. Foy was able to get his son out the door with most of the cast and crew before running back INTO the fire to try to hold off a stampede. He yelled for the curtain to be lowered (he had never seen the curtain himself, but assumed that they must have one), even as he felt a "cyclone of fire" building behind him. Exactly what he said onstage is not known (different reports gave different quotes), but by all accounts he begged people to remain seated until the curtain could be lowered, then began asking them to leave the theatre slowly. This is exactly what he should have done, too - the panic killed more people than the fire. To keep people calm, he begged the orchestra leader to play the overture. "Play anything!" he shouted.

THough most considered him a hero, Foy was very hard on himself. Interviewed only minutes later in his room at the nearby Sherman House hotel, Foy has wracked with guilt and badly shaken as he recounted the story, mentioning that he'd also been in Chicago (his home town) during the great fire in 1871. He truly believed that he had failed the audience. In fact, he probably saved hundreds of lives.

Lots of people were brought to trial, including the mayor, but none got in trouble. A few "ghouls" reported by the New York Times to have run into the theatre to steal necklaces, rings, and money from the dead may have gotten in trouble, but I've never found a good report about it. The Trib wrote that earrings were torn from women's ears. One story goes that man was eventually arrested for stealing gold fillings from teeth (this is usually said to be Mr. Thompson, who owned the Thompson's Restaurant next door, but this is certainly untrue, though Thompson's WAS used as a morgue and hospital).

What REALLY started the fire is still a bit of an open question. It's generally believed that the light they were using for the "moonlight" in Act 2, during an octet called "Let Us Swear In the Pale Moon Light," arced, sending up sparks that set fire to the drapes. A stagehand, though, said this was impossible, and that the sparks had come from the wiring.

The theatre was re-opened less than a year later under another name, and then operated as the Colonial Threatre starting in 1905. This lasted until the 1920s, when it was torn down. The Oriental Theatre now stands on the spot (one foundation wall down at the basement level, invisible to the general public) is still original. I've never found out what happened to the time capsule that was placed in the cornerstone. Interestingly, one of the shows in line to open at the Iroquois was the musical comedy revue version of The Wizard of Oz. Just over a century later, Wicked opened in the same space.

Here's the ill-fated ad, with the infamous bug stating that the theatre was "absolutely fireproof." And it was, for the most part - the building itself was just fine. But the seats, the scenery, the drapery, and everything else IN it was flammable, all right:

Since it's hard to read, here's a transcript describing the whole show:

ACT 1.
Scene 1— The Market Place on the Quay, near Baghdad. (Bruce Smith.)

Mustapha plots to separate Selim and Fatima and sell the beautiful Fatima to the
monster Blue Beard. Blue Beard arrives; purchases slaves. Sister Anne falls in love
with Blue Beard and spurns Irish Patshaw. Blue Beard seizes Fatima and takes her
on board his yacht.

Opening Chorus—

a. "Come, Buy Our Luscious Fruits."

b. " Oriental Slaves Are We."

c. " We Come From Dalmatia."

d. Algerian Slave Song and Chorus.

aa. Grand Entrance Blue Beard's Retinue. Medley Ensemble.

bb. Song—" A Most Unpopular Potentate," Blue Beard and Chorus.
a. "Welcome Fatima."
Song: "I'm As Good As I Ought To Be," Blanche Adams.
Finale: "Then Away We Go."

Scene 2-On Board Blue Beard's Yacht. (Bruce Smith.)
Fatinia with Selim attempts to escape from Blue Beard's yacht, but is prevented.
Selim jumps overboard.

Opening Chorus— "There's Nothing Like The Life We Sailors Lead."
Duet— Miss Rafter and Miss Adams.

Song: "Beautiful World It Would Be." (Harrv Von Tilzer.) Harry Gilfoil.
Song: "I'm a Poor Unhappy Maid." (Jerome and Schwartz.) Eddie Foy.
Finale—" He's Gone."

Scene 3— The Isle of Ferns. (H. Emden.)
Fairy Queen appears to Selim, promises him her aid and the power or the Magic
Fan to reunite him to his loved one and to protect them from evil.

Scene 4— The Laud of Ferns. (H. Emden.)
Ballet of Ferns- Procession and waving of the Magic Fan, by the Fairies and
Grand Corps de Ballet.

ACT II
Scene 1—The Terrace
Fatima believes Selim dead and agrees to marry Blue Beard. She gets
the Castle from Blue Beard, who enjoins her not to open the Blue Chamber.

Opening Chorus—" Davlight is Dawning."

Song: "Songbirds of Melody Lane," Beatrice Liddell, Elsie Romaine, and Chorus. (Ed-
wards and Brvan.)

Song: "The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous." (Harry Gilfoil, Bonnie Magmn and
Pony Ballet.

Sister Anne and the Pet Elephant.

"In the Pale Moonlight." (Jerome and Woodward.)

