The "Old Red Ship" and a Woman in Black: Ghosts of Chicago's Maxwell Street Police Station

  

C

hicago’s well-storied Maxwell Street neighbor­hood has never been short on folklore. The jumble of life here has lived harder than most Chicagoans, seeing the place through from its tough days as the city’s sprawling ghetto, to its glory days as urban marketplace extraordinaire, to the hard times of a last stand of locals who remain despite the sacrificing of most of the area to the University of Illinois.  Myths, too, are more monstrous here than in the city’s other environs, from the legend of the devil baby who showed up in the early twentieth century on the doorstep of Jane Addams’s nearby Hull House to the rumored ravings of former prisoners from the shuttered dungeon of the notorious Maxwell Street Police Station.

            Indeed, some of the very first ghost stories I ever heard were as a child, sitting on the watch commander's desk at Maxwell, one of the places my dad and I would go on our frequent outings together, as he has worked out of the station during is time as a cop.  I still remember my wide eyed silence as he told tales of the phantoms of Maxwell Street.  I remember wanting to go home . . . but also wanting to go downstairs!

     By the time it was glorified nationwide in the early 1980s, in the opening frames of the popular TV crime drama Hill Street Blues, the Maxwell Street Station (943 W. Maxwell Street) had already endured nearly 100 years of notoriety in its own town. From its inception, it ruled over the precinct the Chicago Tribune christened “Bloody Maxwell,” a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century name that would fit well into the twenty-first. For this was “the crime center of the country,” filled with “[m]urderers, robbers and thieves of the worst kind.” And in those days of Eastern European immigration, and the later days of African-American and Hispanic infusion, the Bloody Maxwell station was known variously as “The Old Red Ship,” “The Old Fortress,” and “The Rock of Gibraltar.” Built to last in 1888, the red and gray stone building towered above the incessant swarm of life here, staking a claim for good at any cost in “the wickedest police district in the world.”

     Like the facts behind the beatings alleged to have occurred here with alarming frequency until its closing in 1951, the ghosts of the 12th District dungeon are hard to lay hands on. Despite their vagaries, how­ever, they are easy to believe in. The dungeon’s history is rife with shock tales: the dozens of prisoners who “fell” down the two flights of marble steps to the front desk; the reported beatings on the kidneys with phone books; the sudden and numerous deaths of perfectly healthy inmates. Whether any of these stories are true, the living hell described by one prisoner was fact: 31 cells, four of them women’s, were installed in the station’s cellar during a surge in crime at the beginning of the twentieth century, during which officers at Maxwell wrote up a murder a day. For half a century, prisoners in the station’s near-catacombs urinated, vomited, and bled into troughs dug from the floor, the refuse flowing under the cells of a dozen fellow convicts. Rats flourished. The walls grew black and blue with graffiti.

     Though the allegations of “lower Maxwell” beatings were halted by the mid-century shutdown of the basement cells, rumors of the cells’ continued use abounded, in and out of police circles. The city finally sawed the dungeon bars down to the floor sometime in the 1970s. They said it was to usher in a new era at Maxwell.  The cops say it was to try to stop the screaming.

     Though the Old Red Fortress has, like much of the Maxwell Street neighborhood, been consumed by the University of Illinois at Chicago, stories of its dungeon prevail, along with reports of bloodcurdling cries seeping from the basement windows. Also alive and well is another Maxwell Street mystery: a local legend known only as the Lady in Black.

     Hailing from the earliest days of “Bloody Maxwell,” as betrayed by her 19th century period clothing, a silent female phantom has been known to play both guardian angel and prophetess to unsuspecting citizens. The country was introduced to the kindly specter through television’s Unsolved Mysteries, which documented the rescue of a motorcyclist in the Maxwell Street area by a mysterious black-clad woman who saved the stranger and vanished into thin air. Paramedics testified to the incident, adding to the credibility of the tale.

     Similarly, in the late 1960s, a Chicago Police recruit encountered a mysterious woman outside a local eatery at Maxwell Street. The meeting would remain with him more than 30 years later:

          I was twenty years old. I was enrolled in the Chicago Police Academy, which was located near Maxwell Street and the Dan (Ryan) expressway. I had been attending the academy for several months and was taking lunch with two other academy students.   As we entered a small restaurant in this area, I remember a white lady dressed in all black clothes. Her dress reminded me of someone from the 1800s, and the reason I mentioned her color is because the area was basically a black neighborhood and seeing a white lady in this area made this individual encounter even stranger.

          Now, as I stood in the entryway to the restaurant with my friends on either side of me, this Lady in Black came up to me   and looked right into my eyes. Without a word or hand gesture   or even a facial expression, she somehow communicated to me to hand her the pen and small note pad I had in my upper left hand shirt pock­et. I did just that without knowing exactly why. She took the pen and note pad and wrote something into the note pad. Then she looked at me and shook her head in a gesture of no, no, no. She handed me the pen and note pad and left abruptly.

          I looked into the note pad and noticed what she wrote: my name and my birth date. But then I also realized that it was in my own handwriting. I quickly turned to my friends and asked them, Did you see what the lady just did? They responded to my question as though I was crazy: What lady? They acted as if nothing unusual happened, and we went into the restaurant and had lunch.

          Well, this strange little encounter stayed with me. ... I felt she was telling me to leave this career in order to save my life.  

The Vatican and the Voices:

What Does the Church Say About EVP?

One of the questions many people ask me, as a Catholic, is how I reconcile my career in paranormal investigation with my faith. 

According to the Catholic Church, they charge, ghosts don't exist.  When we die, we go to Heaven, Hell or Purgatory, and there is no allowance for the spirits of the dead to exist with us here.

The reality is not exactly on par with this statement.  Certainly, the Church believes in the survival theory. When our body dies, our soul lives on.  It is the foundation of everything we believe: that this physical life is not our "real" one; that our true home lies beyond the world of tactile sensation, pain and death.  The Church obviously exists because of the world of the spirit and for the care of souls.  But just what and where Heaven, Hell and Purgatory are have been far from clear cut matters in the Catholic catechism.  As far as disbelief in ghosts, Christ Himself mentions ghosts in the New Testament, as they are mentioned elsewhere in the Bible. 
Certainly too, the Church has always been clear on one thing: we are not to use the spirits to predict the future. The future is only the Lord's to know. But what about communication with the dead at all? What about reserch into Electronic Voice Phenomenon?  Some may be surprised to discover that, in supporting EVP research as a scientific avenue to understanding creation--and the life of the spirit--, the Church has been right there beside the best researchers all along. 

Far from classifying EVP research as dangerous or forbidden, the Church has been supportive to the point of encouraging of such research, and has worked closely with some of the phenomenon’s earliest researchers.

