Adam Selzer - The Ghosts of Chicago: The Windy Citys Most Famous Haunts

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

The Ghosts of Chicago: The Windy Citys Most Famous Haunts 2013 by Adam Selzer.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

As the purchaser of this e-book, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the authors copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

First e-book edition 2013

E-book ISBN: 9780738738697

Book design by Donna Burch

Cover art: iStockphoto.com/441164/Ken Babione, 11433755/Agnieszka Gaul

Cover design by Lisa Novak

Map of Chicago provided by the author

For a complete list of photograph credits, see page .

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Llewellyn Publications does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publishers website for links to current author websites.

Llewellyn Publications

Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

2143 Wooddale Drive

Woodbury, MN 55125

www.llewellyn.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

: The Iroquois Theatre

: Gallows Ghosts

: The Eastland Disaster and the Haunted Morgues

: The Murder Castle of H. H. Holmes

: H. H. Holmes and the Ghosts of Sobieski Street

: The Ghost of Louisa at the Luetgert Sausage Factory

: The Congress Hotel

: Abraham Lincolns Funeral Train

: The St. Valentines Day Massacre

: Old Town Tatu

: Lincoln Park Ghosts

: The Haunted Hooters

: Fado

: Haunted Nightclubs and Bars

: The Hancock Building

: Resurrection Mary

: St. James at Sag Bridge Churchyard and Other Haunted Cemeteries of Archer Avenue

: Maple Lake

: Dunning Cemetery

: Bachelors Grove Cemetery

: Hull House: Myth and Mystery

: Graceland Cemetery

: Mount Carmel Cemetery

: Some Suggested Scares

: Bughouse Square

: Camp Douglas

: Other Notable Haunts

1. Luetgert Sausage Factory

2. Sobieski Street body dump

3. Liars Club/Vampire of 1888

4. H. H. Holmess North Side apartment site

5. Biograph Theater/Dillingers Alley

6. St. Valentines Day Massacre site

7. Tomb of Ira Couch

8. Site of tavern owned by widower of the Italian Bride

9. Death Corner in Little Hell

10. Bughouse Square

11. Early cemetery site

12. Adams neighborhood

13. Gallows site

14. Eastland disaster site

15. Haymarket rally

16. Republican Wigwam/Mary Bregovy death site

17. Iroquois Theatre

18. Harpo Studios

19. Congress Hotel

20. Hull House

21. Dybbuk of Bunker Street

22. Battle of Fort Dearborn

23. Sam Cardinellas pool hall

24. Early cemetery site

Introduction

Everywhere you go in Chicago, history peeks through the cracks in the pavement, through the spaces in the crumbling mortar between the old bricks, and from old painted signs now buried behind a maze of pipes and cables.

Lets say youre walking west on Chicago Avenue from the Old Water Tower, and you decide to turn south on Clark Street to get to the Loop, the downtown area. Youve just gone right through an area that was a graveyard in the 1830s, and in less than a block youll see a neon sign that says STOP AND DRINK, a relic of the days when Clark Street was one of the citys many skid row districts. Go another block and youll be passing an upscale restaurant that inhabits the site of the McGovern Brothers tavern, where mob boss Dean OBanion got his start as a singing waiter in the 1910s, and which was a notoriously rough jazz bar in the 1950s.

Continue a couple of blocks beyond that, past the Rock n Roll McDonalds (where you just might see a ghost-tours bus parked), and youll pass the site where Tillie Wolf was stabbed in the face with a sharpened umbrella stick in 1898. Cross Grand Avenue, and youll be passing the site of the C and O restaurant, where gangsters shot Hoops-a-Daisy Connors through the eye and the groin in 1929.

Look to your left as you cross Illinois Street and youll see the fire station that was built over the site of the old prison. Near the site where Garage #3 sits now, around ninety men were hanged by the neck until dead between 1872 and 1927.

These same sort of stories could continue all the way to the Loop, and well beyond. Sometimes these stories have been lost to history, buried in microfilm reels in a newspaper archive and waiting for someone like me to dig them up and blog about them or talk about them between stops on ghost tours. Sometimes an old building survives, and sometimes you can even see a faded old sign on the side of it that has survived dozens of Chicago winters. Sometimes you can see old streetcar tracks in the potholes, or old bricks peeking out through the blacktop.

And sometimes, even if the building is gone and the story is forgotten, perhaps the ghosts are still there.

Ive spent the last several years working as a ghost-tour guide in Chicago; in 2012 I ran just under three hundred of them. When people ask how I got interested in ghosts, they usually expect me to follow the formula common on ghost-hunting TV shows and say, I never believed in any of this stuff, until one day

However, for me, my interest in ghostlore probably just came from Scooby-Doo on Channel 9 when I was a kid, and getting the idea that driving around in a van solving mysteries was the way to live . Even now Im quite skeptical about the paranormal and supernatural; Ive only occasionally come across a ghost that turned out to be a guy in a mask, but Id say that I can explain away most of what Ive seen and heard on ghost investigations and tours.

Still, Im not so skeptical that I dont allow myself to have fun with ghost investigations, and most of is not all of. Now and then Ill see, hear, or even record something that forces me to take pause. And, anyway, tromping around in old buildings looking for ghosts is great fun, and now and then I even get to solve a mystery.