"Ma Honey." (Hoffman.) Bonnie IMaginn and Chori-

Scene 2 — Chamber of Curiosities.
Conquered by curiosity, Fatima opens the Blue Chamber and discovers Blue Beard's
awful secret.

Blue Beard's (dead) wives discovered.

Scene 3— Home of the Old Woman Who Lived In a Shoe. (E Albert, i
The disobedient children.
Song: " Wake Up Mammy," Maude Nugent.
.Song: " Mother Eve." (Schwartz.) Eddie Foy, Pony Ballet, and Chorus.

Scene 4— Hall in Blue Beard's Palace. (E. Albert.)
Dancing Specialty by Frank Young and Bessie De Voie. Music by C. Herbert Kerr.

Scene 5— Triumph of the Magic Fan. (H. Emden.)

Tableau 1— The Land of Palms. Tableau 4— Japan.

Tableau 2— Egypt Tableau .5— Parisian Rose Garden.

Tableau 3— India Tableau

ACT III
Nellie Reed, Premiere, and Grand Corps de Ballet.

Scene 1— Hall of Pleasure in Blue Beard's Palace. (E. Albert,)

Scenes of revelry in Blue Beard's absence.

Opening Chorus— "Let Us Be Jolly As Long As We Can."

Song: "Spoony Mooney Night." (Gus Edwards.) Bonnie Maginn and Chorus.

Pony Ballet Specialty. Music by Jean Schwartz.

Song: " Julie." (Wm. Jerome and Jean Schwartz.) Herbert Cawthorne and Chorus.

Blue Beard returns unexpectedly.

Sister Anne gives evidence of temporary insanity. Imagines herself Ophelia.
Song- "Hamlet Was a Melancholy Dane," Eddie Foy. (Wm. Jerome and John Schwartz.)

Blue Beard discovers that Fatima has disobeyed him and threatens her and her
friends with death.

Scene 3— Below the Ramparts. (Hicks and Brooks.)

Blue Beard gives Fatima one hour in which to accept his offer of marriage or perish with her friends. Selim summons Fairies' aid. Attack on the castle by the Fairy Army. Fatima and friends in peril . . .

Scene 3— The Fairy Palace.

Blue Beard is overthrown and the lovers are reunited.

Entrance and triumph of the Fairy Queen.

Grand Transformation Scene.

-------

That the theatre site and alley are said to be haunted probably goes without saying. I've never spoken to an actual witness of the famous ghost of a woman in a white tutu (presumably that of Nellie Reed), but several employees of the Oriental (speaking on condition of anonymity) have described seeing odd black forms zipping through the theatre at night, from roughly where the stage would have been in the direction of the exits. A little girl is often heard giggling (sometimes in conjunction with flushing a backstage toilet). One employee describes hearing a solitary scream in the middle of the night. Several strange audio recordings have been made, including some thought be from BEFORE the Iroquois (a decade or two earlier, that section of Randolph Street was known as "hair-trigger block," the area where shell-shocked Civil War vets would come to drink, gamble and shoot at each other. On a rather unrelated note, lip-prints left on the wall by a vaudeville dancing troupe in the 1930s were recently discovered in the organ room.

As for the alley, we've recently had a spate of odd photographs there (odd shadow pictures have gotten particularly common). Camera batteries often go from fully-charged to drained in the few minutes that we're out there on tours.

One interesting side note: in an article I read just this morning, one of the survivors was listed as living at address instantly recognizable as that of the H.H. Holmes "Murder Castle."

Resurrection Mary and the Eastland Disaster

2011-12-14T03:06:00.000-08:00

While we're looking up possible candidates for the "real" Resurrection Mary, why not look back a few years further than we normally do?

In 1915, when the Eastland capsized in the Chicago river, killing more than 800 people, it was the worst tragedy in Chicago history. The dead had come from all over the city, though most came from the West side, and the most notably-large chunk were of Bohemian descent (though suggesting that Resurrection Mary may not have been Polish tends to generate odd hate mail).

At least five young women named Mary who perished aboard the Eastland were buried at Resurrection, and one other may have been.

One was Mary Malik, age 20 or 21 (depending on the source you're looking at), who was buried in the same casket as her 18 year old sister, Stella (their parents could only afford one - this sort of flies in the face of stories I hear about the Western Electric company bending over backwards to make sure everyone had a coffin). Both girls lived at S 3023 48th Court in Cicero. Mary was born in Moravia, Poland and settled with their parents in the Chicago area as a girl. Upon completing her education at St. Mary's Polish school at 13, Mary got a job with the Western Electric Company and had been with them for 7 years at the time of the disaster. Stella had been working there for four years herself.

Also listed among the casualties of the disaster buried at Resurrection:

Mary Ceranek - age 17 according to modern casualty lists, though the Tribune said she was 20 at the time. She lived at 2838 S. 48th Av, Cicero, and had five brothers and sisters. She had been working for Western Electric for four months.

Mary Krzyzaniak-Dudek. 27 year old wife of John Dudek - probably too old to be the ghost.

