Foolkiller Clue?

When the Fool Killer submarine was discovered in the river in late 1915, there were conflicting reports as to how old it was. Most newspaper reports said it had first appeared in the lake/river around the early 1870s, though no reference to it from those days has been found yet. Many then said it had sunk around the time of the fire (1871) and reappeared in the 1890s, when it sank again. One regional paper, picking up on the story from the Tribune, even said it had claimed a number of victims around the time of the world's fair (1893).

Not much to back this up has been found - it was probably all a batch of mistakes. It seems odd that such a device wouldn't have made the news in the 1870s - but it didn't, as far as I can find.

It's possible that they were simply confusing it with ANOTHER submarine that was being tested in the lake in 1892. In fact, there were a couple being put to the test around the lake at that time - one of them, built by George C. Baker, was fairly easy to confuse for the foolkiller. In the "above the water" shot, it looks just about like the same ship, and, at 40 feet, was about the same size:



I'm not sure whatever happened to that sub - anyone know? However, when you look at the shot of the whole thing, it's clearly not the same sub as the foolkiller. Not nearly cylindrical enough:



That the fool killer submarine was built by Lodner Darvantis Phillips in the 1840s/1850s is still probably the best theory out there, though the only thing that really backs it up is Phillips family lore. And the fact that there were only so many submarines that COULD have been sunk in the river as of 1915.

Our upcoming book (available this summer - keep watching!) will have the biggest section ever published on the Fool Killer! The idea that any new information on it is going to come to light seems unlikely to me at this point, but who knows? I'm still holding out hope that it'll turn up in some warehouse, like the one from end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, one of these days.

To Kill a Bull Moose....

In 1912, while campaigning for a third term as the nominee of the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest by a nut who thought the ghost of President McKinley had commanded him to kill Roosevelt in a dream. The bullet was slowed by a fifty page speech Roosevelt had in his pocket, and, ever a badass, he went onstage and gave a 90 minute speech, roaring "it takes more than that to kill a bull moose!" The speech was supposed to be twice as long, but after 90 minutes, Roosevelt had lost too much blood to continue. They put him on a train to Chicago, arriving at the Wells Street station in the loop. There, Roosevelt walked to the ambulance and hopped onto it himself. It drove him through the loop, onto Michigan Avenue, and south to a hospital at 26th and Calumet.



He ended up being in Chicago for eight days of recovery. While there, he tried to campaign for the progressive party even while he was on the operating table. Newspapers covered every tiny detail of his stay, right down to having headlines stating that Roosevelt said the hospital breakfast was "bully!"

The drive down Michigan would have taken him right past the Congress Hotel, which had been his headquarters during both the Republican and Progressive Party conventions that year. He would go on to lose the general election to Woodrow Wilson, but the Progressive Party was a major milestone; prior to 1912, the Republican party had generally been the more liberal of the two. With the Bull Moose Party, Roosevelt lured most of the progressives out of the party, and they never really went back. The party was the first major party to promote equal rights for women (Jane Addams of Hull House seconded his nomination), and had a platform that reads, today, like a prototype for later Democratic party platforms.

Don't forget to check out the Chicago Anarchy Tour (alias the Chicago Political Tour) available at Weird Chicago.com!

Before EMF meters... there were pistols!

Electromagnetic field (EMF) readers have become so common in ghost-hunting circles that some of them are even being marketed as "ghost meters." This is a bit silly; a weird EMF reading doesn't automatically mean there's a ghost nearby; at best, they just you a clue as to where to look. Even if there are no appliances nearby, that jump could come from a radio tower quite a ways away. It's also worth noting that practically no one ever uses the things correctly in the first place.

But I suppose they're a step up from using guns. This 1888 article from the Tribune is worth reposting in full - it looks to me like the result of a bored reporter on a slow news day. The idea that a ghost would show up so regularly that large crowds come come to shoot at it simply seems fainly ridiculous, don't you think?



Every paragraph contains a mention of large numbers of shots being fired at the ghost. If the ghost was showing up THIS regularly, shouldn't it have warranted a MUCH larger article?

And the dragon comes in niiiigggghtt

Perhaps no mosaic in the city is cooler than this one - the outside of St. George's Cathedral on Wood Street in the Ukranian Village features a big, shiny mosaic of St. George slaying a dragon.



Does this dragon look like Trogdor to anyone else?

Roadside Weirdness!

We're just about done putting the finishing touches on the Weird Chicago book, but taking a break for the weekend, since Troy is off to Gettysburgh for a ghost hunt. So, here's some roadside Weirdness from Grand and Harding on the West Side. Does this look like a lumberjack version of the Statue of Justice or what?



