Have we been slimed?

Well, here's a new one for me. Yesterday I had some friends in town and took them on a mini-ghost tour in the notorious Florentine Room. All I can say is I never saw a picture like this one. The original is mostly dark, but turn up the exposure and see this:

Well, folks, you know me. I never, ever hold anything up as "evidence" that ghosts are real. There is no "good" ghost evidence, only "cool" ghost evidence.  But I never saw a picture that genuinely looked like Slimer before. We'd better pack up the group, get a grip, come equipped, grab the proton packs and our backs and then split!

Of course, proton packs aren't like those big things from the 80s anymore; they fit in your hand now, and you can cross the streams.  I think there's an app, in fact....

The original looks like this:

Weenie in the White City

Ray Johnson just hipped me to a very interesting article from the summer, 1896 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association. In it, Dr. Eugene S. Talbot talks gives the results of a very thorough medical examination he conducted of serial killer H.H. Holmes in January, 1896, a few months before his execution in May of that same year. He goes into great detail about all the bumps and ridges of Holmes skull, and states that he doesn't believe Holmes to have been insane, and that murder was just incidental to his careers in swindling and womanizing. I'm often of this opinion myself - Holmes himself claimed that he killed because of an inner drive to do so, but most of his murders seem to have had a motive beyond pleasure.

Conspiracy theorists will surely like to hear that the doctor said that Holmes didn't look anything like he did in his pictures, but the most striking thing in the study, to modern eyes, are two particular sentences: "Depression on left side of skull at bregma, said to be due to fall of brick at age of 30. Sexual organs unusually small."

It's likely that he took this brick to the head during construction of the castle, if it happened at all.

As for the second sentence.... well, I was a bit relieved to find that Dr. Eugene Talbot died of natural causes in 1924. I was afraid it would turn out that he'd died in a freak accident shortly after the article was published, and I'd have to go back and change up the book about the Holmes Curse!

Ghostly Piano on the Tour

The ballrooms of the Congress Hotel are not a regular stop for me these days - I can't guarantee that we'll be allowed in when we go there, for one thing. But last night one of our usual stops was definitely a no-go, so I took a chance and was able to bring a group into the notorious Florentine Room - the gorgeous old ballroom where, just about a century ago, Teddy Roosevelt announced he was leaving the GOP to be a third party candidate. He's sometimes said to haunt the place - he didn't DIE there, but from a certain point of view, his career did. He never held elected office again.

One night, a few years ago, someone asked me if I knew what kind of music they might have played at those rallies, so we could try some "era cues." That's a trick where you play music from a ghost's era to see if it will make them want to show up. I'm not sure that it WORKS, but it's fun to try, and it probably can't HURT anything. The Bull Moose Party's theme song in 1912 was the Battle Hymn of the Republic - people would spontaneously break out in full-throated renditions in the middle of TR's speeches.

So, when first asked, i strolled up to the piano and picked out a scratchy soprano version, stopping in the middle of a phrase. Nothing happened, but it sounded so cool and spooky in the darkened ballroom that I decided to try it every time I was in the room.

One two occasions over the next year or so, there was another soft piano note as I walked away.

On the tour last night, there were FOUR of them.

As usual, it wasn't the RIGHT notes to come next in the tune, but no one ever said that ghosts were good piano players!

For the record, I didn't hear it, but just about everyone else on the tour did. A few people asked me why I hadn't reacted, and then a show of hands on the bus indicated that practically everyone else had heard four more notes as I walked away.

Who's Buried in Big Jim Colosimo's Tomb?

Today I had to go to Oak Woods Cemetery to get a photograph of Big Jim Colosimo's grave - and to see for myself if the rumors that it had been broken into were true.

At the office, they told me I would recognize the crypt by its broken door. "It's awful, what they did," they told me. "You'll see the bent door and broken fiberglass. I can't imagine what they thought they would get in there."