Two of the earliest investigators into the phenomena were Italian Catholic priests, Father Ernetti and Father Gemelli, who came upon the phenomena by chance while they were recording Gregorian chants in 1952.  While listening to some of these recordings, Gemelli heard what he identified as his father’s voice speaking on the audio recording, calling, “Zucchini, it is clear, don’t you know it is I?”  Zucchini was Gemelli’s boyhood nickname.

Gemelli and Ernetti were confounded and concerned by this apparent contact from the dead: enough, in fact, to approach then Pope Pius XII with the recording.  Pope Pius was nonplussed, soothing the priests with these words:

“Dear Father Gemelli, you really need not worry about this. The
existence of this voice is strictly a scientific fact and has nothing
to do with spiritism. The recorder is totally objective. It receives
and records only sound waves from wherever they come. This
experiment may perhaps become the cornerstone for a building for
scientific studies which will strengthen people's faith in a hereafter.”

It was perhaps not surprising that Pope Pius' cousin, the Rev. Dr. Gebhard Frei, co-founder of the Jung Institute, had made a name for himself as a parapsychologist.  Moreover, he had been close colleague to Constantin Raudive, who most “ghost hunters” recognize as one of the pioneers of EVP research.  As president of the the International Society for Catholic Parapsychologists. Frei stated:

“All that I have read and heard forces me to believe that the
voices come from transcendental, individual entities.
Whether it suits me or not, I have no right to doubt the
reality of the voices.”

Pope Paul VI, too, was well informed of the state of research into the EVP that was happening through a close friend of his own, Friedrich Jurgenson, whose work into EVP research impressed the Pope so deeply that he made Jurgenson a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Gregory to honor his contributions.  Jurgenson was very pleased with the friendship he had formed with the Church, and he wrote to a colleague:

“I have found a sympathetic ear for the Voice Phenomenon in the
Vatican. I have won many wonderful friends among the leading
figures in the Holy City. Today 'the bridge' stands firmly on its
foundations.”

Later, the Vatican extended permission for its own priests to conduct EVP research. Father Leo Schmid, a Swiss theologian, collected more than ten thousand Voices of Unknown Origin, which he documented in his 1976 book, When the Dead Speak.

Also well approved by the Vatican wathe work of s Father Andreas Resch, an EVP researcher who also taught courses in parapsychology at the Vatican.

In England in 1972 four senior members of the Catholic hierarchy
were involved in the famous Pye recording studio tests conducted
by Peter Bander. Of these tests, Fr. Pistone, Superior of the Society of St Paul in England
commented:

“I do not see anything against the teaching of the Catholic
Church in the Voices, they are something extra-ordinary
but there is no reason to fear them, nor can I see any danger.”

Similarly, His excellence, Archbishop H.E. Cardinale, Apostolic Nuncio to Belgium agreed:

“Naturally it is all very mysterious, but we know the voices are there for all to hear them.”

Most recently, Father Gino Concetti, one of the most well regarded of Vatican theologians, went on record with these words:

“According to the modern catechism, God allows our dear departed
persons who live in an ultra-terrestrial dimension, to send
messages to guide us in certain difficult moments of our lives. The
Church has decided not to forbid any more the dialogue with the
deceased with the condition that these contacts are carried out
with a serious religious and scientific purpose.”

Many thanks to Michael Esposito and Phantom Airwaves for sharing these statements with me.

-Ursula Bielski

The Chicago Undertakers who Turned Bodies to Stone

Former site of the Boydston Brothers Funeral Home on Cottage Grove Avenue

In late Victorian Chicago, Cottage Grove Avenue ran through one of the most fashionable districts in the city. Among the local businesses serving the posh residents of the area was the funeral parlor run by the Boydston Brothers, one of the most respected and busy funeral homes on the south side. 

Funeral homes had enjoyed a booming business since the American Civil War, when families looked for a way to preserve their dead sons long enough to be shipped home and "waked" before burial. For grieving military families whose hopes for reunion were so quickly and heartbreakingly lost, a final view of an intact loved one was a small but necessary comfort.  Later, in 1865, when Chicagoans and other mourners along the route of President Lincoln's famed funeral train paid their respects to the assassinated leader, the body had been "touched up" many times along the route, as the embalming lost its hold, but it was enough to convince millions that preservation after death was desirable.

An embalmer preserves a soldier's body on
the Virginia battlefield during the American Civil War.

The Boydston brothers enjoyed their popularity with the Victorians in large part because of their cutting edge practices. Along with providing the very latest in caskets and burial arrangements they also conducted their own experiments in embalming, right in the basement of their Cottage Avenue funeral chapel.  In December of 1898 a reporter paid them a visit and discovered that the brothers had been keeping two bodies in the building which had been deceased for some four to five months. The corpses were the subject of experiments to find a method of "petrifaction"--a way to actually turn human bodies to "stone."

According to the reporter, the woman in the basement had been brought in for preparation in July but then remained unclaimed by family or friends.  The brothers took the opportunity to experiment on the corpse, injecting a "peculiar fluid" at intervals as the weeks passed. Though the death had occurred in the hot summer months no decomposition or even darkening of the skin was observed. As the months passed, the brothers noted a "hardness of the body . . . and none of the usual falling of the features, which are as full and round as they were during life."

The second body in question was that of a 16-year-old girl. The girl had perished in August, some four months before, appearing as fresh and alive as the day of her death.  According to the brothers, relatives of the girl continued to visit the body and bring flowers and trinkets to place in the casket. 

As it turns out, the Boydstons had been experimenting for quite some time. Earlier that same year, they had made the headlines when it was discovered that a woman who had died in 1896 and was allegedly buried at the Dunning cemeteries had actually been lying in the Boydston's embalming chamber for two years.  The burial record of one Julia A. Clerc was declared a fraud and it was expected that the Coroner's office would give order to disinter the body in the Dunning grave.

The Boydstons explained that the woman had been sent to their parlor when she died after surgery for peritonitis. The Boydstons had prepared the body with a new embalming method they were working on and waiting for someone to claim her--but no one did. They decided to keep the body, rather than selling it to a medical school, in order to observe the effects, which were apparently astounding. 

Amazingly, it was the pastor of a south side Spiritualist church, Georgia Gladys Cooley, who identified the body as Clerc's, claiming she had received the woman's name via "spiritualistic communication" when she and several other south side pastors proposed to pay for a funeral for the unclaimed woman. Soon after, Cooley was arrested for shoplifting when she was charged with stealing a bolt of lace veiling, which she claimed she was going to use for the dead woman's funeral. 

The Boydstons' state of the art "ambulance," c. 1903

At the opening of Cooley's shoplifting trial, just as attorney William P. Black arose to make his opening argument in defense of Cooley, nearly 100 square feet of plaster fell from the ceiling upon the court, including Cooley, whose forehead was badly scratched. Several women fainted and had to be carried out. Cooley was eventually acquitted, after ten weeks of hearings.  Despite all the unrest, the body from Boydstons was eventually interred at Oakwoods Cemetery.  It is unknown whether the mysterious grave at Dunning was ever opened.