Mary Kaszuba, 24. A single women who worked for the Novelty Candy Co, lived at 8042 Throop, had four sisters and two brothers.

Mary Kupski (or Cooper) - age 23, lived at 2832 Lawndale Ave. An employee of Western Electric, she was the family's only means of support, as the rest of the family was unemployed.

Another -the "maybe" - was Mary Bizek (or Bezik), who was buried along with her sister Anna. The two, aged 19 and 16 respectively, lived at 2828 S. 50th Court. They had been raised in Chicago. Mary worked for Sears and Roebuck as a mail stamper, and both helped to support the family. The Eastland casualty list I consulted said that both girls were actually buried at Bohemian National, as does find-a-grave.com , though the funeral description in the Trib certainly makes it sound like it was at Resurrection.

The description is part of a section of the Trib that also speaks of the Maliks:

As one of the motor trucks left the church it contained two coffins. They contained the bodies of Miss Mary Malik, 21 years old, and her sister, Miss Stella Malik, 18...They worked on the same bench in the Wester electric plant, went on the steamer together, and found death at almost the same moment. A single grave in Resurrection Cemetery received their bodies. Two other households contributed two members each to the cortege. They were Antonia and Agnes Ignaszak....and Angela and Ladisslaus Latwoski... In the afternoon services were held for Mary and Anna Bizek.

We don't have photos of and of these women, as far as I know, and they died a few years before most Mary "candidates" did. But they're roughly the right age, the right name, and at the right cemetery, which makes them just about as good as candidates as anyone else we know of. The "ideal" candidate is a blonde girl named Mary, age 16-24 (give or take), who died on or around Archer Avenue some time before about 1935, preferably after going out dancing, and was buried at Resurrection. Once again, no one fits all of those criteria, as far as well know. Of the three "major" candidates, Mary Bregovy was a brunette who died in the Loop, Anna Norkus was only 12 and buried at a different cemetery, and Mary Miskowski actually died in her 40s, not at 19, as the story goes.

To consider any of these candidates, you have to jump to some wide conclusions:

1. That the ghost is real in the first place.
2. That her name is really Mary. Most of the eyewitnesses don't seem to get her name at all. And, even if one of them did, was she giving her real name?

Reading all of these obituaries is really terribly depressing. That the people in charge of the ship were never tried for criminal negligence, after adding tons of cement to the deck, raising the capacity after simply adding more life boats, etc, is simply shocking (they were only ever tried for conspiracy to run an unsafe ship, of which they were innocent). Yes, I'm familiar with the argument that the ship tipped over because the out-of-control government required it to have too many lifeboats (since the Titanic had just gone down without enough boats, prompting a handful of new regulation), but that theory doesn't hold water with me. The added weight from the boats didn't concern them so much that they didn't add all that cement, and they RAISED the capacity instead of lowering it. The government probably never should have allowed that ship -which was known as fussy both before and after - to be used as a passenger ship at all.

For a whole lot more information and speculation, check out our Resurrection Mary Roundtable podcast!

Resurrection Mary: Mary Bojacz?

2011-12-13T07:06:00.000-08:00

The great scavenger hunt (or wild goose chase) for the true identity of Resurrection Mary, Chicago's famous vanishing hitchhiker, continues. Just to re-iterate, what we're looking for here is a woman, roughly in her late teens, and probably a blonde named Mary, who died circa the 1920s or 30s and was buried at Resurrection Cemetery, most likely after dying in a car wreck, preferably on Archer Avenue. We can be sort of flexible on a number of these, partly because no one has yet been found who meets ALL of these criteria. The closest match is probably Mary Miskowsi, but stories of her death in 1930 have not yet been verified (no record or contemporary news account has been found, though census forms indicate that she was a real person).

Here's a new entrant into the field that I ran across while doing some research this morning: Mrs. Mary Bojacz, who died in 1921 in a tragic accident that claimed 11 victims, many of who were en route to burial service at Resurrection Cemetery.

She's not blonde, and there's really no telling how old she is. The newspaper reports did not list her age, and I can't find any other record of her yet (most likely, Bojacz was not the correct spelling of the name). All we really know about her is that she was married and lived 2658 West 25th Place. This doesn't necessarily mean she's too old to be the ghost, though; one other candidate was a 17 year old bride. She may not have been buried at Resurrection, though the fact that she was going there at the time of her death is an interesting twist.

The accident that claimed her life was one of the most tragic I've seen. Two cars were headed to Resurrection Cemetery, and the car in the back didn't see the California Limited train coming down the Santa De line as it crossed over an unguarded track at 50 miles an hour. Bodies were mangled, and parts of them, including several heads, ended up scattered as far as a mile away down the railroad tracks. All of this happened so quickly that the the front car made it all the way to the cemetery before it realized that the car behind it was no longer following it. 11 people from the funeral party, including the undertaker, were killed, and three others were injured so badly that their deaths were expected at the time the article was published. Another man was killed in another train-crossing accident that same day.

