Wednesday, January 6, 2010
The Foolkiller (and Weird Chicago) on WTTW
Chicago Tonight did a story on The Foolkiller Submarine, one of our favorite topics, last night. Hope to find an embed code soon. For now, you can click here to see the story - featuring Weird Chicago's own Adam Selzer!
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Weird Chicago: Rewriting the History Books!
My new book, The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History, is in stores now! It is, to my knowledge, the first American history book to include the story of Lillian Collier, the Chicago flapper who ran the Wind Blew Inn (a favorite topic around here, one of the fascinating stories our research has dredged out from the ol' dust of time - see all posts about her). It also covers the Bull Moose Party (born at the Congress hotel), Obama's election night rally in Grant Park, and other landmarks of Chicago history. Collier, who was sentenced by a judge to read a book of fairy tales to cure her of bohemianism, has been written out of the history books - until now!
Meanwhile, Troy and I are digging into the history of Alice Britt, the psychic Al Capone was said to have contacted to confirm that he was being haunted by James T. Clark, a victim of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. At the moment, all signs point to her being a fake (not a fake psychic, mind you, but a fake person altogether!) If you have any information on her, especially information from before the 1990s, please send it our way!
Meanwhile, Troy and I are digging into the history of Alice Britt, the psychic Al Capone was said to have contacted to confirm that he was being haunted by James T. Clark, a victim of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. At the moment, all signs point to her being a fake (not a fake psychic, mind you, but a fake person altogether!) If you have any information on her, especially information from before the 1990s, please send it our way!
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
6/20/06 - Old Town Tatu investigation notes
This morning I ran across a blog entry from 2006 about the first investigation of Old Town (then Odin) Tattoo - the shop that was featured on Ghost Lab and Most Terrifying Places this year. Written down write after the investigation, a few weeks before Richie "Tapeworm" Herrera's death. Several bits of information on the history of the place didn't hold up in the investigation (there was never a Walter who owned the place), but it's still an interesting read:
6/20/06
Last night's ghost investigation led us to a tattoo parlor that was a family-owned funeral home, owned by three generations of one family, from 1903-2003. Gorgeous building; there was a Tiffany fireplace in the entrance in which they had a small tombstone from the early 50's - which they'd found in the attic - on display.
The staff told us a lot of stories of weird things that had happened, including several accounts of seeing a guy in a powder blue suit sitting in the doorway.
"I didn't take my eye off him, cause I know if you look away from these cats for a second, they'll be gone!' said the owner. Others told us pretty much the same sort of story - I questioned how sober they'd been when they say these ghosts, but it was entertaining.
"Twice I felt like someone tried to push me down the stairs!" said the owner, who lives upstairs. "And you can't fight back with these assholes, you know. But I said out loud, man, if I f---ing die in here, it's f---ing ON, Motherf--er!"
With us on this trip were a couple of girls who were said to be psychic - I'm always VERY skeptical of this sort of business, but, hey, I'm of the opinion that there's no such thing as GOOD evidence of ghosts, only COOL evidence, and having a supposed psychic or two around couldn't really hurt anything.
My main job was running audio recordings, following one of the girls around. The basement was especially creepy - you can probably imagine that the basement of any given former funeral home is going to be pretty creepy. The ceiling was probably less than six feet above the ground. There were old drainage holes in the floor. Lots of weird holes in the walls.
I followed the girl to a back corner where things seemed especially odd - the temperature was changing, and I kept feeling like something was touching my shoulder. She said "there's something here!" and right then, in the headphones I had attatched to the audio gear, I thought I heard something say "Walter!"
It was a few minutes later that they told us that the funeral home went out of business after the last owner died - he'd held onto it as long as he could, but his kids didn't want to take over the family business, so it died with him. And his name was Walter.
As I've said, I'm a confirmed skeptic. There're ALWAYS other explanations for this sort of thing.
But I had to admit - that was pretty cool. I love this job.
6/20/06
Last night's ghost investigation led us to a tattoo parlor that was a family-owned funeral home, owned by three generations of one family, from 1903-2003. Gorgeous building; there was a Tiffany fireplace in the entrance in which they had a small tombstone from the early 50's - which they'd found in the attic - on display.
The staff told us a lot of stories of weird things that had happened, including several accounts of seeing a guy in a powder blue suit sitting in the doorway.
"I didn't take my eye off him, cause I know if you look away from these cats for a second, they'll be gone!' said the owner. Others told us pretty much the same sort of story - I questioned how sober they'd been when they say these ghosts, but it was entertaining.
"Twice I felt like someone tried to push me down the stairs!" said the owner, who lives upstairs. "And you can't fight back with these assholes, you know. But I said out loud, man, if I f---ing die in here, it's f---ing ON, Motherf--er!"
With us on this trip were a couple of girls who were said to be psychic - I'm always VERY skeptical of this sort of business, but, hey, I'm of the opinion that there's no such thing as GOOD evidence of ghosts, only COOL evidence, and having a supposed psychic or two around couldn't really hurt anything.
My main job was running audio recordings, following one of the girls around. The basement was especially creepy - you can probably imagine that the basement of any given former funeral home is going to be pretty creepy. The ceiling was probably less than six feet above the ground. There were old drainage holes in the floor. Lots of weird holes in the walls.
I followed the girl to a back corner where things seemed especially odd - the temperature was changing, and I kept feeling like something was touching my shoulder. She said "there's something here!" and right then, in the headphones I had attatched to the audio gear, I thought I heard something say "Walter!"
It was a few minutes later that they told us that the funeral home went out of business after the last owner died - he'd held onto it as long as he could, but his kids didn't want to take over the family business, so it died with him. And his name was Walter.
As I've said, I'm a confirmed skeptic. There're ALWAYS other explanations for this sort of thing.