Well, it's easy enough to imagine - everyone's heard about gangsters from the 1920s getting lavish funerals and million dollar coffins. Colosimo, a relatively early vice lord who ran a fancy cafe and was a noted patron of the opera, was shot and killed in his cafe in May of 1920 (by none other than Al Capone, according to legend), clearing the way for the gangs to move into the liquor rackets. It wasn't until a few years later that massive gangland funerals became the order of the day, but Colosimo WAS buried in style, and, well, can we expect that would-be grave robbers would have really looked up all the details? I can't imagine how they thought they'd get the coffin out of the tomb, let alone carry it back to their car or drive away with it, but, hey, it's none of my business.

Here's how the tomb looks today (not pictured are the mournfully-cawing crows who circulated about while I took the pictures).

Unlike, say, the Couch vault, we can see inside, which gives us this curios view. Notice anything odd about the dates in this photo by Natalia Wood?

The date there says 1919. Colosimo died in May, 1920. The death certificate confirms his age and place of interment, so this is kind of a mystery. Do we have the wrong man here? Did whoever carved it just screw up and figure no one would ever see it, so it didn't really matter?

New Book Announcement!

You might notice that links to our "Ghosts of Chicago" ebook have disappeared. That's because I'm pleased to announce that I've just made a deal with Llewellyn Press to do a new book on that subject to be released next fall!

In the mean time, we're stepping our investigations up a notch, trying to hit all of the under-investigated places in town. If you can get us into any places we haven't been to before, please let us know!

The "Glinda Orb"

I suppose that on any website that deals with ghostlore, we have to deal with "orbs" from time to time. Orbs are little white or grey balls of light that often appear in photos, and some say that they're ghosts. Most of the time, they turn out to be something else - dust, the result of a camera dealing with low light, light refraction, or such like. I seldom mention them on tours, though on many tours I've had people who've heard of them elsewhere getting excited to get photos of them. I don't want to spoil their fun or anything, though I also don't want people going around posting orb pictures and saying "Adam Selzer says these are ghosts."

Here's an example - one that backs up the pet theory I joke about sometimes: that orbs aren't ghosts, they're ghost farts:

All that said, though, now and then we'll go through periods where we get one particular one over and over. In that same basement above, we used to get a couple where the visual noise in the center kept looking like two specific faces (one looked like the former owner of the building, and the other looked like the guy on the Quaker Oats box). I remember that some years back we used to get one oversized one at the Eastland site that we called "Sherman." (I'm sure we had a good reason for this, but damned if I remember what it was!) Both of those things went through a brief period of showing up often, then stopped showing up altogether. 

In the last few months, we've had a lot of shots of a really, really big one in the courtyard next door to Hull House. We call it "Glinda," because it looks like something the Good Witch of the North might float in on. Here's one example, in a shot by Josh Finehan:

Now, I always assume that orbs can be explained away easier than most ghost photos (and there's no such thing as a "million dollar photo" that will truly convince anyone who didn't take it), but I'm amused by the Glinda orb. In seven years of taking tour groups there I can't think of any other time when we were getting this specific shot over and over. Did something in the environment change? Is it a quirk of the cameras that are popular this year? Or COULD it be something else? Between the closing of the Hull House foundation and some of the political stuff going on this primary season, there have been few months in history when Jane Addams' rest would have been more disturbed.

H.H. Holmes Confessions: A Cheat Sheet

In April, 1896, HH Holmes published a "confession" in which he claimed to have killed twenty-seven people. Actually, there were two, and possibly three, confessions written out from his prison cell.

The main confession was written for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Consisting of about 10,000 words, he claimed early on that he had killed twenty seven people, and proceeded to detail each murder. However, he may have left a couple out; he only actually mentions 24 or 25 of them (including a couple of unborn babies). A few of the people he confessed to killing, though, were actually still alive, and others appeared never to have existed in the first place. One (Gertrude Conner) was found to have died of neuralgia of the heart several weeks after leaving Holmes' employ, and was presumably not a victim (though a slow acting poison isn't out of the question).  A couple more were un-named. The police claimed at the time that they only suspected Holmes of killing nine or ten people, and that the confession didn't give them a single reliable name to add to the list. They may have been wrong; there was one girl, Anna Betts, whose death certificate may back Holmes' story up. A few others were unnamed and couldn't be confirmed or denied.