Mrs. Bojacz doesn't meet all the requirements for Mary - she's probably too old, and certainly wasn't a blond, but nearly any Mary killed in a tragic wreck who can be associated with Resurrection qualifies as a fringe candidate. Click the "Resurrection Mary" label below for more information on the other candidates, including Anna Norkus, Mary Bregovy (who is also not a blonde) and others. I'll update this posting when we get a better idea of Mary B's age.

For a whole lot more information, check out our Resurrection Mary Roundtable podcast!

Did H.H. Holmes really say "I was born with the Devil in me?"

2011-11-22T09:20:00.000-08:00

I've finally acquired a copy of the "confession" of H.H. Holmes as excerpted in the Phildelphia North American on April 11, 1896, which was cited by many regional papers as the source of many of the famous "Holmes" quotes, including the notable "I was born with the devil in me" passage. That portion was absent from the complete version of the "confession" that was published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on the same day . There were a couple of parts that were unintelligible in the scan, but in one major case I was able to fill in the blanks using excerpts published in regional papers.

Buried in the middle of it, there's a point where the North American says their own source is the advance proofs of the confession Holmes' own hand (presumably the one that was published in the Inquirer, which they studiously avoid mentioning). Through most of the article, they subtly imply that the confession was written for THEM.

My first inclination was to think that they got a look at the proofs and tried to reconstruct it from memory - this certainly seems to be the case in the parts about turning into the devil, which are also in the Inquirer, though in different words. However, none of Holmes' direct quotes in the article actually appear verbatim in the full version, and a couple of sections are unlike anything that occurred in the confession at all, making me wonder if they just made it up altogether.

This is all probably going to boil down to whether The North American was a respectable paper of more of a tabloid in 1896. Most of the other articles that I can see in the margins of the scan seem respectable enough, but most of this article is pretty much "pot boiler" writing, re-stating a few main themes and concepts over and over to stretch what little info they had to go on to cover their full front page.

Many regional papers printed excerpts from the North American, including the portion about Holmes mutilating his son (which does not appear in the full version). Since every regional paper demurely refrained from including all of the details of that part of the story, I had thought that their source paper might have the full version, but it doesn't appear to. Since the scan of that portion of the paper at the Free Library was unreadable, I've filled in the blanks using an excerpt of it published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

My full transcription of the article is below - thanks for Peter Stone Brown of Philadelphia for digging it up at the Philadelphia Free Library!

PHILADELPHIA NORTH AMERICAN

Saturday, April 11, 1896. Eight Pages. One cent.

HOLMES' CONFESSION.
The Story of the Most Horrible Murderer Ever Known in the Annals of Crime
--
STAMPED BY SATAN HIMSELF
--
The Multi-Murderer Feels That He Is Gradually Turning Face and All Into a Demon
--
DISFIGURED HIS OWN FLESH AND BLOOD
--
The Man Now Sitting In the Shadow of the Gallows Tells How He Took His Little Son into a Barn and There Committed the Most Horrible of Crimes - "I Was Born With the Devil In Me" - A Fearful Narration of the Taking of Twenty-Seven Lives - His One Regret."
---

(click to see the full transcription of the article)

"Yes I was born with the devil in me," is the startling declaration which H.H. Holmes, the arch-murder, the multi-mutilator and self-admitted author of 27 murders makes in his awful confession of guilt, which the North American is enabled to present to its readers for their perusal to-day.

Then he adds: "I was born with the evil standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since."

This startling declaration strikes the keynote of the long and revolting story told by the arch murderer himself, and which was written word for word by the man now sitting in the shadow of the gallows and awaiting only the fatal moment when the noose will be placed about his neck and his power ruthlessly and recklessly to destroy will forever be removed.

This confession, this terrible record, of slaughter made by the man himself and over which he seems to gloat as he leaps from word to word in the written recollection of his blood deeds, at last tells the true story of his murderer's life, his motive and the dark inspiration that led him to choose a life to devoted absolutely and fervidly to the pursuit of murder.

Imbued with the conviction that he was born for murder, that he was possessed of the evil one, and that he really at this moment is gradually but surely turning body and soul into an imp, a representative of the infernal regions, under whose banner he has so long served, this man, feeling not the slightest pang of remorse, and expressing no regret whatever for the twenty-seven souls he has ushered into eternity, sits to-day and, more like demon than man, tells the story of his bloodthirsty career.

Beginning at the date of his birth, the impious character of which he so graphically describes in the opening sentence, he leads the reader on line by line through the chapters reeking with gore and swelling to heaven with the foulness of his deeds until he pictures himself as a fiend, a monster, changed not only in mind actually in feature, to the demon he has lived all his life long.

He tells with awfully dramatic effect of his registered vow to learn the subtle qualities of fatal drugs - the agencies that kill be sleep and stealth - the employ ( UNINTELLIGIBLE one line) -cine, and made doubly dangerous, he meant to pursue.