But I had to admit - that was pretty cool. I love this job.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Bloody Mary and Mary Worth
THis is a cross post from my other blog - Playground Jungle , which is attempting to chart out the "folk process" in songs, rhymes, and stories that go around the playgrounds of the English speaking world, including the handful of ghost stories that every kid knows. Here's the entry on Bloody Mary, with the story's Chicago connection::
One of the most famous, widespread, and puzzling ghost stories is that of Bloody Mary. Kids on ghost tours I run ask me about this ALL the time. The basic idea is that if you look in a mirror in a dark room, you can summon a spirit known as Bloody Mary (or Mary Worth*, or something like that). Kids never ask if I've HEARD the story, or even if it's true - they ask how you're REALLY supposed to do the ritual.
The version of the story at my school was that Mary was the Devil's wife or girlfriend (there were arguments about this), and to summon her, you were supposed to be in a totally dark room, look in a mirror and say "Bloody Mary" 100 times, followed by "come out with your ax!" She would then, according to the story, come out with her axe and cut you. The kid who first told me the story swore that the only three kids who ever went all the way to 100 came running out of the bathroom as blood-red skeletons.
Stories as to who Mary was before she started hiding in mirrors vary wildly. Some say she was a woman who killed herself when her baby died (and the way to make her appear is to say "I killed your baby.") In others, she killed her own baby. More often, the story is that she was a "witch" who was burned at the stake. Often, there's a local gravestone associated with her.
There are tons of variations as to how the ritual works, too. Sometimes you have to touch the mirror, sometimes it has to be at midnight. Exactly what you say differs. Many kids think they've actually seen a face in the mirror (the fact that your mind probably plays tricks on you when you stare into a mirror in the dark for this long is a pretty easy conclusion to jump to). Others swear they've been scratched. The fact that there are so many variations works to the legend's advantage - a kid who tries it and doesn't get it to work can decide later that they failed because they forgot to touch the mirror or something.
But here's the thing: no one know where this story comes from. Forms of divination based on looking in the mirror certainly go back a long way, but Bloody Mary rituals seem to have come out of nowhere in the late 1960s and captured the imagination of a whole country full of kids simultaneously. Usually we can trace this sort of thing to a book or a movie, but no one knows quite where this came from (which only makes it spookier, of course, though these things can spread FAST in the kid world; kids in Australia knew many of the Davy Crocket song parodies before the original song was released there).
I'd certainly be remiss in my duties around here if I didn't point you to Myths Over Miami, a 1997 article which details the central role Bloody Mary played in the folklore passed among homeless children in the city at the time. How widespread these stories were is totally unknown, but social workers tell me they hear stuff like this (though not exactly like it) all the time.
Rumors that a book about Mary legends is in the works go around from time to time, but they never seem to materialize.
As for me, I STILL get nervous around mirrors late at night. I'd love to hear the versions you knew in the comments!
*- A local variation that's spread around here in Chicago is that she was Mary Worth, a 19th century woman who lived up in Lake County, north of the city, where she used to torture runaway salves in her barn (where she was finding all of these runaway slaves us another matter). She was killed as a witch, then buried in a Catholic cemetery (for some reason). One folklorist even claims to have met a woman in the 1960s who remembered being five or six and witnessing her execution. Making the story even better, old bits of chains were said to be found on her farm occasionally. I've always wondered if Tom Waits' song "Don't Go Into That Barn" was based on a story like this.
As for whether the story is true.... well, folks, I'm a Chicago historian who runs ghost tours. Getting to the root of these stories is sort of my job. As far as any records indicate, this Mary Worth was not a real person, and even a 90-something was not probably old enough in the 1960s to have remembered the execution of a slave-catcher, slavery having been illegal since 1865 (unless they caught her years later). It's fairly difficult to imagine that even suburbanites (at a time when the suburbs were still largely woods) could have burned a woman at the stake without it making the papers seems pretty unlikely. I'm not aware of any actual stake-burnings of suspected witches in America - in Salem the method of execution was hanging (or, in one case, pressing with stones).
The story may have no basis in fact, but ghost hunters who aren't as concerned with facts still tell the story and swear that research has confirmed at least the historical part, and kids around here still look in the mirror and say "I believe in Mary Worth." Simon Bronner referred to these legends as "Mary Worth Rituals" exclusively in his 1988 book on American Children's Folklore. From what I hear from kids on tours, though, "Bloody Mary" has far eclipsed "Mary Worth" in popularity by now.
One of the most famous, widespread, and puzzling ghost stories is that of Bloody Mary. Kids on ghost tours I run ask me about this ALL the time. The basic idea is that if you look in a mirror in a dark room, you can summon a spirit known as Bloody Mary (or Mary Worth*, or something like that). Kids never ask if I've HEARD the story, or even if it's true - they ask how you're REALLY supposed to do the ritual.
The version of the story at my school was that Mary was the Devil's wife or girlfriend (there were arguments about this), and to summon her, you were supposed to be in a totally dark room, look in a mirror and say "Bloody Mary" 100 times, followed by "come out with your ax!" She would then, according to the story, come out with her axe and cut you. The kid who first told me the story swore that the only three kids who ever went all the way to 100 came running out of the bathroom as blood-red skeletons.
Stories as to who Mary was before she started hiding in mirrors vary wildly. Some say she was a woman who killed herself when her baby died (and the way to make her appear is to say "I killed your baby.") In others, she killed her own baby. More often, the story is that she was a "witch" who was burned at the stake. Often, there's a local gravestone associated with her.