Nothing more is known about how the Boydstons' embalming experiments proceeded, though apparently they did not pan out. A few later appearances in the local papers don't speak about their methods. In 1903, they prepared the bodies of five victims of the devastating Iroquois Theater Fire. In 1904, a man walked in their chapel to make funeral arrangements for a "friend" who had committed suicide and, moments later, shot himself in the funeral parlor bathroom. And in 1908, the Health Department asked the county to suspend their license for cremating a body without a permit at Graceland Cemetery.

One wonders what plans they had for the method if it succeeded. Perhaps they imagined a futuristic cemetery, with preserved corpses in glass cases; perhaps an addition to the funeral home where bodies could be displayed in a sort of "museum of the dead."  Perhaps they hoped to offer families the option of installing their loved ones back in the family home, delaying burial indefinitely. 

In any case, the Boydstons' strange moment in Chicago history still lives on, a testament to the excitement and innovation of the 19th century funeral industry.  

How I Came to Believe in Faires

As adults, we assume that children live in a world where reality and imagination hold equal sway, but this may not be as true as we think.  Many paranormal researchers believe that much of what we pass off as “imaginary” in children may actually be part of a reality of which most adults are not aware.  Sometimes, children may truly see things adults don’t. 

The paranormal gift of seeing what others don’t is called clairvoyance.  It is a real gift, but though few adults can claim it, we all seem to own it, for a little while from birth, for an unspecified amount of time.  Over the centuries, no brand of clairvoyance has been more closely associated with children than the seeing of—and interaction with—fairies. 

When my young daughters and I first moved into our flat on Chicago’s north side, not far from Wrigley Field, they began what would become a ritual of going out into the front garden each evening to “feed the fairies.”  They built chairs and a table of twigs, which they placed in the dirt under the evergreen shrubs, lent their tiny tea set for the fairies’ use, and offered bits of cookies, raisins and diminutive bowls of milk and lemonade. 

In 1922 the great Scottish writer Arthur Conan Doyle completed a divisive volume entitled The Coming of the Fairies, based on his two years of involvement in the controversial world of the so-called Cottingley Fairies.  The alleged fairies were “captured” on a still-debated series of photographs taken by two young girls outside their home in Cottingley, England, which depicted what appeared to be fairies and even a gnome frolicking with the children.Generations later, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, cousins, publicly admitted to faking the photographs using cardboard cutouts.  Still, they forever held that they had created the hoax to prove the existence of the very real fairies in their garden to non-believing grown-ups, particularly Elsie’s mother and father, with whom the girls were living.  Frances maintained until her death that the fifth photograph in the series—which depicted a gathering of fairies but neither of the girls--was genuine. The photographs first came to Conan Doyle’s attention via Edward Gardner, a well-known Theosophist, who received the prints from Polly Wright, Elsie’s mother, who at the time was developing an interest in Theosophy and other spiritual ideas.  Though Gardner believed the photographs were authentic, Sir Oliver Lodge, one of the first practitioners of psychical research, pronounced at once that the prints—and the girls--were frauds.  Conan Doyle, however, was a practicing Spiritualist, having come to the religion after the closely-occurring deaths of his wife, his son, his brother, his two brothers-in-law and his two nephews.  Eager to discover the truth behind the prints Conan Doyle asked Gardner to go to Cottingley to meet with Elsie and Frances, and to try to persuade the girls to take more photographs.  Gardner found the girls believable and the family stable, and he left with the girls two new cameras and a stack of photographic plates, along with his rousing encouragement. 

When new photos resulted, Gardner sent them on to Conan Doyle, then on a pro-Spiritualist lecture tour in Australia, who saw the fresh prints as the imminent “visible sign” of the spiritual world that had been promised by spirits in recent séances he had attended. Previously, Conan Doyle had published a selection of the initial photographs in an article for the Christmas issue of the wildly popular English magazine, The Strand, which sold out within days.  Controversy over the article had rocked the nation, opinion split fiercely between wide-eyed wonder and sheer disgust.   But while Conan Doyle hoped the new photos would convince both the fence sitters and stalwart skeptics, he found himself, instead, the center of much of the lingering controversy: how could this brilliant man be taken in by the obviously deceitful antics of two country girls?Much of the criticism of Conan Doyle that remains to this day can likely be credited to the public editions of the photographs themselves, as theorized by writer Barbara Roden.  Roden suggests that the retouched images which were first printed—and continue to be—appear gravely fraudulent to modern critics, though the originals were much less sharp, the subjects much less defined and “flat” (one of the primary public criticisms over time).  The original photographs were sold at auction in 1998 as part of Frances’ collection for more than 21,000 pounds and appeared on a Belfast-based edition of Antiques Roadshow in 2009, along with the camera that had been given to Frances by Conan Doyle.  Frances’ daughter also appeared on the show and talked about her mother’s embarrassment over her deceit, as well as her mother’s insistence that the fifth photo was real.  As Roden writes, under the modern lens the case against Doyle emerges—like the photographs themselves--as “less clear-cut than critics would have us believe.”

What are They?

Fairies have held a central place in children’s “imaginations” for centuries, but they were once a central part of the adult world as well.  Over the ages, many theories have emerged claiming to identify what, exactly, they are.This theory would explain the disturbing dual personality of fairies.  On the one hand, they are pictured as benevolent nature-lovers, caring for farm animals and the environment, friends to children, even prone to help with house and farm work.  On the other hand, fairies are more traditionally believed to be quite malicious.  They were for centuries known for harming those who stood in the way of their activities or who did not give them gifts, typically indulgent foods.  They regularly abducted or killed babies, misled travelers, burned barns, poisoned livestock and drowned those who wronged them.  Staying out of their paths and living grounds was the preventive antidote to their ill will.  Stories even tell of houses being built with the front and back doors lined up over known fairy paths.  These doors were left open at night no matter the weather, so that the fairies would be able to use their usual path without interruption.

In the late 1600s a Scottish native named Robert Kirk attempted to document the culture of his local fairy population in Aberfoyle.  His illustrative book was published in 1691, and the Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies laid out his findings to the world.   Though Kirk’s tomb may be found in Aberfoyle yet today, locals swear all is not as it seems.  According to legend, his soul was abducted by fairies after he published his research, as he crossed a known “fairy hill” in the region.  Reports claim that his body was left behind, appearing to be dead.   After the burial, Kirk was said to have appeared in a dream of a close friend or relative, claiming that he was imprisoned in “Fairyland” and begging for help in his release.  The tale tells that the relation was too scared to follow Kirk’s instructions, and that Kirk remains in Fairyland to this day.