He speaks of the holy bond of matrimony into which he entered while still a youth, and his ghastly mutilation of the innocent result of that union.

n and on he goes, and tells with utter abandon of the murder planned, carried out and the out beings whom he put out of the world, and whose friends never knew how they died.

He designates them by name, as a tradesman would his wares, and speaks of the fine work he did here or the botch me made there.

Only once does he show remorse, and that is when speaking of Minnie Williams.

"I really did love that woman," he says, and then, with an expression that passes off like a sigh, he seems to say, "Well, it's done, and it was a good job."

Throughour the long story, that reads more like a book of the wildest kind of fiction, the pen never falters, and the gloom of the cell never for a moment seems to dim the page.

"I believe I have no longer anything human in me," he declares, and then makes the startling statement in conclusion that "he is gradually turning in a devil, head, tail and all."

In conclusion he declares that an abnormal deformity is gradually taking place in his form and features, and standing as he does on the threshold of his doom, declares, multi-murderer that his is, that he is already the living personification of Satan himself.

Can it be, indeed, that the evil one has actually put his mark upon his own in such a way that it cannot be mistaken, or is it the ( ) of a demon in the flesh that occupies the cell in the County Prison?

Verily, the North American is led to believe that such is the case.

----

IT'S ALL FOR HIS BOY
Holmes Makes the Confession to Enable Him to Secure Money With Which His Son My Be Educated

In prefacing the confession of his many murders, which cover in full nearly three newspaper pagers, written in Holmes' own handwriting and detailing with a minuteness that is simply at times revolting, the arch mutilator and author of twenty-seen murders, as he admits himself to be, states with something like pathos that he does so simply that he may obtain enough money to educate his boy.

That "boy," outside of one of the victims of his numerous tragedies, seems to be the only human thing that ever reached the absyssmal heart of H.H. Holmes.

It was because of the love of the boy primarily that he determined when he found the shadows of the gallows closing upon him to accept the offers made in big sums of money to write a confession, and it was because the lad that the latter might be left enough money to see him safely through life, that the fantastically criminal father accepted the offer and wrote out night after night by the dim burning light in his cell the words which rise up against him and stamp him as the most terrible of human monsters that ever lived since the days of conspicuous degenerates began.

It was then that Holmes made the request of Judge Arnold of "the light in his cell," and procured copy paper and pens and began to write the memorable document, the advance proofs of which the North American has seen, and which in part this journal reproduces below.

It may be stated at the beginning that Holmes writes of his bloodcurdling atrocities with an abandon that simply appalls one. None one grain of remorse seems to enter in to the construction of that terrible document, and never for a moment, except in two isolated cases - one where he refers touchingly to the memory of Minnie Williams and another time when he pathetically speaks of an outrage perpetrated on his boy, does the redeeming element pity figures in the case Regret is never for a moment expressed. "Nascor (? non fit" seemed to be the motto of Holmes with regard to his devilish inclinations and he comes out boldly and without compunction at the very opening with the statement "I was born with the very devil in me."

POSSESSED OF THE DEVIL

Holmes as he Sites in his cell at Moyamensing Believes Fervently That He is Owned by the Evil One

(untinelligigble - roughly two column inches)

-tion, which conjures up hosts of vengeance-calling dead, or not, his face assuming the lok, the eyes, the leer, and the very ears the exact similitude of the picture of Satan themselves.

"Yes, I was born with the devil in me," says he in one part of the concessions. "I could not help the fact that I was a murderer no more then the poet can help the inspiration to song, nor the ambition of an intellectual man to be great. I was born with the evil one standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since."

"The inclination to murder came to me as naturally as the inspiration to do right comes to the majority of persons.

"Where others' hears were touched with pity, mine filled with cruelty, and where in others the feeling was to save life, I revealed in the thoughts of destroying the same.

"Not only that, I was not satisfied in taking it in the ordinary way. I sought devices strange, fantastical and even grotesque. It pleased my fancy. It gave me play to work my murderous will, and I revealed in it with the enthusiasm of an alchemist who is hot on the trail of the philosopher's stone.

"This inclination," continues Holmes, "came to my early in life. I remember when a mere lad my ambition was to study medicine, that I might know the relative effects of poisonous ases, that I might fully become acquainted with their uses, and learn to be an expert in handling them."

This inclination, according to the multi-murderer, followed him up through boyhood, confronted him as he stood on the threshold of manhood, and when he entered into the sacred state of husbandhood it even confronted him there in an eveil shape, and led him to think of murders then to be committed, to be kept in oblivion for some time to come, but finally to be divulged before HEaven and earth and rise up against him as he mounted the steps of an avenging scaffold.
----
"I HAVE SATAN'S FACE"
The Arch Mutilator Firmly Confinces That His Features Are Growing to Resemble More and More Those of The Arch Fiend

This feeling so grew upon the man that he lost all affinity for his brother man. He felt himself apart from the rest of the world, and endowed with a mission to destroy everyone and everything that crossed his path.