There are tons of variations as to how the ritual works, too. Sometimes you have to touch the mirror, sometimes it has to be at midnight. Exactly what you say differs. Many kids think they've actually seen a face in the mirror (the fact that your mind probably plays tricks on you when you stare into a mirror in the dark for this long is a pretty easy conclusion to jump to). Others swear they've been scratched. The fact that there are so many variations works to the legend's advantage - a kid who tries it and doesn't get it to work can decide later that they failed because they forgot to touch the mirror or something.
But here's the thing: no one know where this story comes from. Forms of divination based on looking in the mirror certainly go back a long way, but Bloody Mary rituals seem to have come out of nowhere in the late 1960s and captured the imagination of a whole country full of kids simultaneously. Usually we can trace this sort of thing to a book or a movie, but no one knows quite where this came from (which only makes it spookier, of course, though these things can spread FAST in the kid world; kids in Australia knew many of the Davy Crocket song parodies before the original song was released there).
I'd certainly be remiss in my duties around here if I didn't point you to Myths Over Miami, a 1997 article which details the central role Bloody Mary played in the folklore passed among homeless children in the city at the time. How widespread these stories were is totally unknown, but social workers tell me they hear stuff like this (though not exactly like it) all the time.
Rumors that a book about Mary legends is in the works go around from time to time, but they never seem to materialize.
As for me, I STILL get nervous around mirrors late at night. I'd love to hear the versions you knew in the comments!
*- A local variation that's spread around here in Chicago is that she was Mary Worth, a 19th century woman who lived up in Lake County, north of the city, where she used to torture runaway salves in her barn (where she was finding all of these runaway slaves us another matter). She was killed as a witch, then buried in a Catholic cemetery (for some reason). One folklorist even claims to have met a woman in the 1960s who remembered being five or six and witnessing her execution. Making the story even better, old bits of chains were said to be found on her farm occasionally. I've always wondered if Tom Waits' song "Don't Go Into That Barn" was based on a story like this.
As for whether the story is true.... well, folks, I'm a Chicago historian who runs ghost tours. Getting to the root of these stories is sort of my job. As far as any records indicate, this Mary Worth was not a real person, and even a 90-something was not probably old enough in the 1960s to have remembered the execution of a slave-catcher, slavery having been illegal since 1865 (unless they caught her years later). It's fairly difficult to imagine that even suburbanites (at a time when the suburbs were still largely woods) could have burned a woman at the stake without it making the papers seems pretty unlikely. I'm not aware of any actual stake-burnings of suspected witches in America - in Salem the method of execution was hanging (or, in one case, pressing with stones).
The story may have no basis in fact, but ghost hunters who aren't as concerned with facts still tell the story and swear that research has confirmed at least the historical part, and kids around here still look in the mirror and say "I believe in Mary Worth." Simon Bronner referred to these legends as "Mary Worth Rituals" exclusively in his 1988 book on American Children's Folklore. From what I hear from kids on tours, though, "Bloody Mary" has far eclipsed "Mary Worth" in popularity by now.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Ghost in the Gold Room?
Walter Flores snapped this shot on a tour last Friday in the Congress Hotel:
I wasn't near Walter at the time, so I can't say if there was a person standing there at the time. But Walter is fairly sure there wasn't, and I don't recall anyone walking over to the East side of the room - people were hanging around the West end, mostly. If no one was there, this would be the best picture I've seen from this particular ballroom.
I wasn't near Walter at the time, so I can't say if there was a person standing there at the time. But Walter is fairly sure there wasn't, and I don't recall anyone walking over to the East side of the room - people were hanging around the West end, mostly. If no one was there, this would be the best picture I've seen from this particular ballroom.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Old Town Tatu on Ghost Lab (long post)
The Weird Chicago Team started investigating Odin Tatu (formerly the Klemundt Funeral Home, currently Old Town Tatu ) before Weird Chicago even existed - we were all still working for another company at the time. And the first investigation (June, 2006) of the tattoo shop was different than the more recent ones have been; back then, we were just looking for ghosts from the funeral parlor. Richie "Tapeworm" Herrera was the owner of the place then - it was on that first investigation that he pointed to the staircase and said "you guys see that staircase?.....twice, when I was walking down those stairs, I felt like someone was trying to push me. And that freaked me out, because everyone knows you can't fight BACK with these cats, right? So the first time it happened, I said 'listen! if I die in this place, it is ON!'" (those aren't his exact words - I'm basing this on my notes from that night - the recorder wasn't running at the time - and cleaning up his language a LOT, as I try to keep things clean(ish) around here).
Anyway, by now you probably know the story - Tapeworm died a few weeks after that first, somewhat informal investigation, and since then people have focused on looking for HIS ghost there. And if there was ever a ghost I believed in, it's his. Many times, I've felt someone in that basement flicking my ears and pulling my hair - all the ways guys like Richie would pick on nerds like me.
Tapeworm had several stories for us that first night - what he told us, and the events of that night, are chronicled extensively in Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps and on our podcast (16mb mp3), which includes some of the audio. The short version: Tapeworm had seen a guy in a brown suit, another guy in a powder blue suit, a little girl, and a woman in white. I think he was making the woman in white up - my impression of him that night was that he genuinely thought the place was haunted, but had some misinformation about the place and wasn't above exaggerating. Exaggerating when you tell ghost stories is hardly unusual. Almost everyone does it - and Tapeworm probably would've copped to it sooner or later. He was a cool cat.
We've had just a handful of experiences there on the occasions that we've brought tour groups there (which we can't often do - just occasionally). There have been a handful of interesting pictures, but I haven't seen anything REALLY exciting. There've also been a few nights when the basement suddenly began to smell of formaldahyde.