Even in modern-day England, these curious tales persist.  English native Janet Bord’s A Traveller’s Guide to Fairy Sites was published as recently as 2004; the volume has proved a very popular resource for those drawn to these mystical locales.  Along with all of the expected legends, Bord shares some unnerving tales from several counties, including Yorkshire, home to the village of Cottingley, of Cottingley Fairies fame.  In the late 1980s, during construction of a new highway—the Stocksbridge bypass, reports were rife of so-called ghosts at Pearoyd Bridge.   During these months, two security guards driving near the new road saw a group of very small children playing at the construction site just after midnight.  After driving past them and realizing the oddity of the situation, they stopped the car and walked back to find out why they were there at that hour.  No one was to be found, and nary a footprint could be located, despite the ample muddiness of the area where the children had been seen.   In the days that followed, the workers talked to construction workers at the road who admitted to hearing children singing each night in the same area, singing which would begin around 11pm and last into the wee hours.

Many locals came to believe that these visual and audio “apparitions” were not of ghosts at all, but of flesh and blood fairies. Much like ghosts, fairies are known to become more active during times when their turf is disturbed—during the rehabbing of a house, for example, or—in this case—the full-scale eradication of their natural lair.  The difference between the two situations is significant:  ghosts may try to foil the project in some way—pulling up the new floorboards or breaking the new lights—or may simply appear more often, as if they are keeping an eye on the work’s progress.  Fairies, however, are not so lenient.  As mentioned, they are most known for their vindictiveness in the face of mistreatment and disrespect.  Maiming, cursing, even killing are not unusual punishments in the eyes of fairies. 

One wonders what fates befell the construction workers of the Stocksbridge bypass.

Fairies in ... Northwest Indiana?

One of the most unsettling and thought-provoking nights of my long career of ghost hunting found me, on a winter’s night in the late 1990s, at a farm in Northwest Indiana.  I always call it “the first night I believed in fairies.”

The farm’s owner is a woman known simply as Luann among the hundreds of ghost hunters who have visited her property over many years, and over those years “Luann’s Farm” has become a point of pilgrimage for believers and skeptics alike, from every walk of life.  Luann first began to wonder about her property when she moved in and the animals in the barn seemed “spooked” by something that Luann herself couldn’t see.

A visit by a clairvoyant brought Luann two pieces of astonishing news. 

First, the clairvoyant said, the property where Luann’s barn stands is the site of a so-called “portal,” a doorway between the physical and spiritual worlds that had been opened by Native Americans during the time of Anglo settlement. According to Native American lore, many such portals were opened during the early and mid-19^th century, specifically to frustrate and terrify the white encroachers on Native American land, as tradition states that ghosts, demons and other disembodied entities must enter and exit the physical world via a portal that has been opened for this purpose. 

Those living or working in portal areas are, according to sensitives, relentlessly surrounded by otherworldly creatures, which are also known to congregate at portal entrances, much the way the humans loiter at bus, plane or train terminals.  Adding to the inconvenience and unease at such sites is the additional belief that beings coming in through portals tend to attach themselves to living, physical bodies, in order to stabilize themselves and travel more easily.  Children or weak-willed adults, it is said, are most prone to these attachments.

As astonishing as this news was for Luann, nothing could prepare her for the clairvoyant’s second pronunciation:  “You have fairies on your property.” 

Shocked and disbelieving, Luann listened as her visitor, equally amazed, told her some facts about fairies:  that they are extremely rare in North America, that they tend to congregate at portals in natural settings, and that those who have them living on their land are highly fortunate, as they bring good luck if you treat them well.  Luann naturally asked what she should do to please her fairies, and the clairvoyant said, “You have to feed them.”  Of course Luann asked, “What should I feed them?”  Her visitor told her that she had to experiment to see what they liked.

So Luann began the bizarre ritual of placing petri dishes of various foods and drinks in the barn and on the hill behind it too see what would go missing in the night.  Oddly, foods one might expect to be eaten by animals remained each morning: bits of leftover meat—cooked and raw--, vegetables, milk, apples.  What disappeared, finally, night after night, was what tradition could have dictated. 

Fairies, again, are indulgent creatures.  They live well and treat well, and when they are displeased, they punish well.  Each morning Luann found only three things consistently gone: her tiny servings of fudge brownies, Jameson’s whiskey, and Starbucks’ Frappuccino.

Regularly sated with such luxuries, it seems the fairies have remained.  They’ve given two varieties of evidence:  good health, good fortune and other benefits to Luann herself—and another sort of evidence that has confounded literally hundreds of visiting paranormal researchers.  I witnessed it myself.

When I visited Luann’s farm, I was taken into the barn along with about a score of other ghost hunters, as I was the guest that evening of a local ghost hunting club, whose meeting always took them to a haunted area site.  Most of the others present had brought digital cameras, and they snapped many photographs as we entered the barn and made our way upstairs, to the area where the portal has been pinpointed, in the hayloft.  

Now, “orbs” have been a subject of great controversy in ghost hunting circles over the years.  These semi-transparent balls of white light that show up in photographs are believed by some to be balls of spirit energy, by others to be dust, moisture or other explicable culprits.    With more than twenty people walking into a hay-filled barn, one might well expect “orbs” to show up on film as the dust is disturbed by all of those footsteps.  However, in Luann’s barn, nearly twenty cameras caught only a handful of them when we entered.

We settled down and stood or sat.  When we were all quiet and unmoving, Luann began to speak to the fairies. 

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “No one is here to hurt you, only to learn about you.”

She introduced me, as I had never been there before, and as she spoke the blackness was lit, again and again, by the flashes of the cameras going off, dozens of flashes a minute, as the others gathered snapped photo after photo.  Luann asked the fairies to come to me, to come and meet me and, again, to not be afraid. 

I felt, as the minutes went by, an increasing tingling sensation all around, of which I told Luann. 

“Put out your hands to your sides, with your palms up, “she said.  “And they will come to you.” 

I did as I was told. 

I stood, transfixed, in the most aware state I can remember, and it seemed I did feel something come to me and a tingling in my hands and fingers.

A few minutes later we went back to the house to look at the images that had been captured during our visit to the barn.  To my astonishment, the photographs showed a definite progression of events.  As mentioned, when we entered the barn at first, trampling hay everywhere, a couple of little dust orbs showed up in the digital camera frames of my fellow ghost hunters.  It was when we were perfectly still, however, as Luann began her soothing monologue, that they began to gather.  And the more she talked, the more she reassured her fairies, and the more still we stood, the more orbs gathered around me. 

And, sure enough, when she asked them to come to me, into my hands, there they were.  

The barn was lit with the flashes of a dozen cameras, and their frames all captured the scene.  When I looked at them, I was deeply quieted.  In each one, there I was: standing, shivering in an Indiana barn at midnight, arms outstretched, with a rapturous expression on my face—and my hands filled with little balls of light.