The other confession was written for the New York Morning Journal. Like the Inquirer, it ran a hand-written statement from Holmes saying that this would be his only confession. It was largely the same as the Inquirer, but with stories of six or seven victims omitted, one story expanded, and few minor word changes (most likely, Holmes wrote out the first and then copied it down, making minor changes as he went). This was the version that was published in most of the regional papers, including the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean.


The day before these two were published, another confession appeared in the Philadelphia North American. The paper claimed to have seen advance copies of the confession that was to be published the next day, and a few things it lend credibility to the idea that they had, in fact, seen a copy. However, most of the text of their version, including a story about mutilation his son and the famous "I was born with the devil in me" section, was not present in either of the confessions published the next day, and the Inquirer included a hand-written bit from Holmes saying that other confessions printed were "false." So, where this one came from is sort of a mystery. It's possible that they saw an earlier draft, and it's possible that Holmes sold them another version under the table (this is just the sort of thing he WOULD have done). The writing style of this version is a bit more dramatic, though, and my guess is that they saw or heard just a bit of the confession and wrote up a bunch of extra stuff themselves. But papers of the day seemed to believe them; many papers, including the Tribune, published excerpts.

A century later, we're really no further on the case than the police were. We still can't really NAME more than a dozen or so victims. We suspect the number is much higher, but we don't have much more information about who those other victims might be! I'll be running a Devil in the White City tour tonight with Ursula Bielski and Jeff Mudgett, Holmes' great great grandson.  If you want to know more about what was in the confession, there's a new ebook which includes the full texts (with notes on differences between versions) and contains highly detailed analysis of how the confession lines up with what we know of the truth

Johann Hoch and HH Holmes: Partners in Crime?

It's kind of a disturbing thing to have  "favorite serial killer" at all, but mine is probably Johann Hoch, the goofball who spoke like a German dialect comic, looked like the dude on the Pringles can, and had already a proposed to what may have been his 55th wife when they caught him.  Wife #53 was a Chicago woman who ran a candy shop near Halsted and Willow; he had slipped her some arsenic shortly after the wedding, thrown a big pity party for himself while she lay in agony, and then proposed to her sister while the coffin was still in the room. HE married the sister a day or two later, then took her money and ran.

"All the women for Johann go crazy, ja?" We went to Hoch's burial place on our latest podcast.

When he was caught and brought back to Chicago, the Chicago American started spreading all sorts of rumors about him, like one that he was a twin brother of Louis Thombs, a guy who had been hanged a couple of years before, and that he had enchanted women by playing a magic zither of some sort. 

But one charge seemed to stick: that Hoch had once been an apprentice or pupil of H.H. Holmes, and had worked at the famous "murder castle." 

The American was famous for making up stories to sell papers (it was owned by William Randolph Hearst), but one by one, people who had lived in the castle lined up to identify Hoch. There were some holdouts, like EC Davis, the jeweler, who was generally known to tell it like it is; he said that he'd never seen Hoch in his life. But other residents swore that Hoch had lived at the castle and collected their rent under the name Jake Hecht.

In Richard Lindberg's recent book on Hoch, he speculates that, while the police didn't believe Hoch had been in the country until 1895, by which time Holmes was in jail, he had deluded the police with a web of lies, and had, in fact, been a worker at the castle. I'm a bit of a doubter. Davis the Jeweler was generally one of the more reliable witnesses in the crowd (though that isn't saying much). They also brought in M.G. Chappell, the skeleton articulator, to identify Hoch. He identified him, but he was not exactly a reliable source. No one from the castle had ever seen Chappell when he came there to talk to police in the first place, and most of what he told them was quickly dismissed; Chappell's family said he was a drunk who was given to making up wild stories. I've always thought that the Holmes/Hoch thing was just an example of the papers playing "connect the dots" with criminals, which they loved to do in those days.