Anyway, going into the ghost lab show, there have been some mysteries:
1. For how long has there been a funeral parlor on the spot? Oral tradition has it dating to the 1880s. The Klemundt Funeral Parlor on the site was built in the 1920s, but the basement is clearly the foundation of an earlier building (there are places where you can see where the windows were). What this building was has never been determined. Also undocumented is the notion that the garage was once a stable and that some 30 bodies were buried on the grounds at one point (members of the Klemundt family I've spoken to seem to disagree on the history of the place, though they HAVE thought it was haunted for years).
2. Who was "Walter?" On that first investigation, the EVP mic picked up a ghost that identified itself as Walter. Tapeworm got all excited and said that Walter Klemundt was the last owner of the funeral parlor to die. We later learned that there was no Walter Klemundt (or that there WAS a Walter, but he wasn't dead yet, depending on who you asked). I suspected that there may have been someone in the building messing with us on this one. It happens.
Trying to get to the truth of the matter on anything ghost-related is rough going. I often compare ghost hunting TV shows to professional wrestling - some of the moves might be "real," but, whatever the intentions of the investigators, most of the shows are 90% showmanship. Trying to get "answers" to any of these mysteries from a show is usually a fool's errand. They may learn information that contradicts the stories they've heard, or find a good explanation for the evidence they gather, but those scenes will probably end up on the cutting room floor.
Pointing out the problems of these shows and the evidence they gather tends to make me look like a spoilsport (at best), but, hey, if we want to find any real ghosts, we should learn to separate the misinformations and outright fictions that generate around any well-publicized "haunted" place from the real history and sightings, especially if we're ever going to go so far as to actually declare a place to be haunted. I've never said that for sure about any place myself, even though I'd probably make a lot more money if I were willing to go on TV and say "it's a shadow person! Dude, this place is freaking HAUNTED!" However, there are a handful of places I'd put in the ol "it practically MUST be" category - and Old Town Tatu is one of those.
When the Ghost Lab guys contacted me over the summer to get my permission to use the audio I recorded there, I certainly got the impression that these guys were doing their level best to get the facts straight and conduct scientific investigations. That hasn't always been the impression I got from the show itself, but, hey, that could always just be the editing.
Anyway, on to tonight's episode:
Glad they like my "Walter" EVP (I recorded the "walter" voice that they played on the show in the basement back in 2006 - Ken, who appears in the show, was also in the basement at the time). I'm not buying their "turn me on" one, though. Sounds like a mechanical noise to me. I can't pass judgement on their other one without hearing it unedited. Certainly seems like something Richie would say, though.
The released-endorphin theory is a fun idea. I won't be getting a tattoo during a tour, though.
Old Irving Park (it's not actually anywhere the neighborhood known as Old Town) is hardly what I'd call the rough side of Chicago. I mean, it's on the North side. Everyone knows (thanks to Jim Croce) that the SOUTH side is the baddest part of town. One could argue that the west side is worse now, but the Irving Park and Kimball area isn't bad at all.
I heard about their findings about there being a Walter in the Klemundt family - a guy named Walter Loeding - last summer, during their investigation. It's a great find - I had Walter Loeding's obit among the handful of Walters whose funerals or wakes were held there, but the obit didn't mention that he was a relative of the family. If there is a ghost named Walter, he's as likely a candidate as anyone.
However, I don't think that he is the person Tapeworm was talking about. He certainly never owned the place, and I doubt Tapeworm would have heard of him. Even most of the members of the Klemundt family I'd spoken to didn't know about him.
Anyway, one story about Walter Loeding - who died in the late 1960s - that has gone around in the last couple of months is that when he died, he didn't own a suit, so the family bought him a brown one, making him likely to be the guy in the brown suit Richie told us he'd seen. There's also a story I've heard that during his funeral, a guy wearing a powder blue suit crashed his car into the place and died - Tapeworm also talked about seeing a guy in just such a suit. The story about Walter being buried in a brown suit sounds reasonable enough, but I'm not sure I'm buying the idea that a guy fatally crashed into a funeral and that the story somehow didn't make the papers.
In summary, The Ghost Lab team still seems like they believe everything they hear to me - and they repeated some misinformation (which I thought they KNEW was misinformation from the family) about the history of the building, particularly the basement. BUT, they didn't make any totally outrageous claims, didn't waste time showing any orb pictures (I'd say the odds they got those in the basement are about 100%), and they did dig up some good stuff.
For a lot more information and stories about the place, read Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps and ""listen to our podcast from 2007. We've been investigating the place for over three years now, and I'd say we'll still be there for a long time to come. I always knew it'd be famous one day!
Klemundt Funeral Home, currently the home of Old Town Tattoo (alias Odin Tatu) on the North side of Chicago.
"Orbs" in the basement at Odin / Old Town Tattoo, emerging, it seems, from Ken's butt. The shape of this one gives it away as a dust particle (which is pretty generally what orbs turn out to be - very few reputable ghosthunters believe that orbs are ghosts). This one may prove my own pet theory - orbs aren't ghosts, they're ghost FARTS. :)
Tapeworm, who challenged the ghosts in his the Odin Tatu building to a fight in the event of his death - which, tragically, came three weeks later.
"Orbs" that appear to have faces in them are almost invariably just "matrixing," a trick of the mind the makes us look for faces and other such patterns in random visual noise (and no serious ghost investigator still claims that orbs are ghosts to begin with). But the "face" in this one at Odin Tatu sure does look like Tapeworm! It's one of two distinct "faces" that tend to show up in this location - the other looks like the guy on the Quaker Oats box. I never hold orbs up as ghost evidence, but this one is kinda neat. It was taken about a year and a half after Tapeworm's death.
The gravestone in the fireplace at Odin / Old Town Tatu. They found this in the attic when they moved in.
This, not the mask shown on Most Terrifying Places, was the mask Tapeworm said tended to fall off the wall. This was taken during the first investigation, just after he showed it to me.
