Robbin' Graves and Takin' Names

You can't rob graves like you used to. The days when you could just dig down to the head of the coffin, cut a hole in it, and drag the body out on a rope are over. You basically need a jackhammer to get into a casket nowadays.

But do you know that that is? It's quitter talk!

The Smart Aleck's Guide to Grave Robbing is now available (in a newly-formatted edition) on the ibook store via iTunes for use on your iPad. 

Iroqouis Theatre "Ghouls"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Dickens and Chicago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lost Storey Mansion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hangman's Death Certificates

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

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

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

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


Read more about it here:

Resurrection Mary: Other Marys at Resurrection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

Iroquois Theatre on Celebrity Ghost Stories

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

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

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

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

Ghosts at the H.H. Holmes body dump?

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

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

Another Ghost Pic From the Vaults

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

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

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

Notes from the photographer:

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

I was looking at the pictures I took afterword that I took with a flash, and there was a lady standing around but I can't see how that would be her. But I guess it could be proof enough for some people to say it's not real."

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

Ghost Pic from the Vaults

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

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

Ghost Picture from the Alley of Death and Mutilation

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

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

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

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

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

Archer Avenue's OTHER "Woman in White"

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

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

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

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

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

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