Banshees, Bridgeport, Bishops and Bugs . . . B'Gora! Chicago's Irish Ghosts

It’s March again Chicago, home of one of the largest concentrations of Irish heritage in the world, and time once more for the city’s Irish Chicago ghost stories, which include some of the darkest in the town's vast ghostlore, but some of the most sacred and truly spiritual as well.

Bugs Moran

Without a doubt, Chicago’s Irish ghosts are best known for their gangland manifestations, particularly the phantoms that were formed on the bitterly cold morning of St. Valentine’s Day, 1929, when Al Capone arranged for the single-minded slaughter of seven of Bugs Moran’s men at the back of a narrow garage at 2122 N. Clark Street.   The ghosts of the vanquished of Moran's gang are still seen as bobbing lights and shadowy figures, moving over the grassy lot at the site of the bloodbath. Meanwhile, at Holy Name Cathedral, visitors still flock to put their fingers in the bullet hole in the church's cornerstone, which was shot up with slugs during the gunfight which led to the death of Hymie Weiss, who had attempted to avenge the death of beloved  Irish mob boss, Dion O'Banion.  But it’s not only the Irish mob that haunts the streets of the Windy City on the

The Cornerstone of Holy Name Cathedral after the s
hooting of Hymie Weiss

night when the River runs green. In fact, some of Chicago’s Irish spirits are the utter opposite of these bad guy ghosts.

One of Chicago’s most mysterious Irish spirits remains that of little Mary Alice Quinn, long known as Chicago’s Miracle Child. A sainted girl, Mary was in life devoted to St. Therese of Lisieux, and followed the saint’s “little way” of daily acts of love and charity towards others. Since her death and burial in suburban Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, Mary’s apparition has been seen in many parts of the world. Moreover, visitors to her grave are treated to the scent of

Grave of Mary Alice Quinn
(Matt Hucke, www.graveyards.com)

roses—a common sensation at the burial sites of the holy—and claim miraculous cures from prayers for the girl’s intercession. On the west side of the city, two sites still draw lovers of Irish heritage and Chicago ghosts in droves, though their phantoms are believed to be long gone. One is the site of the old firehouse housing Engine 107 and Hook and Ladder 12, at 13th Oakley. As documented in David Cowan’s Great Chicago Fires (Lake Claremont Press), on Good Friday, 1924, firefighter Frank Leavy had a premonition of his own death, when (while washing the firehouse windows) he told a colleague it would be his last day on the fire department. Moments later, the company was called to a fire at Curran Hall on the south side, where Frank and others perished. The next day, fellow firefighters noticed Frank’s “Hand of Death”—his soapy handprint—imbedded in the firehouse window. Try as they might, no one and nothing could remove the spooky memento of Frank Leavy. Even the company which had

The Hand of Death

made the window was called in, and representatives brought special chemicals to dissolve it—which failed. Finally, the Chicago Fire Department sent in an official with Leavy’s file, and compared his fingerprints to the “Hand of Death.” They matched perfectly. The Hand of Death remained on the window for twenty years, until a newsboy threw a paper through the window, shattering it on the morning of the twentieth anniversary of the death of Frank Leavy.

Just across Roosevelt Road is the site of the Cook County Juvenile Courts, formerly the site of St. Charles Borromeo Parish, and home of one of the most little known Chicago ghosts, but also one of the most influential, Bishop Peter Muldoon. Muldoon served not only Chicago and Illinois but the nation during World War I, serving as chairman of the National Catholic War Council, but also proposed the creation of the National Catholic Welfare Council, one of the great pioneering social justice organizations in American history. Muldoon

Bishop Muldoon

founded St. Charles Borromeo and, after death, as the neighborhood turned African American and the parish lost its congregation, was believed to have haunted or even terrorized a later pastor, who shared little of Muldoon’s ideals of evangelization or charity. The bizarre haunting is documented by a former priest who had been assigned at the parish, Rocco Faccini, in his book, Muldoon: A True Chicago Ghost Story (Lake Claremont Press).

Certainly, the worst of Chicago’s Irish heritage lies in Bridgeport and points further south, where—in the mid 19th century-- Irish American canal workers built the Illinois & Michigan canal along a route wracked with hunger, thirst, disease, violence and death. The neighborhood and the route remain today the most haunted areas of Chicago, including legendary Archer Road, the ancient Indian trail along which the Canal was built, and along which many canalers perished. Resurrection Cemetery and four other burial grounds lie along Archer. All of them are reportedly haunted, but probably none more than the desolate St. James at Sag Bridge, the oldest

Works on the I & M Canal

cemetery in Cook County, where many of the Irish American canalers found their final rest—or unrest. The site of St. James is an ancient sacred site, originally a Native American burial ground, then a French signal fort and church during the days of French exploration. Today, reports of voices, chanting, and hooded figures persist, as well as visions of the ground rising and falling as if the dead are breathing in their graves.

Just through the woods from St. James Sag is Kean Avenue, site of none other than a banshee--a wailing woman seen in the road outside Buffalo Woods. If you see her, start to pray; the sight of her is believed by some to be a premonition of death.

Of course, no Chicago Irish ghost tour would be complete without a visit to DeKoven street, now the site of the Chicago Fire Academy, where the Great Fire began in October of 1871, in the O’Leary family’s barn in the neighborhood known as “The Patch.” Though no ghosts have been reported here, occasionally the spirit of the “hanged man” is seen in the windows of the Chicago Water Tower on Michigan Avenue, believed to be a misty memory of that fateful night long ago.

For an up close and personal look at these and other of Chicago’s distinctly Irish haunted sites, sign up for Chicago Hauntings’ St. Patrick’s Day Irish Chicago Ghost Tour at www.chicagohauntings.com. For more information on Holy Sepulchre and St. James at Sag Bridge, as well as the other cemeteries of Archer Road, visit www.graveyards.com.

Stone Cold Haunted: Chicago's Limestone Ghosts

In the 19th century, when Chicago was bourgoning, no stone was more appealing than our local limestone. Hailing from the region just southwest of the city, Lemont (or Joliet) limestone became one of the most desirable building materials in the nation; its buttery yellow hue and softness of appearance joined with a stability that made the stone irresistible to many builders in Chicago, including architects who designed some of Chicago’s most recognizable--and haunted--structures.

    On the north side of the city, the Ravenswood Avenue gate of Rosehill Cemetery, designed in limestone by architect W.W. Boyington, is said to be haunted by Boyington’s granddaughter, Philomena, who loved to play at the construction site during her short life, cut down by childhood illness.  Visitors claim to see a little girl in the windows of the structure. or running past the gate and disappearing into the cemetery beyond.

   On the south side, the sturdy, limestone Church of St. James-Sag Bridge marks the southernmost point of Chicago’s Archer Avenue, one of the most haunted roadways in the world . . . and burial site of many Irish immigrant workers who, during the mid-19th century, died along the building route of the Illinois and Michigan Canal.  The original church was established in the 1850s, built of limestone carried from the Lemont quarries over a period of more than six years. The original church has been greatly expanded over the generations. Ghost stories have been told about the church since the tenure of its earliest pastor, Fr. Bollman, who would report seeing the cemetery ground rising and falling as if it was breathing.  Some researchers wonder if limestone under the cemetery itself may have more than a little to do with the myriad phenomena reported here over the years.