Actually, this happy gent is one of the Muffler Men built in the 1960s to hold up muflers outside of service stations. They turn up nowadays as cowboys, spacemen, and other such things. Viewed from the right angle, this guy, he appears to be shaking his pipe and shouting "damn you kids! Stay away from my pipes!"

Hot Dogs!

Cross-posted from dragitthroughthegarden.com.

Finally, there's a GOOD place to get a proper Chicago-style hot dog in West Town!

Rockstar Dogs, on Chicago and Ashland, deserves to be in the Weird Chicago book (as it will be) for two reasons right off the bat: for one thing, it's thought to be the narrowest-eat-in restaurant in the city. Years ago, when Ashland street was widened, the already-narrow building was chopped in half. For another, it's probably the only hot dog place in town that boasts its own stripper pole. If not, it's certainly the only one you'd want to eat at.

Rockstar Dogs are new to the Chicago scene, but deserve to take their place among the new generation of Chicago dog icons. While the all-hot-dog menu isn't as wildly original as Hot Doug's, one doesn't get the sense that these guys are trying to be quite like Doug - this is a hot dog joint with attitude. A sign on the menu specifies that ketchup is not allowed unless you're under 13 (the fastest way to a Chicago dog connoisseur's heart), the decor is mainly rock photos by Philin Phlash, whose work also adorns much of The Liar's Club, and the place is open until the wee small hours of the night. The logo features a woman in a bikini holding a hot dog in one hand and a bottle marked "XXX" in the other.

Given the style of the place, the food almost seems like an afterthought, but it turns out to be fantastic. The Chicago-style dogs are perfectly executed, well constructed, and wonderfully tasty. The fries, which come with every dog, are well above average, as well. To top it all off, each one comes with a guitar pick. Another true Chicago original. http://www.rockstar-dogs.com

In the wee small hours of the morning

Back from our late-night investigation of the old courthouse and gallows site. Very cool old building - most of the original woodwork is intact, and the vaults are still there. So are many old jail cells, though they're used for kitchens, storage rooms, and that sort of stuff now.

We took a lot of pictures and recorded a podcast, and have enough information for another ebook, so stay tuned! I'll need a good nap before I can start compiling everything.

A Short Drop and a Sudden Stop: The Gallows, Part 1

Sure, this LOOKS like a regular old pile of wood....



In fact, this is the Chicago gallows as they appeared in 1950.

This particular set was first assembled in the 1880s to hang three guys who had murdered a lemon-cart operator (the kind who are always getting knocked over in urban car chase movies), stuffed his body in a trunk and mailed him to Pittsburgh. A couple of years later, it was expanded to handle to the Haymarket anarchists. It remained in service for decades; inhabitants of the old jail would say that they heard the sounds of it being erected in the middle of the night - even when no workmen were present.

The method of execution was switched to the electric chair in the 1920s, but the gallows had to be kept in the basement of the old courthouse on Hubbard street for half a century, because one man, "Terrible Tommy O'Connor," had escaped from the jail with a death sentence on his head. They had to hang on to the gallows because O'Connor's sentence specified that he be hanged, and if they ever caught him, then by God, they were gonna hang him!

Eventually, in the 1970s a judge ruled that O'Connor was probably dead anyway and ordered that the gallows be sold off. They were sold to a Wild West museum who sold them to Ripley's Believe it Or Not Museum last year. But rumors have persisted that some of the gallows are STILL in the courthouse - along with a handful of ghosts. Stay tuned for more!


For more on the courthouse/gallows in Chicago, see



Fatal Drop: True Tales from the Chicago Gallows by William Griffith(Click for ordering info!)and check out the courthouse/gallows episode of our podcast

The Iroquois Odor

The strange history of the Iroquois Theatre (on the site of the current Oriental Theatre) doesn't end on December 30th, 1903, when the theatre burned in what remains the deadliest single-building fire in U.S. history. The building didn't burn down; the exterior was still in good enough shape to stand for another 20+ years, first under the name The Hyde and Behman Music Hall, and then as the Colonial Theatre. Both of those, and the Oriental, have their fair share of strange stories.


In 1909, the Colonial and three other theatres had to be evacuated due to a mysterious odor, described by the papers as "a stench seemingly compounded of all known evil odors," that left both the audience and the actors in a "state of quasi-asphyxiation." In most theatres, the stench was just an annoyance, not something to get alarmed about, but n the Colonial, it "came early and stayed late." According to the Tribune, some said it smelled like fresh paint. Others said it smelled like paint mixed with a bunch of rotten eggs. But "all agreed that it was a compound to remember."