But in all of the controversy, no one seems to have taken any notice of one of the murders Holmes talked of in his 1896 "Confession."

The "confession" itself was sort of a joke; of the 27 murders he confessed to, at least three were of people who weren't dead yet. Several more were people who may never have existed, or had already been shown to have died of some other cause.  But there were a couple where he didn't give names, and were therefore hard to refute.

One of these he blamed on a castle "tenant." The man had grown tired of his wife and had his eye on a wealthy widow, whom Holmes suggested they kill. The man had balked, but took Holmes suggestion to come live at the castle with the widow, and that they'd kill her if life with her became intolerable. This happened in due time, and Holmes had killed the woman with chloroform (his preferred method, really) while the man held her down. This, according to Holmes, started the man off on a life of crime.

Leaving one's wife to marry and kill a wealthy widow sounds like Hoch to a T.

Of particular note here is that that particular part of the confession is different in the two versions of the confession Holmes wrote. He wrote one, the best known, for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and then seems to have immediately copied down another version for the New York Journal, both of which printed hand-written notes in which Holmes said that what they were printing was his real - and only - confession. The two are mostly the same, except that the Journal version (which was the version published in Chicago papers) leaves six of the stories out, and is missing a word or sentence here and there from other sections. There's only one section in which the Journal version is longer than the Inquirer, and that's the story of the man in the castle who killed the wealthy widow.

Get the whole confession, with detailed notes on how the two versions differ (as well as the mysterious version published in another paper the day before, which is the source of the famous "I was born with the devil in me" quote) and over 20k words of analysis on whether he was telling the truth in each section in our new "Confession of HH Holmes ebook!"

Ebook: The Confession of HH Holmes

In 1896, H.H. Holmes, "arch fiend of the century," was paid to write a "confession" by newspapers. Published a month before his execution, he confessed to twenty-seven murders.  Today he's suspected of far more, but many of those he confessed to were lies. Some of the "victims" were even still alive. So, how much of the confession was real? Did it contain dark hints that he was leaving a lot out?  But clues found in his famous "murder castle" backed many of his stories up. Holmes, the star of DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY, is now often said to be the most prolific serial killer in American history. In fact, two confessions were written at the same time - one for one paper, and one for another. THE CONFESSION OF HH HOLMES contains the complete 10,000 confession as published in the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, as well as detailed notes as to differences between that version and the slightly different one that appeared the same day in THE NEW YORK JOURNAL.  In addition, there are over 20,000 words of new explanation and analysis, based on new findings and evidence from 1895, telling what we know of the true stories of each crime he wrote about.  Also included is the bizarre, completely different "confession" published a day earlier in another paper, which included Holmes' most famous line: "I was born with the devil in me...." CHICAGO UNBELIEVABLE asserts that the truth about Holmes will never really be known - most of the evidence has long since vanished. But the information here is essential for anyone interested in trying to get to the bottom of the tantalizing mystery.  Includes an active table of contents and active internal links for easy navigation, and more than a dozen illustrations.

Full length ebook only $2.99! Available for Kindle or Nook Don't have one of those?  Read it on a free Kindle app  for your pc, mac, iPad or phone.  Or  a free NOOK app  for pc, mac, iPad, or phone

Ghouls of the Eastland Disaster

Robbery of the dead does not seem to have been as major an issue after the Eastland Disaster as it was following the Iroquois Theatre fire. This may be due to the fact that people didn't carry as many valuables or as much cash on a boat trip, or it may simply be that Western Electric company employees didn't have as much as to carry as theatre patrons did. But that's certainly not to say that there were no incidents.