So possessed had Holmes become with this belief that he grew to imagine himself a part and parcel of the Inferno, and now that he is imprisoned, and his brooding thoughts have more time to work on his disordered brain, he is fully convinced that physically as well as mentally he is slowly but surely growing to look like a devil, and that incipient malformation has already taken place.

"I am convinced," he declares, that since my imprisonment I have changed woefully and gruesomely from what I formerly was in feature and in figure."

"If you look at my picture when I was first taken into custody in Boston, nearly two years ago, and look at my face now, you may begin to observe something of what I mean

"I mean, in fact, that my features are assuming nothing more nor less than a pronounced Satanic cast; that I have become afflicted with some disease, rare but terrible, with which other physicians are acquainted, but over which they seem to have no control whatever.

"That disease," said he, "is a malformation or distortion of the osseous parts, causing deformity so marked that in many cases men are made to assume likenesses to the inferior animals.

"It begins with paints (SIC) in all the joints, followed by excruciating symptoms, local on the head and bones of the face."

"These I attributed at first to rheumatic trouble, until I found that they were gradually causing a change to take place in my whole figure, quite in keeping with my character."

"The real nature of the malady then began to dawn, and I recollected having studied once about a man whose features had become deformed by this disease in such a way that he gradually grew to resemble a monkey."

"The horror of the thing did not pall on me, for it was quite in keeping with y nature, and like a true medical student I began to study the new conditions which had arisen.

"From what I can see, I believe fully that I am growing to resemble the devil, that the osseous parts of my head face are gradually assuming the elongated shape so pronounced in what is called the degenerate head, and that the similitude is almost completed."

"IN fact, so impressed am I with this belief," continued Holmes, "that I am convinced that I have no longer anything human in me."

Holmes' confession from this on speaks of his early experiences of his boyhood days on the farm up in Vermont, and the life he led, until he entered college to study medicine in Mighican.

It was not until after he graduated, fully equipped with the knowledge of poisons and the easiest way to sever the simple thread of life, that Holmes bgan his career as a murderer and mutilator.
"And I would have committed six other murders," he added, "had not certain occurrences intervened.

"I had planned them and was several times about to carry them out when something intervened."
------

MUTILATED HIS OWN BOY
The Unnatural Father Took His Son Into a Shed and There Satisfied the Awful Cravings of His Murderous Heart

Possibly one of the worst, most brutal, revolting and disgusting crimes this arch-murderer ever committed was one he speaks of in a chapter devoted to his boy, the son of his first wife, whom he married in New England while but a youth. The chapter in question tells a story that is hardly credible, coming as it does from the lips of a father, and outranks for (unintelligible) any other act he ever committed.

THe only explanation he offers is that he said it simply to gratify his love of mutilation."

"It was shortly after I was married," he declares," "and the boys was then but a youngster playing about with other lads of his own (FOLLOWING UNINTELLIGBLE IN NORTH AMERICAN, FILLED IN FROM SYDNEY MORNING HERALD QUOTES) size and age that I was seized with a wild desire to destroy. I called him in from the road where he was frolicking about….and took him out to a rear barn. I don't know what it was that possessed me, but I took a surgical knife along with me. It was not the sudden impulse more the maddening desire of a father seeing his child about to grow up and enter a world of sorrow and sin that led me to the deed. No, it was not that. It was simply the craving of the murderer within me that inspired me to make a subject of my little one. I noticed there was a terrible look of fear on the little fellow's face as I took him into the barn, and he trembled as I took the knife and told him to undress. I have often thought since that it was like the look of the scared rabbit laid on the operating table as its pitiful eyes search the group about him and see them all intent only on the anticipated incision."

We refrain from quoting the details)….

Mystery at the Couch Tomb

2011-10-31T12:48:00.000-07:00

The following (fake) newspaper article was found taped to the back of the Couch vault:

Though the article is too funny to be real, the date is a giveaway - it's dated 1857, several years before they started naming parks (or anything else) after Lincoln. The space was still called City Cemetery then

Nearby was another item, a fake section of Ira Couch's will:

Besides the fact that printers didn't exist in those days (or ballpoint pens, with which the signature appears to have been added), I'm pretty sure Couch's net worth was more than 210k.

So, I assume this is part of a scavenger hunt, letter-boxing, or "How to Host a Murder" sort of thing? Well done, in any case!

On the Radio

2011-10-31T05:10:00.000-07:00

This morning I was on WBEZ talking about ghost hunting at the haunted Hooters on Wells on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me"'s podcast, "How to do Everything." Happy Halloween!

Listen in to me doing my best to talk about ghost hunting without seeming like I'm crazy!