It's tempting go ahead and blame the stench on ghosts - "olfactory apparitions" are among the most common type of ghost sightings, in fact. And they're more reliable than most sightings, since smell is the sense you're least likely to hallucinate. In fact, though, the stench came from "balls" (stink bombs) thrown by audience members - probably theatre bill-hangers, who were on strike at the time and may have been looking to shake things up.


The Colonial, looking almost exactly as it did when it was called the Iroquois, in 1924, when it closed down.

Ghost Signs!

Of all the weird old remnants of the City As It Was, Ghost SIgns are probably the easiest to find. These faded old ads are everywhere! One of my favorites to point out to people is this one near 11th and Wabash for a carriage and delivery wagon company:



It's too faded for me to be sure what sort of business it was, exactly, or WHERE it was - anyone know?

But every now and then you still see ads for long forgotten products, products that aren't advertised anymore (corsets, for instance), or ads with old-fashioned phone numbers.

Hull House False Positives

Of all the places I've ever nvestigated, it's Hull House that generates the most false positives - photos that LOOK like a ghost, but actually aren't, even though some of them are really, really cool. Here are a couple that have been taken on tours that I've run over the years, representing what are probably the two most common of them:

1. The "Monk" - a ghostly figure that looks kinda like a guy in a hooded robe. Monks at Hull House are pretty well known:



2. The "feminine form" apparition. Pictures of a little girl were common a couple of years ago, but, like the rest of the hauntings there, they've tapered off. Here's a cool one, which could also probably pass for a monk:



I'm not saying Hull House isn't haunted - we used to get some GREAT shots there, though it hasn't been all that active in a while, leading us to avoid it on most tours. But it's also THE easiest place I know of to get a false positive, and these ones aren't ghosts.

In fact, they're probably both the same thing: ears. Reflections of people's ears in the window through which the picture is taken. The top one I'm less sure about, but that's definitely the case in the bottom one. I've gotten at least one or two good "little girl" pictures at Hull House that I've yet to explain away, but every monk on the stairs I've ever seen has turned out to be an ear in the end. In many (including one of these, in its un-cropped incarnation), if you look closely, you can also see the nose, which is a dead giveaway.

I'm not saying the place isn't haunted - on an "active" night, it can be the spookiest place in town - but there's a LOT of crap going around about the place that ghost hunters ought to ignore. There's no abortion graveyard on the grounds, no headless ghost that'll follow you home, and there was never actually a devil baby (though there was actually RUMORED to be one in 1912 or 1913 - I forget which. See the tag to find an earlier entry with a link to an article Jane Addams wrote on it). But there DOES seem to be something weird about the place, and we've dug up some information on it for the upcoming Weird Chicago book that hasn't been widely known before!

Snugglepupping at the Wind Blew Inn

There's an early 20s slang term I've been trying to revive: snugglepupping. It was coined, as far as anyone knows, right here in Chicago, down at the courthouse on Hubbard and Dearborn, by one Miss Lillian Collier.

Here's Lillian on the right:



Lillian was a teenage flapper when she moved to Chicago, determined to turn the residents of this "hick town" (as she called it) on to high art and convert them to the "gospel of real life." She ran a "tea shop" at the corner of Ohio and Michigan (where the Eddie Bauer is now, i believe) called The Wind Blew Inn. The strange poetry readings and Greek nude statues made the place a notorious bohemian dive.

But it was rumors of "petting parties" that got Lillian in trouble. One day, the cops raided the place and arrested everyone. Lillian was forced to cover up the statues' hoo-hoos.

On trial, Lillian testified that "there is no snugglepupping at the Wind Blew Inn." Snugglepupping is about like regular snuggling, but more illicit. The judge (get this) sentenced her to read a book of fairy tales to cure her of bohemianism. The Wind Blew Inn was torched a few months later. She re-opened another place, but it flopped.

A few years later, Lillian gave an interview claiming that flappers were the "modern woman" and represented a future in which women would enjoy much more freedom; the article reads like an early feminist manifesto. After that, though, she disappears from the record altogether. I've found a few people with her same name - a poet in Canada, a socialite who married an Olympic fencer - but not that I think I are her. The fact that her name was spelled a few different ways (Collier, Kelly, Collee, etc) makes it doubly hard.

Ghost busting!