Above: the "floating morgue" beneath the Wells Street bridge

One victim was Mrs. Mary Puts, 1210 Addison. More than $2000 worth of jewelry was found on her person after her body was recovered from the interior of the boat - a lavaliere containing three diamonds, several diamond rings, a pair of earrings containing two diamonds each, a cameo pin and ring, and a gold wedding band.  The jewelry was taken by two patrolmen and given over to the DeWitt Cregier, the city custodian, just as it should have been (the police seem as though they may have been more careful to handle valuables found on victims in this manner after what had happened with the Iroquois victims).  But when Joseph, her husband, went to the office to retrieve them, they couldn't be found. I don't know if they were were.

More common that this seems to be a particularly dastardly form of robbery - ghouls would go right into the homes of the bereaved families of the victims. This type of thieve, known as a "mourning raffle," would go into the homes of victims during their wakes, kneel beside the mourners, and approach the coffin, then deftly steal the jewelry from the coffin. if they had the room to themselves, the sometimes also stole furniture, pictures, and anything else they could get their grubby hands on. The Tribune reported at least a score of these "raffles" were operating in the Cicero area, and the police began to station guards at the homes of the grieving families.

One Tribune article did refer to there being ghouls caught stealing from victims as they were pulled from the hull of the ship or as they were laid out in the improvised morgues.

Heres a photo of the disaster site taken by Lynn Peterson on one of the tours just last week - some see the image of a person trying to climb out of the river in the photo.

PODCAST: The Old Asylum Graveyard part 1

We're back with a whole new podcast today! We went out on a trip to the memorial park set up on the sight of Dunning cemetery - a place used for years as a pauper's cemetery, as well as graves for unclaimed Chicago Fire victims, orphans, and inmates of the insane asylum that once stood on the grounds. Have you ever heard of an abandoned insane asylum that was NOT supposed to be haunted? At least two killers are buried here: Johann Hoch, the Bluebeard of Chicago, and Marion Hedgepeth, who ratted on HH Holmes (and may have been a victim of the Holmes Curse)

New Episode! Dunning Memorial  Free on or download it  from archive.org Want to hear more and  help us check for odd voices? Get an additional  20 minutes of audio from the investigation on archive.org

This was just an initial visit to get a feel for the lay of the land, not a formal ghost hunt, but it sure was creepy! It was colder inside the park than out. Our equipment was acting funny. Batteries were fine outside, but drained inside. Weird pictures abounded (though most were due to the snow). At one point after the podcast ended I started smelling a strong aroma of pine (hear that on the continuation of the audio). Listen in. Can you hear any voices that we're missing? We'll be coming back here soon!

Some photos:

The entrance

The main memorial

The surviving grave marker 

The plywood keeping the place of a second stone

Hector's weird blob of light. 

Adam's yellow streak - this is how the falling snowflakes appeared under the flash (we can back it up with videos - yellow streaks all over!). One creepy streak of light, though!

New Ebook: THE CURSE OF H.H. HOLMES

Did the murderous H.H. Holmes put a curse on all those present at his trial? And did so many of them die that some believed Holmes was taking revenge from beyond the grave? Stories of Holmes and his "Evil Eye" have been circulating since before his execution in 1896. In the twenty years after that, around 30 people were listed as victims of the "curse." Here, for the first time, is the surprising truth - a comprehensive list of supposed victims and their stories, all taken from contemporary sources. Though author Adam Selzer, (Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps, Llewellyn 2009 and the Chicago Unbelievable blog) believes some of the stories were hearsay, some of the evidence is truly shocking. This 17,000 word mini-ebook contains 24 illustrations, including the death certificates of Holmes and several of the curse victims, as well as an active table of contents. Also included is the mysterious 2000 word "missing confession" from the Philadelphia North American.

New ebook only 99 cents! Amazon (kindle) BN (Nook) Don't have one of those?  Read it on a free Kindle app  for your pc, mac, iPad or phone.  Or  a free NOOK app  for pc, mac, iPad, or phone