Anyway, by now you probably know the story - Tapeworm died a few weeks after that first, somewhat informal investigation, and since then people have focused on looking for HIS ghost there. And if there was ever a ghost I believed in, it's his. Many times, I've felt someone in that basement flicking my ears and pulling my hair - all the ways guys like Richie would pick on nerds like me.
Tapeworm had several stories for us that first night - what he told us, and the events of that night, are chronicled extensively in Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps and on our podcast (16mb mp3), which includes some of the audio. The short version: Tapeworm had seen a guy in a brown suit, another guy in a powder blue suit, a little girl, and a woman in white. I think he was making the woman in white up - my impression of him that night was that he genuinely thought the place was haunted, but had some misinformation about the place and wasn't above exaggerating. Exaggerating when you tell ghost stories is hardly unusual. Almost everyone does it - and Tapeworm probably would've copped to it sooner or later. He was a cool cat.
We've had just a handful of experiences there on the occasions that we've brought tour groups there (which we can't often do - just occasionally). There have been a handful of interesting pictures, but I haven't seen anything REALLY exciting. There've also been a few nights when the basement suddenly began to smell of formaldahyde.
Anyway, going into the ghost lab show, there have been some mysteries:
1. For how long has there been a funeral parlor on the spot? Oral tradition has it dating to the 1880s. The Klemundt Funeral Parlor on the site was built in the 1920s, but the basement is clearly the foundation of an earlier building (there are places where you can see where the windows were). What this building was has never been determined. Also undocumented is the notion that the garage was once a stable and that some 30 bodies were buried on the grounds at one point (members of the Klemundt family I've spoken to seem to disagree on the history of the place, though they HAVE thought it was haunted for years).
2. Who was "Walter?" On that first investigation, the EVP mic picked up a ghost that identified itself as Walter. Tapeworm got all excited and said that Walter Klemundt was the last owner of the funeral parlor to die. We later learned that there was no Walter Klemundt (or that there WAS a Walter, but he wasn't dead yet, depending on who you asked). I suspected that there may have been someone in the building messing with us on this one. It happens.
Trying to get to the truth of the matter on anything ghost-related is rough going. I often compare ghost hunting TV shows to professional wrestling - some of the moves might be "real," but, whatever the intentions of the investigators, most of the shows are 90% showmanship. Trying to get "answers" to any of these mysteries from a show is usually a fool's errand. They may learn information that contradicts the stories they've heard, or find a good explanation for the evidence they gather, but those scenes will probably end up on the cutting room floor.
Pointing out the problems of these shows and the evidence they gather tends to make me look like a spoilsport (at best), but, hey, if we want to find any real ghosts, we should learn to separate the misinformations and outright fictions that generate around any well-publicized "haunted" place from the real history and sightings, especially if we're ever going to go so far as to actually declare a place to be haunted. I've never said that for sure about any place myself, even though I'd probably make a lot more money if I were willing to go on TV and say "it's a shadow person! Dude, this place is freaking HAUNTED!" However, there are a handful of places I'd put in the ol "it practically MUST be" category - and Old Town Tatu is one of those.
When the Ghost Lab guys contacted me over the summer to get my permission to use the audio I recorded there, I certainly got the impression that these guys were doing their level best to get the facts straight and conduct scientific investigations. That hasn't always been the impression I got from the show itself, but, hey, that could always just be the editing.
Anyway, on to tonight's episode:
Glad they like my "Walter" EVP (I recorded the "walter" voice that they played on the show in the basement back in 2006 - Ken, who appears in the show, was also in the basement at the time). I'm not buying their "turn me on" one, though. Sounds like a mechanical noise to me. I can't pass judgement on their other one without hearing it unedited. Certainly seems like something Richie would say, though.
The released-endorphin theory is a fun idea. I won't be getting a tattoo during a tour, though.
Old Irving Park (it's not actually anywhere the neighborhood known as Old Town) is hardly what I'd call the rough side of Chicago. I mean, it's on the North side. Everyone knows (thanks to Jim Croce) that the SOUTH side is the baddest part of town. One could argue that the west side is worse now, but the Irving Park and Kimball area isn't bad at all.
I heard about their findings about there being a Walter in the Klemundt family - a guy named Walter Loeding - last summer, during their investigation. It's a great find - I had Walter Loeding's obit among the handful of Walters whose funerals or wakes were held there, but the obit didn't mention that he was a relative of the family. If there is a ghost named Walter, he's as likely a candidate as anyone.
However, I don't think that he is the person Tapeworm was talking about. He certainly never owned the place, and I doubt Tapeworm would have heard of him. Even most of the members of the Klemundt family I'd spoken to didn't know about him.
Anyway, one story about Walter Loeding - who died in the late 1960s - that has gone around in the last couple of months is that when he died, he didn't own a suit, so the family bought him a brown one, making him likely to be the guy in the brown suit Richie told us he'd seen. There's also a story I've heard that during his funeral, a guy wearing a powder blue suit crashed his car into the place and died - Tapeworm also talked about seeing a guy in just such a suit. The story about Walter being buried in a brown suit sounds reasonable enough, but I'm not sure I'm buying the idea that a guy fatally crashed into a funeral and that the story somehow didn't make the papers.
In summary, The Ghost Lab team still seems like they believe everything they hear to me - and they repeated some misinformation (which I thought they KNEW was misinformation from the family) about the history of the building, particularly the basement. BUT, they didn't make any totally outrageous claims, didn't waste time showing any orb pictures (I'd say the odds they got those in the basement are about 100%), and they did dig up some good stuff.
For a lot more information and stories about the place, read Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps and ""listen to our podcast from 2007. We've been investigating the place for over three years now, and I'd say we'll still be there for a long time to come. I always knew it'd be famous one day!