I dig my job. Yesterday was the first mini-investigation at one of the newer locations (have to keep a lid on where it is for now). There are a handful of haunted pubs in the city that have fallen out of favor in recent years - The Red Lion, for one - partly because there's just not much of a story behind them. Or, in some cases, the story turns out to be inaccurate (ie The Excalibur, which was never used as a morgue. That story started when people saw photos of bodies from the Eastland in the 2nd Regiment Armory that were marked "chicago historical society," and thought that it meant the photo was taken there (The Exaclibur is in the former historical society site) when it was actually indicating the owner of the photo, not the place where the it was taken.

Incidentally, the armory is now Harpo Studios, and a few ghost stories have floated around. Some people say Oprah won't go into the building alone at night, but I can't imagine the circumstances under which she would have occasion to in the first place.

Anyway, this new place will be announced in our book and upcoming tours - we're still gathering information on it, but it may be among the most actively haunted pubs in the city!

Mary Bregovy: Resurrection Mary?

Moved to here with a lot more info.

100 W Grand (nee ______?)

Research into the building at 100W Grand (currently the location of Fado) is turning out to be pretty tricky.

We know that in the 1980s, it was the Conklin and Adler law firm.

However, it gets a bit hard to trace before that. I'm almost certain that Conklin and Adler were the first to use 100W Grand as the address; prior to that, the entrance was almost certainly on Clark. My guess is that C&A didn't want to be associated with Clark; they probably moved in at a time not so very long ago when that stretch of Clark was just one strip club after another.

Rumor has it that Clarence Darrow once had an office in the building; we know he had one in the Rookery and one at 94 LaSalle (which, since the 1909 renumbering, would have been half a block down from this building), but I haven't been able to verify that yet.

We do have some pretty good information on the place, but the number of address changes at this place make it hard to verify things.

Anyone know any more than I do? Send the info along!

Things You Find Around the City #2 - Street Car Lines

Here's a streetcar going down Racine at Grand in the 1940s.


The last of the streetcars in Chicago stopped running in the late 1950s. However, thanks to the magic of potholes, you can still see the tracks:



There's no mass transit on Racine at all anymore; finding North-South transportation between Halsted and Ashland is a real trick nowadays. About a week ago they finally filled in the potholes here, but some of the tracks are still visible.

Things You Find Around the City #1: Old Addresses

Traces of the city as it was a century ago are everywhere - looking for them while walking, biking or driving around is like a treasure hunt.

One of the trickier things to find is old addresses. All of the numbers of addresses were changed in 1909 - which can really make finding the exact location of certain old buildings that we investigate a challenge, even with the renumbering guide - and some houses, especially many built around the 1880s, had elaborately built their original address into the building, often in stained glass. Quite a few people put up the new address but left the old one up, as well:



According to the gang over at Forgotten Chicago, the best place to find these is in the Ukranian Village - that's where I found the one pictured above. There does seem to be quite a handful of them there!

Murder Castle Ebook Outtake!

While we endeavored to cram every contemporary eyewitness account, drawing, and diagram into our Ebook on the H.H. Holmes Murder Castle, we also had to keep it short enough to print out. Some things just didn't fit in - here's the first of our outtakes, on Davis, who ran a jewelry shop n the castle. He had always insisted that there would be bodies found in the basement, but seemed a bit amused by the whole affair.




During the excavations, The Chicago Daily News reported the following exchange:

"The morbid novel writer was also abroad in the shape of a pretty young woman of about twenty summers. She dropped into the drug store with her pencil and pad and began to question jeweller Davis.
"There's Holmes' brother," said the jeweller, pointing to his roommate, who was standing near. The young lady novelist opened her eyes wide with amazement. She tried to speak to the man, but almost went off into hysteria with excitement. As the man passed out, Jeweller Davis said "Good by, Holmes."
"So long, Davis," was the quick reply, and young lady novelist almost fainted.

This speaks volumes about the reliability (or lack therof) of many of the firsthand accounts. Some tenants who hadn't seen a thing probably wanted to get into the story as it caught national news, and other bits of made-up gossip by annoyed residents probably got passed around as fact.

Davis was back in the spotlight in 1905, when Johann Hoch, a bigamist/murderer not unlike Holmes, was on trial in the old Courthouse on Dearborn and Hubbard. Papers had been reporting that Hoch had been a regular at the castle in Holmes' day under the name Jacob Schmitt, and Chappel, the skelton articulator Holmes employed, swore that it was true. Davis swore that he'd never seen Hoch in his life, at the castle or otherwise.

If you haven't already, don't forget to pick up your copy of the Ebook!