History
Chicago grew faster than it could bury, house, or protect its people. It had 109,000 residents in 1860 and more than a million by 1890.
Beginnings
The name Chicago is older than the city. Several Native languages named the marshy river mouth for the wild onions and leeks that grew there. Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable was the first permanent non-Native settler. In August 1812, with the country at war with Britain and the fort at Mackinac already fallen to the British, the Army ordered Fort Dearborn evacuated. Potawatomi warriors attacked the troops as they left, and the battle left more than 50 soldiers and settlers dead, women and children among them.
Cholera and the Lakefront Graves
Cholera hit Chicago hard. It killed 678 people in 1849, about one Chicagoan in 35, and more than 1,400 in 1854. The dead went to the City Cemetery on the lakefront until doctors worried about graves so close to the lake. In 1864, the council ordered the bodies moved to cemeteries outside the city like Graceland and Rosehill, and the ground became Lincoln Park.
Fire and the Fair
In October 1871, Chicago burned. The fire killed an estimated 300 people and left 100,000 homeless.
Chicago rebuilt in time to host the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which drew more than 150,000 people a day. The fair had a dark twin in H. H. Holmes. WTTW, Chicago’s public broadcaster, calls him the city’s first documented serial killer, and Erik Larson’s 2003 book The Devil in the White City tells his story alongside the fair’s.
Disasters and Gangsters
In the new century, Chicago kept losing people by the hundred: 602 at the Iroquois Theatre in 1903, 844 when the Eastland sank in the river in 1915. Prohibition handed the streets to Al Capone and his rivals. In the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of February 14, 1929, seven men from Bugs Moran’s gang were machine-gunned against a garage wall on Clark Street. FBI agents killed John Dillinger outside the Biograph in 1934.
Why Is Chicago Haunted?
Chicago magazine says the city often ranks among the most haunted in the United States, and that “most of Chicago’s enduring ghost stories contain at least a kernel of historical truth.” In Chicago, that truth usually comes in crowds. Disasters killed people by the hundred, the city filled a cemetery and then tried to empty it, and its most famous crimes left their stories at addresses a visitor can still find.
Disasters
Chicago’s worst disasters killed people faster than the city could find room for the dead, and some of the buildings pressed into service kept the stories. After the Iroquois fire in 1903, the Marshall Field’s department store nearby took in victims, and many of them died there. The store is a Macy’s now. Chicago historian Adam Selzer says an employee told him that some of her co-workers didn’t like to go to one floor, where they sometimes saw “apparitions like ominous coffins.”
The Eastland was loaded with Western Electric workers and their families when it rolled over in the river in 1915. Bill Savage, a Northwestern University historian, has put it plainly: “Chicago is haunted not by ghosts, but by the city’s neglect of the working class.” About 600 of the Eastland’s dead were laid out in the Second Regiment Armory in the West Loop. The armory later became Harpo Studios, where Oprah Winfrey taped her talk show, before it was torn down for McDonald’s headquarters. In 2003, Chicago librarian Alice Maggio wrote that night guards at Harpo had reported crashing noises, “dozens of invisible footsteps marching across the lobby,” phantom laughter, and a woman sobbing. Others had met a ghost known as the Gray Lady, “seen floating down hallways in vintage dress.”
Cemeteries
Chicago’s cemeteries hold some of its best-known ghosts, and some of its dead are still under a park. When the city emptied the old City Cemetery for Lincoln Park, as many as 12,000 of the dead may have stayed behind, and Selzer says bodies are still dug up there “pretty regularly.” The one tomb left standing, the Couch Tomb, has a legend all its own. At Graceland, a legend says the statue over the grave of a little girl named Inez disappears during thunderstorms because she is so afraid. In the southern suburbs, Resurrection Mary is said to hitch rides along Archer Avenue to the gates of Resurrection Cemetery.
In 1991, a member of Dale Kaczmarek’s Ghost Research Society took what may be the most famous photo at Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery, in the woods near Midlothian. It shows the figure known as the Madonna of Bachelor’s Grove. The group has since photographed what appears to be a figure holding a baby, and some tie the two to a tombstone there that reads only “Infant Daughter.”
Crime
Chicago’s most famous crimes happened at real street addresses, and the ghost stories stayed even where the buildings came down. A post office now stands at 63rd and Wallace, partly on the ground where H. H. Holmes built what came to be called his murder castle. Guides say people have heard sounds and seen shadow figures in its basement.
The garage where the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre took place came down in 1967. Kaczmarek says that in the years since the massacre, people have heard sobbing and moaning at the site, and that a Chicago police dog has been seen “barking, snarling and growling at something unseen.” Julia Hansen and her husband owned the Liar’s Club, a Lincoln Park bar. In 1986, she was killed with an ax in the apartment upstairs. Herb Rosen, who owns the bar now, says a woman alone in its bathroom had her hair pulled, and a bar worker was grabbed by the elbow when no one else was downstairs.