Klemundt Funeral Home, currently the home of Old Town Tattoo (alias Odin Tatu) on the North side of Chicago.
"Orbs" in the basement at Odin / Old Town Tattoo, emerging, it seems, from Ken's butt. The shape of this one gives it away as a dust particle (which is pretty generally what orbs turn out to be - very few reputable ghosthunters believe that orbs are ghosts). This one may prove my own pet theory - orbs aren't ghosts, they're ghost FARTS. :)
Tapeworm, who challenged the ghosts in his the Odin Tatu building to a fight in the event of his death - which, tragically, came three weeks later.
"Orbs" that appear to have faces in them are almost invariably just "matrixing," a trick of the mind the makes us look for faces and other such patterns in random visual noise (and no serious ghost investigator still claims that orbs are ghosts to begin with). But the "face" in this one at Odin Tatu sure does look like Tapeworm! It's one of two distinct "faces" that tend to show up in this location - the other looks like the guy on the Quaker Oats box. I never hold orbs up as ghost evidence, but this one is kinda neat. It was taken about a year and a half after Tapeworm's death.
The gravestone in the fireplace at Odin / Old Town Tatu. They found this in the attic when they moved in.
This, not the mask shown on Most Terrifying Places, was the mask Tapeworm said tended to fall off the wall. This was taken during the first investigation, just after he showed it to me.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Ghosts at the Congress Theatre?
We've covered the Congress Hotel, its fascinating history, and its supposed ghosts, frequently here. But the Congress Theatre? The one that was on Ghost Hunters lately? We've never mentioned that.
That's because it's never really been thought of as a haunted location around the city before. None of the other ghost tour guides in the city had heard about it, either.
That said, though, had anyone asked me, I would have assumed the employees here had a ghost story or two to tell. As Jim, a lifelong theatre employee who works on our team, says: "If you ask a theatre person to tell you a ghost story, they WILL do it." There's hardly a theatre in the city that isn't said to be haunted. However, stories to back up the hauntings at the Congress Theatre seem awfully flimsy - the old "the mob used to meet in the basement" story goes around here in Chicago even more that the ol' "Indian Burial Ground" story. And, of course, all old theatres are full of strange noises and dark corridors and basements, and most have bars. Selzer's First Theorem (which I suppose I can call this now, since it's been published in a book available at most major bookstores) states that any vaguely spooky place where people get wasted will eventually show up on a book, tv show, or website about ghosts. It just took this one longer than most.
I'm not saying the place ISN'T haunted or anything - I've never been there, so I shouldn't really pass judgement. But it certainly seems like one of those places that people say is haunted just because it looks like it ought to be - or, in this case, because it would look good on TV.
I'm not the business of criticizing TAPS or anything (I don't really watch the show very often), but I certainly have gotten the impression that The SyFy channel is starting to pressure the TAPS crew to find stuff wherever they go. You have to take ANY ghost hunting tv show with a certain grain of salt - no matter how honorable the intentions of the actual investigators are, they still have to filter their shows through the suits at the network who usually have a final say in how the show is edited. I've always had a pretty good idea that if I were more willing to say places were really, truly haunted and risk looking like a jackass, I'd be making a lot more money in this business.
That's because it's never really been thought of as a haunted location around the city before. None of the other ghost tour guides in the city had heard about it, either.
That said, though, had anyone asked me, I would have assumed the employees here had a ghost story or two to tell. As Jim, a lifelong theatre employee who works on our team, says: "If you ask a theatre person to tell you a ghost story, they WILL do it." There's hardly a theatre in the city that isn't said to be haunted. However, stories to back up the hauntings at the Congress Theatre seem awfully flimsy - the old "the mob used to meet in the basement" story goes around here in Chicago even more that the ol' "Indian Burial Ground" story. And, of course, all old theatres are full of strange noises and dark corridors and basements, and most have bars. Selzer's First Theorem (which I suppose I can call this now, since it's been published in a book available at most major bookstores) states that any vaguely spooky place where people get wasted will eventually show up on a book, tv show, or website about ghosts. It just took this one longer than most.
I'm not saying the place ISN'T haunted or anything - I've never been there, so I shouldn't really pass judgement. But it certainly seems like one of those places that people say is haunted just because it looks like it ought to be - or, in this case, because it would look good on TV.
I'm not the business of criticizing TAPS or anything (I don't really watch the show very often), but I certainly have gotten the impression that The SyFy channel is starting to pressure the TAPS crew to find stuff wherever they go. You have to take ANY ghost hunting tv show with a certain grain of salt - no matter how honorable the intentions of the actual investigators are, they still have to filter their shows through the suits at the network who usually have a final say in how the show is edited. I've always had a pretty good idea that if I were more willing to say places were really, truly haunted and risk looking like a jackass, I'd be making a lot more money in this business.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Banned in Idaho?
Just a little bit off-topic:
Mother Wants Book Banned From Idaho Library. The book in question is How To Get Suspended from Influence People, which I wrote a few years back. She's gone all the way to the mayor with her complaint!
That's right, folks - come on a Weird Chicago tour, and you may get to meet an alleged smut pedlar!
Mother Wants Book Banned From Idaho Library. The book in question is How To Get Suspended from Influence People, which I wrote a few years back. She's gone all the way to the mayor with her complaint!
That's right, folks - come on a Weird Chicago tour, and you may get to meet an alleged smut pedlar!
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
The Liar's Club
If you watched Ghost Lab tonight, you caught Weird Chicago's own Ken Melvoin-Berg talking about the two axe murders and one pop bottle bludgeoning that took place in The Liar's Club, a frequent tour stop for us. An interesting thing in this episode was the woman talking about people picking up on residual emotions left over from violent deaths. I have actually seen this in action at the club - in the upstairs room, where the murders took place, I once had a tour patron become very disturbed - she felt almost as though she was being "possessed" by something very unpleasant, and had to leave the room. I can't say what was really going on in her head, but I HAVE gotten good at telling when someone is putting me on, and she wasn't doing that. However, that has only happened once, and is, in fact, the ONLY ghosty experience I've ever had at the location. But it did happen RIGHT in the spot the Ghost Lab team was testing.