 Downtown, Holy Name Cathedral, seat of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, is a limestone beauty--marred only by several bullet holes in the cornerstone that remain from the 1926 shooting of Northside Mob leader, Hymie Weiss.  Despite repeated efforts of Cathedral staff to plug the holes with fresh mortar, the plugs refuse to stick, and mysterious photographs of orbs at the cornerstone seem to support a paranormal dimension of the site‘s notoriety.

    Doubtless, the most iconic of Chicago’s Lemont limestone structures is the Chicago Water Tower, enduring emblem of the city and, indeed, one of the only structures to survive the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.  The Fire swept Chicago on the night of October 8th, hastened by high winds and fueled by kindling from the bone-dry prairie that hadn‘t seen rain for weeks.  More than 18,000 buildings were destroyed by the inferno, leveling the city and making way for Chicago’s progressive city planners to lay out the Great Plan of Chicago: the grid system that made Chicago one of the most sensible cities ever constructed, along with the miles of open public lakefront that made it one of the most beautiful.  

   And beautiful it is.  Today, the Water Tower holds its own along the Magnificent Mile, the glamorous stretch of Michigan Avenue which each year draws millions of shoppers and sightseers from all over the world.  In the midst of the glitz, the Tower is a reminder of all that was lost in the Fall of 1871 . . . and all that survives.  Since the rebuilding of the Near North side, passersby have frequently glimpsed the apparition of a man hanging in one of the windows of the Chicago Water Tower.  Paranormal researchers in Chicago are uncertain about the origin of the apparition, but it’s likely that the phenomenon stems from the days after the Fire itself, when Chicagoans lived under martial law.  In the wake of the Fire, looting and further burning became the order of the day, inspiring a curfew and a decree that anyone who did not answer to police should be shot--or hanged--immediately.

    Since 1871, historians, journalists and others invested in Chicago’s history have been confounded by the lack of historical documentation before the year of the Fire.  In fact, almost all of the city’s historical records--public and private--were destroyed that October.  Some of the first historical records we have are letters written to family and friends in other parts of the country--or overseas--by distraught Chicagoans sending word of survival--and death--to their loved ones.  Though the “official” history of the city denies it, we know from these letters, today nestled safely with the Chicago Historical Society, that many Chicagoans were shot and hanged  in accordance with the temporary orders in place immediately after the fire.  It seems likely that any ghosts at the event’s signature structure must certainly be tied to the chaos of those days, and it may be that the building’s handsome limestone itself helps to harbor the memories.

Many paranormal investigators have come to believe that limestone has a special ability to "hang on" to energy from the past and replay it like a video or audiotape. This theory was popularized in the 1970s-era British miniseries, "The Stone Tape," leading to the "Stone Tape Theory" of residual haunting.

    But in Chicago there may be a bit more to consider when we look at haunted limestone structures. According to some sources, early immigrants without families to care for their remains--including a number of the Irish Illinois and Michigan canal workers--were cremated, and their ashes scattered across the Sag Quarries just south of St. James Sag Bridge. The quarries, now filled with water, are today a beautiful part of the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. Yet visitors often tell of vanishing figures, disembodied singing and whistling, and other experiences suggesting that the old quarries, so to speak, still have a lot of life left in them.

Wild Nights: Ghost Hunting Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo (Part 2): The Primate House

My first exposure to primates as a child was at the old "Children's Zoo" at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo: a building next to the Sea Lion pool which focused on education for young children, where my dad would take me as part of our regular "rounds" about the city.

At the Children's Zoo we could watch baby chimps being bottle fed, learn about the varying plumage of birds, and even hold a snake or two.  My dad, always the troublemaker, would horrify me by taking off his stocking hat and holding it through the bars of one of the walk-in cages where an active little white headed capuchin was housed. Invariably, the little guy would grab Dad's hat, and a keeper would eventually have to go in and coax it back.

Little did I know while I watched that tiny creature pulling on my dad's cap that Lincoln Park Zoo was one of the most important centers for primate research in the world.  Named for a former Zoo director and world renowned ape researcher, today the Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes brings together researchers and organizations from around the world.

Dr. Lester Fisher is a familiar name to native Chicagoans born between 1960 and 1975, as the good doctor was a popular fixture on WGN's beloved Ray Rayner Show: a morning news show for kids which featured news, weather and sports, comedy and musical sketches, arts and crafts and more. Animals were an important part of the show.  Children looked forward to the weekly visits from Chelveston, a white duck who lived at the Animal Kingdom pet shop on Milwaukee Avenue, as Rayner fed the duck and chased him around the studio, trying to get him to jump into a basin of water, which usually ended up with Rayner being much wetter than Chelveston.

Dr, Lester Fisher (photo lpzoo)

Rayner also took occasional "field trips" to Lincoln Park Zoo, in a wonderful segment called The Ark in the Park. During the segments the host would visit with Dr. Fisher, who would introduce viewers to one of the thousdands of breeds housed at the Zoo and talk about their habitats.

The Regenstein Center houses the finest collection of endangered apes in the world.  Before it was built, the Zoo's apes were housed in the modern Great Ape House (completed in 1976), which today is office and meeting space, topped by an enchanting carousel featuring endangered species rather than horses. Previous to the erection of that facility, the great apes made the old primate house their home, which is today called the Helen Brach Primate House. This structure was one of the original Zoo buildings but was remodeled in the 1990s to remove the cells and bars and recreate, instead, a two-story faux "jungle" of trees and water, fronted by thick glass and enhanced by an outdoor habitat for the warmer months.  The Primate House today is home to monkeys, lemurs, gibbons and tamarins who mesmerize guests for hours with their antics.  Perhaps my dad's capuchin is still there, in old age, waiting for the tall guy with the hat to come back. Perhaps not.

Until the opening of the Great Ape House in 1976, Dr. Fisher's office was housed in the Primate House as well. You can still see the door to it, on the left as you enter the beautiful arched entryway to the historic structure.

A young Winifred Hope with baby
Bushman, 1930. (lpzoo photo).

Though he was a famous and much-loved fixture at the Zoo, Dr. Fisher's popularity was eclipsed by another familiar of the Primate House: the world-renowned great ape known as Bushman, one of the most famous animals ever held in captivity.  Often featured in newsreels, Bushman had been the pet of a Cameroon minister's daughter before being sold to the Zoo in 1930 for $3,500, or about $50,000 today.