The Death of the Lone Wolf

2011-10-30T12:29:00.000-07:00

1921 must have been an interesting time to be in death row. You had Sam Cardinella and several members of his gang, all awaiting execution and plotting for Cardinella's escape (by means of being brought back to life after the hanging). And there was Carl Wanderer, who had shot his wife and blamed it on a drifter (whom he had also shot). And there was Harry Ward, known as the "Lone Wolf Bandit." While Cardinella bided his time and sneakily tried to effect his escape, Ward tried every weird trick in the book to get out of the hanging.

"The Lone Wolf" had been arrested for a double murder that occurred while he was robbing the shop of "Al the Hatter" at Cicero and Lake. A former bandit in Mexico, Ward acted as calm and collected as any man who had ever been in prison. A warden later told Ben Hecht that Ward was the most cold-blooded man who ever lived, and that he had been the best rummy player he'd ever known. Warden and Ward spent Ward's last night playing cards in the death cell.

But as calm as Ward seemed, he was either putting on a good show or was entirely confident that he was going to escape. Recently, he had attempted to plead insanity (as practically everyone did) - the defense had held up a plan he had to open a harem on an island in Lake Michigan and start an airline to take customers to and from the island - as evidence.

As the date of his execution approached, a woman named Elizabeth smuggled a metal file into his cell inside of a magazine. It was confiscated when another prisoner (one of the guys Carl Wanderer wouldn't let into his "army") ratted him out.

All through the day, friends of Ward had been driving up to the jail, only to be warned away by armed police. A "priest" came in to minister to Ward, but fled when they started searching him.

Oddest of all was that Ward's attorney was approached by "a stranger" with an offer to revive him after hanging - he said that if the body was obtained immediately and taken to an undertaker, he could revive it with pulmotors. The attorney refused - Ben Hecht probably based his story of a gangster named Frankie Piano on this story.

The was only a short time after the police had caught several men trying to revive Sam Cardinella (and had possibly let Nicholas Vianna, a Cardinella associate, BE revived, according to legend retold in FATAL DROP), and they were in no mood to take chances this time. Authorities wouldn't release the body from the jail until he had been dead for an hour.

Carl Wanderer and Sam Cardinella: BFF?

2011-10-28T04:49:00.000-07:00

It's always interesting when two crime stories intersect - and in a real way, not another case of the newspapers making wild stabs at a game of "connect the dots" with criminals (like the attempts to connect Johann Hoch to HH Holmes, Louis Thombs, and every other criminal of the day).

In 1920, Carl Wanderer was jailed for murdering his wife and trying to blame it all on a drifter (whom he'd also killed). Whether he was trying to get away from his wife to rejoin the army, be with a 16 year old girl, or with an army buddy with whom he was in love depends greatly on who's telling the story, but one clue is how he behaved in prison.

While in jail, he grew bored with the monotony of prison life and the lack of opportunities for exercise. Hence, he asked for (and received) permission to raise an army of convicts and drill them in military formations. His seven men would perform drills at his command, using brooms instead of guns. Two others asked to join, but they were black (this army was not integrated), and, having killed only one man each, seen as unsuitable material for this particular army, which was made up of multi-murderers (the papers listed the average murder per soldier as three).

One of the soldiers was Sam "Il Diavolo" Cardinella, the leader of the "murder clique"that had terrorized the city. He may have joined the ranks to help his master plan to escape: he was losing a lot of weight as part of a plot to make sure he would be strangled by the gallows without his neck breaking. After his execution, the police found his friends trying to resuscitate the body.

Also present in the army was Harry "The Lone Wolf" Ward, whose execution was also nearly foiled by a crazy plot to bring him back to life (more on him in future posts). Most of the others were members of the Cardinella gang.

Stories of both of these guys are in William Griffith's book, shamelessly plugged below:

Chicago and the first Fingerprint Evidence

2011-10-27T11:38:00.000-07:00

Here's a story I've been telling a brief version of on tours lately:

In 1910, a robber named Thomas Jennings was making a run from the scene of a burglary - the Englewood home of Clarence Hiller, who had once been chief clerk of a local railway. During his escape, Jennings fired two shots at Hiller and killed him instantly. But Jennings made a mistake he couldn't have predicted at the time: he touched some wet paint on a railing with his hand, leaving a print. After his capture, the prosecution used the fingerprint to convict him. Such a thing had never been done before.

Naturally, the defense objected to such evidence. The attorney told judge Kavanagh that "There is only one case in the world where finger prints were attempted to be introduced in a criminal trial. That was an old English case, and it was then held that a special law would have to be passed to legalize such evidence."

Captain Michael Evans of the police was asked about his confidence in the system. "Suppose," said the attorney, "that I were to plant my thumb - so - on this piece of white paper, could you make a print from this paper that would prove it was my thumb that had been pressed on it?"

Upon replying that he could, the attorney said (probably with a smug grin), "All right. Go ahead and do it." Evans dusted the spot the attorney had touched with powder and showed the jury the print, and a print taken from the attorney matched the one on the paper.

But the judge and jury were both convinced, and Jennings was sentenced to hang.