As usual, the issue I have with these guys is that they seem to believe everything they hear, and seem awfully quick to claim that any weird picture or equipment reading they come up with is definitely a ghost. Perhaps it's just the way the show is edited. I'm glad they at least came clean on the banging noise that turned out to be a manhole being driven over tonight, and I'm glad to see them using gear that I DON'T have - I've never had the chance to use a biocam.
I'm also not entirely sure why they put up obviously photoshopped headlines instead of the real newspaper clippings - probably just a rights issue. In any case, for your perusal, here are a couple of actual articles about the murders in the Liar's Club: the pop bottle bludgeoning in 1962 and the axe murder from 1986.
I don't have any documents on the 1950s ax murder (bizarrely, it didn't make the Tribune) - HOWEVER, there are more stories about the history of the place. A guy who lived in the building was shot - and nearly killed - in a fight outside of a nearby bar in 1955, and there was actually very nearly ANOTHER murder in the upstairs room in the last year, when a guy narrowly survived after having his throat cut in a bar fight.
The article notes that the body from the 1986 murder was found on the third floor, not the second, which is said to be where all of the murders took place. Apparently the body was moved upstairs. It IS probably worth noting that the pop bottle guy appears to have died in the hospital, not outside of the club, though I believe other sources say he was dead on arrival.
It looks like next week's episode will be the investigation at a place I've investigated heavily - Old Town Tatu.
As usual, the issue I have with these guys is that they seem to believe everything they hear, and seem awfully quick to claim that any weird picture or equipment reading they come up with is definitely a ghost. Perhaps it's just the way the show is edited. I'm glad they at least came clean on the banging noise that turned out to be a manhole being driven over tonight, and I'm glad to see them using gear that I DON'T have - I've never had the chance to use a biocam.
I'm also not entirely sure why they put up obviously photoshopped headlines instead of the real newspaper clippings - probably just a rights issue. In any case, for your perusal, here are a couple of actual articles about the murders in the Liar's Club: the pop bottle bludgeoning in 1962 and the axe murder from 1986.
I don't have any documents on the 1950s ax murder (bizarrely, it didn't make the Tribune) - HOWEVER, there are more stories about the history of the place. A guy who lived in the building was shot - and nearly killed - in a fight outside of a nearby bar in 1955, and there was actually very nearly ANOTHER murder in the upstairs room in the last year, when a guy narrowly survived after having his throat cut in a bar fight.
The article notes that the body from the 1986 murder was found on the third floor, not the second, which is said to be where all of the murders took place. Apparently the body was moved upstairs. It IS probably worth noting that the pop bottle guy appears to have died in the hospital, not outside of the club, though I believe other sources say he was dead on arrival.
It looks like next week's episode will be the investigation at a place I've investigated heavily - Old Town Tatu.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Old Town Tatu
Old Town Tatu was recently featured on Most Terrifying Places in America on the travel channel (click the link to see part 1 - the segment kicks in about 7 minutes in. Part 2 is right here. The segment features Weird Chicago's own Ken Melvoin-Berg (as well as driver Brant McRae, who plays the "visual apparition").
The haunted tattoo parlor is also featured prominently in Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps (teh excerpt online is all about the place). I was the EVP guy on the first investigation of the place a few years ago - the night when Tapeworm claimed that he'd challenged the ghosts in the place to a fight in the event of his death. "They freak me out, because everyone knows you can't fight back with these cats!" he said (in not those exact words - I'm cleaning up his language a LOT). "So I just said, 'listen! if I die in this place, it is ON!'" And, as the program notes, he died in the place three weeks later.
I'm not sure how good the history used by Most Terrifying Places was - the history of the building is sort of in dispute. The Klemundt Funeral Parlor building dates back to the 1920s, not the 1800s, but the basement level is clearly the foundation of an earlier building, about which little is known, though it IS said to have been an 1880s funeral parlor (records on the place tend to contradict each other; a common problem around here). Even if it WAS a funeral home in those days, I'm not sure that it was the first established funeral home in Chicago, as the show says - by the 1880s, Chicago's population was around a million, so I sort of doubt that no private funeral home had been established. However, the term "Funeral home" doesn't appear in the Tribune until the 1890s, and "Funeral Parlor" doesn't appear until 1902 - the custom at the time was for wakes to be held in private residences.
But whether the history there is correct or not, I can vouche for the stories about Tapeworm. I have my doubts about many of the stories I've been told about hauntings in the place from decades past, but if there's ever been a ghost I believed in, it's the ghost of Tapeworm.
For a LOT more information about the place, check out Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps or download The Weird Chicago Podcast (16mb mp3) episode about the place, featuring recordings from the first investigation of the place, shortly before Tapeworm's death. I understand that some of the EVP I recorded there has been analyzed for an upcoming episode of "Ghost Lab," too. They seem to have done MUCH more historical research. Most of what they found is stuff I could have told them myself if they'd asked, but they did come up with some stuff that was news to me, including a possible identity for "Walter," the ghost who seems to identify himself in the EVP. I'll be back with a full report when the episode airs!
Note: In Tapeworm's day, the place was called Odin Tatu - it was renamed Old Town Tatu after his death. For the record, it's located on Irving Park on the Northwest side, not in the neighborhood known as Old Town. It's too far away to be a regular stop on tours, though we have been known to go there occasionally.