The cuddly creature she'd called "my sweet little boy" as a child grew into a 550 pound hulk who drew millions of visitors during his tenure at Lincoln Park Zoo.  His massive girth was a shuddering thing to behold. As one reporter observed, Bushman appeared

"like a nightmare that escaped from darkness into daylight who has exchanged its insubstantial form for 550 pounds of solid flesh. His face is one that might be expected to gloat through the troubled dreams that follow overindulgence.  His hand is the kind of thing a sleeper sees reaching for him just before he wakes up screaming."

Bushman: The "Lord of Lincoln Park." (lpzoo photo)

But Bushman's real appeal lay not in his ability to terrify, but to charm.  Visitors stood for hours watching his antics, which included throwing food and dung at patrons with razor sharp precision. In the fall of 1950 Bushman escaped from his cage, meandering through the primate house for hours until a garter snake scared the giant back to his enclosure.

Earlier that year, an illness which threatened death had caused more than 100,000 visitors to pay their last respects. Bushman survived--briefly--and passed away the next winter, on New Year's Day 1951. His empty cage became a point of pilgrimage for weeks after his death. His enormous frame was preserved by taxidermy and put on permanent display at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. In 2013, Winifred Hope, the girl who had loved Bushman like a baby brother during his earliest days in West Africa, visited the specimen in the spring of 2013 at the age of 92.


The emotional and important history of the Primate House made it a definite "to do" on our list of locations to investigate at Lincoln Park Zoo. I especially wanted to see if we could pick up any residual voices in Dr. Fisher's erstwhile office.

Bushman's specimen at the Field Museum of Natural History today.

Dr. Fisher, of this writing, is very much alive; however, often we find that when someone is passionately tied to a location for many years, their voice, their smell, and even their physical form can leave a lasting impression which can sometimes be picked up by future generations. With his intense connection to the Zoo and to primate research here, would we find that Dr. Fisher, upon retirement, had left part of himself behind?

That first night we set up a laptop computer to record for EVP in Fisher's old office space. We left the laptop inside, closing the door and going on to investigate elsewhere. Since we were not trying to communicate with an intelligent entity but simply pick up residual sounds, there was no need for us to remain and ask questions, which is the usual method of collecting EVP from discarnate entities.

Disappointingly we did not pick up any voices from Fisher's office, but we did find that the laptop had mysteriously ended the recording and started two successive ones--a truly impossible feat with no one in the locked room to stop and start the recording button.

While the recording was going on, we went on to the larger Primate House to investigate. With us was Colleen Nadas, a medium who picked up numerous entities in the building, most of them the energies of children. Fascinatingly, several years later Dave Olson and his group, Chicago Paranormal Investigators, recorded what sounded like a little girl saying, "I want to go to the Lincoln Zoo."  During the same investigation, Olson's group was able to record, with a thermal camera, anomalous moving forms along the floor of the corridor.

That same night, I had been recording hear the interior part of the entrance and went out into the vestibule to listen to the recording, hoping I'd picked something up.  After a few minutes I shut off my laptop because I heard, coming from inside the building, a high pitched screaming which sounded like one of the lemurs shrieking at the top of its lungs.  I had several teams with me that night as my guests and thought one of the members was agitating the animals. After several minutes of this relentless screaming, I went to tell the culprit to stop annoying the creature so we wouldn't be asked to leave.  As soon as I opened the interior door, the shrieking stopped. To my amazement, I found upon inquiring of the various investigators that not one person had heard the hair curling sounds or picked them up on their recording devices.

Later that evening, I sat on the floor against the wall, recording with my laptop and softly asking questions of any entities which might be present.  Asking, "How many are here?" I received the answer, "Many. Like meeeeeee....." (Hear it here.)  And, "We're all here." (Hear it here.)   I then asked, "Are you an animal or a keeper?" In response, a male voice with an Australian accent responded, "Who cares?" (Hear it here.)  When I asked if there were any animals or humans from another country, a voice responded, "I've been so many places." (Hear it here.) This particular clip is an example of an entity using an investigator's voice to create words, as this voice sounds like mine, but of course with the unnatural rhythm so common to EVP.  Very interestingly, another voice mentioned Julie, the events manager who was with us that night.  We had all been very, very busy that spring but Julie was eager to set up another investigation so that we could add more material to the Zoo ghost tour that fall. Thanks to her efforts, we finally got everyone together on schedule to come out for an investigation.  The entities in the Primate House evidently knew it had been hard to coordinate, because when I asked, "Are you glad we are here?" A voice says, "I love it. Julie caught you." (Hear it here)

Of course, in all of the locations investigated, there was the possibility that entities were attached to the bodies who had been interred at the City Cemetery which formerly stood here.  During one investigation, Dave Olson and the Chicago Paranormal Investigators asked, "Are you part of the cemetery that was here?" A male voice answered, "Yes, I was." The team also picked up another, higher, possibly child's voice, which says, "He's talking over us." You can watch the clip from the investigation and hear the EVPs by clicking the video below.

Be sure to sign up for Lincoln Park Zoo's newsletter to get first notice of our next round of Zoo Ghost Tours at www.lpzoo.org. 

Next time: Ghost Hunting Lincoln Park Zoo (Part 3): The Suicide Bridge.

Wild Nights: Ghosthunting Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo: (Part 1)

Lincoln Park Zoo  Lion House c. 1920. Photo from zoo collection.

As one of the oldest neighborhoods in Chicago, Lincoln Park is also, surely, one of the most haunted in the city.  The home of George "Bugs" Moran, Lincoln Park saw some of the worst Gangland violence in American history, including the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre.  Occurring in a narrow brick garage at 2122 North Clark Street, the slaughter was part of a Chicago almost as blighted as today's city by turf wars, shootings and death.

Paula Prince, one of the victims of the
1982 Tylenol Murders, lived in Old Town.

Lincoln Park also hosted one of the terrifying deaths which became known as the "Tylenol Murders." On October 1, 1982, flight attendant Paula Prince was found dead two days after buying a bottle of the cyanide-laced capsules at the Walgreen's store at North Avenue and Wells Street, in Lincoln Park's Old Town section.

The famed Second City comedy theater and school makes its home across Wells Street from Walgreen's, in an ornate structure where a murder allegedly took place soon after its erection. According to my old friend, comedian and writer Kevin Dorff, the residue of that violence is believed to still remain, nearly a century later, manifesting to performers and staff over many generations.

Next door to the Second City was the infamously haunted restaurant called That Steak Joynt (now Adobo Grill), an old school eatery with one of the meanest ghosts in town, known to drag waitresses down the staircase and manifest as a pair of glowing eyes. Psychics and mediums claimed that a double murder had occurred in  Piper's Alley, the cobblestoned pathway which once ran along the building, and that the killer, in phantom form, was still at large on the premises. Adobo Grill denies any ghostly goings-on today.

That Steak Joynt (now Adobo Grill)
was one of Chicago's most haunted places.