I have no doubt that earlier cases of finger prints being used as evidence could probably be brought up by a thorough search (this strikes me as one of those fields where the answer to "which was the first" or "what was the real cause" depends greatly on who you ask; the police seem to have used it for some time), but the idea of using them as actual evidence certainly seemed novel at the time. The Tribune pondered what this would mean for the future:

WILL CRIMINALS WEAR GLOVES?
Now that the criminal classes are menaced with the finger print system, George Porteous, an expert in criminology, propounds this question: "Will the future housebreaker wear gloves to foil the police in procuring finger print evidence?....One pair of gloves of a certain make is like another. But it is different with a person's hands or fingers. No two hands are exactly alike. If Jennings had worn gloves the night he entered the Hillers' house I don't think he would have been convicted."

In any case, the defense appealed, and Jennings got a couple of last minute reprieves from hangings before the Supreme Court of Illinois decided that finger prints were admissible in December, 1911. In the busiest day in the history of the Chicago gallows, he was hanged along with four other men in February, 1912. He had to be carried by the armpits to the scaffold. The bodies of the other four men (who, unlike him, were white) were brought to an undertaking parlor on Noble and Division) where a large crowd had come to see what was happening. "Three thousand persons," the Tribune wrote, "viewed the remains and then lingered in the street so as to miss none of the misery of the dead men's relatives."

A whole lot more about hangings is in William Griffith's FATAL DROP: TRUE TALES OF THE CHICAGO GALLOWS.

Chicago vs. the Spiders

2011-10-24T20:12:00.000-07:00

Among the many weird legends about the John Hancock building is that every year there is a huge migration of deadly brown recluse spiders that work their way up the building and then back down. Like many of these legends, it's about half true. Go up to the observation deck this time of year and you'll see a whole LOT of large brown spiders outside of the window.

But, luckily, they aren't brown recluse spiders. They're known as "bridge spiders," a species that makes its home in nature around cliffs and rocks that hang over water and are harmless to humans. It's also not exclusive to the Hancock - most skyscrapers have them.

It's said that they get up there by "ballooning," a process in which they let out a bit of silk and fly up as though they were attached to a kite. So it's no real paranormal mystery, but I do have a few questions: How come you don't see them flying up from ground level? And did Spider-man ever try ballooning?

Here's a recent Sun times article. “They are crawling everywhere, they are coming down on their strings everywhere, there are a lot of dead carcasses around — it’s like a haunted house,” (says the Hancock Center broadcast facilities manager). “It’s really weird seeing so many. You scratch your head, literally and figuratively. When I first started, there was a lot of night work and all of sudden you have three or four of them crawling in your hair. As time goes on, you become more aware of them and can brush them away.”

The Shrieking Mummy of the Field Museum

2011-10-20T16:28:00.000-07:00

On night, during roughly the 1930s, a museum guard at the Field Museum heard a blood curdling scream coming from the Egyptian wing. He found no one there, but one of the mummies had fallen from its base and was lying face down inside of its case.

When the story is repeated today, it's usually said that the mummy was that of Harwa, The Doorkeeper of the Temple of Amun which has been in the museum's collection since 1904. However, the earliest known mention of the incident (a Bulletin from the Field Museum reprinting an older piece by Henry Field from 1953) says it was naked, and Harwa is still covered, like a DECENT mummy.

Field, an anthropologist and grand-nephew of Marshall Field, wrote that he studied it carefully, but could find no possible explanation for why the thing fell over, and no way a person could have knocked it down - the locked case was filled with poison fumes to keep bugs out.

Field wrote::

"The base extended at least four inches on each  side of the dried skin and bones. No living  person could have entered the poisoned  case. No vibration in the building could have knocked it off the base without rending the  walls, for the museum floats on an island of concrete, there being no hardpan on the  filled-in land along the lake front. 

"There is still no explanation of the scream or of the fallen mummy. It is just one more example of things we cannot explain."

John Wayne Gacy and the bus station

2011-10-20T09:31:00.000-07:00

In my first year or so of tours, I was mostly repeating the stories I heard from other guides and "ghosts of Chicago" books. A major task of mine since then has been to filter out all the misinformation. Some of the stories were completely made up. Others were just a little bit off - like the story I heard about John Wayne Gacy when I was first studying up....

With serial killer John Wayne Gacy back in the news as a handful of his previously unidentified victims being exhumed for possible ID, ghost tours in the city are naturally bringing him up.

A common story is that he met up with many of his victims (the number 27 out of 33 gets bandied about) in a Trailways Bus Station, then brought them into the alley known as "Death Alley" behind the former Iroquois Theatre - a common stop for just about every ghost tour in town.

The story is a little bit off. Gacy met one victim, his first known one, at the Greyhound station that used to stand at Randolph and Clark. It would be the next alley over on the other side of Dearborn from the "Alley of Death and Mutilation." That station has been gone since the early 1990s; the Chicago Title and Trust building was built in its place. So the alley in question would have been in site of the alley Gacy could have used, but it wasn't the same one.