Congress Plaza Hotel

History

The Congress Plaza Hotel was built to house visitors to Chicago’s 1893 world’s fair, the World’s Columbian Exposition. It opened on Michigan Avenue that year as the Auditorium Annex, an addition to the Auditorium Building across the street. The Auditorium then held a hotel, a theater, and offices. The hotel developer R.H. Southgate built the Annex, and the architect Clinton Warren designed its first section, the North Tower. The South Tower followed in the early 1900s, designed by Holabird & Roche, the firm behind Chicago’s City Hall. Its banquet hall, the Gold Room, became the first ballroom in America to use air conditioning, the hotel says.

By 1911, the Annex had a new name, the Congress Hotel, taken from its spot on Congress Street beside the Congress Plaza section of Grant Park. Presidents from Grover Cleveland to Franklin Roosevelt stayed or visited, and the Congress became known as the “Home of Presidents.” When World War II broke out, the U.S. government bought the hotel and used it to house Army officers. It takes guests today as the Congress Plaza Hotel & Convention Center.

Hauntings & Lore

Tony Szabelski, a guide with the ghost tour company Chicago Hauntings, says he tells every tour group the same thing: if any place in Chicago is haunted, it’s the Congress. He told CBS Chicago, a Chicago TV news station, in 2021 that the hotel is “very creepy” inside.

Room 441

Room 441 is on the fourth floor of the South Tower, and Szabelski says many consider it the most haunted room in the hotel. Many people, he says, report calling security because they see a woman standing or hovering over the bed. They see her pushing or tugging on the bed or the covers. Some say they have seen her coming in and out of the bathroom. Nobody knows who she is, he says, but a lot of people have reported her.

Choose Chicago, the group that markets the city to visitors, tells it another way. Its guide to the city’s haunted hotels credits “ghost experts” with naming Room 441 the hotel’s most haunted spot. In that version, a female ghost “reportedly kicks guests awake from the foot of the bed.” The same guide calls the room “a frequently requested reservation.”

Book a stay and ask for Room 441.

The Boy on the 12th Floor

In August 1939, Adele Langer came to the Congress with her two sons. Karel Tommy was six, and Jan Misha was four and a half. The three had fled what was then Czechoslovakia as the Nazis took over, arriving in the United States about a month earlier. Her husband, also named Karel, had stayed behind to try to sell their home and his textile mill in Prague, the Chicago Tribune reported at the time. The paper quoted him as saying she had been depressed since leaving Czechoslovakia.

Szabelski says she took the boys to the Lincoln Park Zoo that afternoon, and they all had a wonderful day. Back at the hotel, she threw both boys out the window to their deaths, then jumped after them. The three landed on the Michigan Avenue sidewalk below. A coroner’s jury found that she had taken her life while temporarily insane, the New York Times reported. The jury blamed her despair at having to leave her home and family in Prague to escape the persecution of Jews.

The Tribune put the Langers’ room on the 13th floor, and so did the Times. Szabelski and other tellers put it on the 12th. He says the 12th floor of the North Tower is haunted by Karel. On that floor, he says, some of the doors don’t match, and neither does some of the paint. The carpets are old and worn, and the hallway widens and narrows.

Szabelski tells of John, a security guard with 30 years at the hotel, who didn’t believe in ghosts until he started working there. One day, John got a call about a little boy running around and making a lot of noise on the 12th floor. When he went up, he saw nothing at first. Then he saw a boy who looked like any other, except that his clothes were older and worn. John told him he wasn’t supposed to be up there. The boy just looked at him, grinned, and slowly faded away, John says. He says he has seen the boy a couple of times since at the hotel, and once, briefly, at home.