Old Town is also home to St. Michael's Church, where the Devil himself is said to have appeared in the Communion line one Sunday night in the 1970s, cloaked in a black hood and robe, with hooves instead of feet.  And it's the stomping grounds of Candyman. The Cabrini Green housing project, now gone forever, was the reported lair of the hooked killer of urban legend--and Sandburg Village the home of the heroine who tangled with his menace.

Without a doubt, one of the most legendary of Lincoln Park's ghosts is that of the late John Dillinger, the swashbuckling bank robber who in 1934 wreaked havoc for months across three states before being gunned down in the alleyway just south of the Biograph Theater. They say you can sometimes still see his bluish form stumbling and falling on the pavement--or feel the icy chill of his spirit move through your own body there.

Chicagoans fleeing into the cemetery during the Great Fire

Despite these plentiful tales of the neighborhood, there is no part of Lincoln Park more haunted than the park itself, which was originally the home of Chicago's City Cemetery, a sprawling burying ground stretching from North Avenue to Armitage and from the old Green Bay Trail (Clark Street) to Lake Michigan.  The cemetery was short lived. Established in 1843, a cholera scare caused residents to fear that the burial of victims would spread the disease to the nearby water supply. Soon, the order was given for the disinterment and removal of the tens of thousands of corpses.  The long process came to a shocking halt when, on the night of October 8, 1871, high winds  blew flaming debris from a south side inferno across the river. The Great Chicago Fire, sweeping swiftly northward, pushed north side residents to flee into the cemetery grounds and, eventually, into the waters off North Avenue Beach.

The cemetery was almost completely destroyed in the Great Fire. "Headboards"--the wooden markers which designated most burials of the day--were reduced to ash by the conflagration, rendering plot after plot impossible to identify. With no way to discern where the myriad burials remained, the city simply continued its plans to create a lakefront park, and Chicago moved on. Apparently not all of the dead, however, did.

Artist and scholar Pamela Bannos (see her wonderful site here), after years of painstaking research, determined that as many as 15,000 bodies may remain in Lincoln Park today, under the Zoo, the ball fields, the grounds of the Chicago History Museum and even the posh homes of the Gold Coast; land south of North Avenue was home to an Archdiocesan cemetery concurrent with City Cemetery's time here. A cousin of mine, a retired sheet metal worker, years ago told me strange tales of the bones often found on the properties of the mansions of Astor Street, Dearborn Street and other blocks.  The workers kept close the business card of a local shaman, who they would call to collect the bones and re-inter them, in hopes that their owners would not wander the Earth after the disruption of their graves.

Ghost hunters have long known of the haunting of these old cemetery grounds by the dead left behind after the Great Fire, but while several investigations have been done on the public grounds of Lincoln Park and in some of the private homes and businesses of the surrounding area, no investigation had ever been done of the Zoo, which spread from it original enclosure over a large acreage, including much of the former cemetery grounds. When, then, the events manager called me in the spring of 2013 about creating a "ghost tour" of the Zoo for patrons as part of its public programming, I was beyond thrilled at the prospect, and we immediately set a date for an initial investigation night.

I knew exactly where I wanted to go on that first visit, because over many years I had been approached via letter, phone call and email about close encounters in, of all places, the women's restroom in the Lion House basement.  Time after time, women would report having used the facility and, while washing their hands or applying makeup, seeing in the mirrors men and women dressed in Victorian clothing.  On the night of the first investigation that summer, myself and another investigator entered the restroom and were immediately struck by the layout of the room.  Rows of sinks lined the two walls, parallel to each other. Above the sinks were rows of mirrors, creating an "infinity" effect from the two walls of mirrors facing each other.

Now, most paranormal investigators will concur that mirrors are one of those things--like salt or water--that have some definite power in the world of the preternatural.  Steeped in folklore, these items really do seem to have some importance in the realm of paranormal experience.  One theory is that entities can be easily "trapped" in mirrors. Presumably, the spirits enter them to explore the objects they see reflected, but suddenly find themselves engulfed in blackness, on the other side of the mirror's glass--essentially inside the mirror.

Investigators Colleen Nadas and Ron Jamiolowski assemble
a "Devil's Toybox" for use in EVP experiments.

This works the opposite way as well.  My friend Colleen Nadas, a medium, likes to build and use a
tool called "The Devil's Toybox," which is a kind of "ghost trap" comprised of a cube made of inward facing square mirrors, securely taped together at the seams. Investigators use contact microphones to record sounds from inside the box, believing that if a spirit attempts to investigate, it will find itself trapped because of the mirrors and start to make a fuss. Sometimes this "fussing" leads to great electronic voice phenomena, or EVP: recordings of the voices of the angry or frightened ghosts or knocking sounds from inside the box.  In the Zoo's Lion House, we instantly theorized that entities were routinely finding themselves stuck in these mirrors due to the effect created by the rows of mirrors facing each other.

Anecdotes collected from the Zoo staff confirmed that staff members had also experienced encounters here, especially hearing a man's voice commanding, "Get out!"  Amazingly, when I set up my laptop and began to record for EVP, within a minute I picked up a stern male voice warning, "Get out! There's a woman here!" (Hear it here.) A future visit by a medium confirmed that one of the male spirits had taken on the task of keeping men--dead and alive--out of the women's restroom.

As we continued our investigation, I took several series of photographs down the row of stalls leading to the end of the facility. During investigations, I like to take fifty to one hundred photos or more of each location to see if any of the frames contain an anomaly. When I played back the recording done during this time, I found that one of the male entities was a bit angry that I wasn't paying as much attention to him as the area I was photographing, because he clearly says, "Will you look at me!" (Hear it here.)

As is typical with most investigators, I asked if there was anything I could do for the entities who remained in this spot. The same voice, now with a tinge of sadness, answered, "Help me...with leaving."  (Hear it here.) When I asked if there was anything the spirits wanted to tell us about their time on Earth, one can make out the sound of a lion's roar and of the same voice saying, "I miss it." (Hear it here.)

Shadow figure captured on the stall wall, center.

On a subsequent visit to the Lion House bathroom, I was amazed to find that I had photographed a shadowy figure silhouetted against one of the bathroom stalls. This photograph was one of a sequence of sixty I had snapped, one after another in quick sequence. Only this photo showed the image.  The other investigators with me attempted to recreate the shadow by standing against the opposite wall, out of view, but could not.

On the first investigation night, after several hours of research and experiment, we decided to call it a night and began to disable and back up our equipment.  I would say that, generally, when an investigator ends an investigation and says "Goodbye!" before turning off a recording device, the entities tend to scramble to say more, especially to give more pleas for help. Not so in the case of this location. At least one of the entities was eager to see us go. In response to my invitation, "Is there anything else you'd like to say before we go?"  the sound of--perhaps anxious--footfalls can be heard, along with the words, "Turn out the light. Good night!" (Hear it here.)

Next time... The Haunting of Lincoln Park Zoo, Part 2: The Primate House

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