Some pictures from the "pics of stuff from the book" page put up for Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps:
Klemundt Funeral Home, currently the home of Old Town Tattoo (alias Odin Tatu) on the North side of Chicago.
"Orbs" in the basement at Odin / Old Town Tattoo, emerging, it seems, from Ken's butt. The shape of this one gives it away as a dust particle (which is pretty generally what orbs turn out to be - very few reputable ghosthunters believe that orbs are ghosts). This one may prove my own pet theory - orbs aren't ghosts, they're ghost FARTS. :)
Tapeworm, who challenged the ghosts in his the Odin Tatu building to a fight in the event of his death - which, tragically, came three weeks later.
"Orbs" that appear to have faces in them are almost invariably just "matrixing," a trick of the mind the makes us look for faces and other such patterns in random visual noise. But the "face" in this one at Odin Tatu sure does look like Tapeworm! It's one of two distinct "faces" that tend to show up in this location - the other looks like the guy on the Quaker Oats box. I never hold orbs up as ghost evidence, but this one is kinda neat. It was taken about a year and a half after Tapeworm's death.
The gravestone in the fireplace at Odin / Old Town Tatu. They found this in the attic when they moved in.
This, not the mask shown in the show, was the mask Tapeworm said tended to fall off the wall. This was taken during the first investigation, just after he showed it to me.
The haunted tattoo parlor is also featured prominently in Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps (teh excerpt online is all about the place). I was the EVP guy on the first investigation of the place a few years ago - the night when Tapeworm claimed that he'd challenged the ghosts in the place to a fight in the event of his death. "They freak me out, because everyone knows you can't fight back with these cats!" he said (in not those exact words - I'm cleaning up his language a LOT). "So I just said, 'listen! if I die in this place, it is ON!'" And, as the program notes, he died in the place three weeks later.
I'm not sure how good the history used by Most Terrifying Places was - the history of the building is sort of in dispute. The Klemundt Funeral Parlor building dates back to the 1920s, not the 1800s, but the basement level is clearly the foundation of an earlier building, about which little is known, though it IS said to have been an 1880s funeral parlor (records on the place tend to contradict each other; a common problem around here). Even if it WAS a funeral home in those days, I'm not sure that it was the first established funeral home in Chicago, as the show says - by the 1880s, Chicago's population was around a million, so I sort of doubt that no private funeral home had been established. However, the term "Funeral home" doesn't appear in the Tribune until the 1890s, and "Funeral Parlor" doesn't appear until 1902 - the custom at the time was for wakes to be held in private residences.
But whether the history there is correct or not, I can vouche for the stories about Tapeworm. I have my doubts about many of the stories I've been told about hauntings in the place from decades past, but if there's ever been a ghost I believed in, it's the ghost of Tapeworm.
For a LOT more information about the place, check out Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps or download The Weird Chicago Podcast (16mb mp3) episode about the place, featuring recordings from the first investigation of the place, shortly before Tapeworm's death. I understand that some of the EVP I recorded there has been analyzed for an upcoming episode of "Ghost Lab," too. They seem to have done MUCH more historical research. Most of what they found is stuff I could have told them myself if they'd asked, but they did come up with some stuff that was news to me, including a possible identity for "Walter," the ghost who seems to identify himself in the EVP. I'll be back with a full report when the episode airs!
Note: In Tapeworm's day, the place was called Odin Tatu - it was renamed Old Town Tatu after his death. For the record, it's located on Irving Park on the Northwest side, not in the neighborhood known as Old Town. It's too far away to be a regular stop on tours, though we have been known to go there occasionally.
Some pictures from the "pics of stuff from the book" page put up for Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps:
Klemundt Funeral Home, currently the home of Old Town Tattoo (alias Odin Tatu) on the North side of Chicago.
"Orbs" in the basement at Odin / Old Town Tattoo, emerging, it seems, from Ken's butt. The shape of this one gives it away as a dust particle (which is pretty generally what orbs turn out to be - very few reputable ghosthunters believe that orbs are ghosts). This one may prove my own pet theory - orbs aren't ghosts, they're ghost FARTS. :)
Tapeworm, who challenged the ghosts in his the Odin Tatu building to a fight in the event of his death - which, tragically, came three weeks later.
"Orbs" that appear to have faces in them are almost invariably just "matrixing," a trick of the mind the makes us look for faces and other such patterns in random visual noise. But the "face" in this one at Odin Tatu sure does look like Tapeworm! It's one of two distinct "faces" that tend to show up in this location - the other looks like the guy on the Quaker Oats box. I never hold orbs up as ghost evidence, but this one is kinda neat. It was taken about a year and a half after Tapeworm's death.
The gravestone in the fireplace at Odin / Old Town Tatu. They found this in the attic when they moved in.
This, not the mask shown in the show, was the mask Tapeworm said tended to fall off the wall. This was taken during the first investigation, just after he showed it to me.
Friday, October 16, 2009
The Fool Killer Submarine - Part 3!
excerpted from the Weird Chicago book
Phillips appears to have designed at least four submarines in his lifetime - according to his descendants, his third model, built in 1851 and known as the Marine Cigar, was stable enough that he was able to take his family on fantastic underwater picnics (this was probably the one he lost in 1853 while trying to salvage the wreck of The Atlantic in Lake Erie - it's still lost in the lake today). A fourth model had torpedo mechanisms added. These third and fourth models were improvements of his earlier, less successful boats; the first, built in 1845, was a fish-shaped apparatus that sank in Trail Creek near Michigan City. The second just may have been the Fool Killer.
While actual details are scarce, family legend has it that Phillips' second model was a forty-foot cigar-shaped submarine that was built in the late 1840s (in an 1853 letter to the Navy, Phillips did mention building a sub in 1847). According to these family stories, the machine lacked a decent mechanism for propulsion and sank on a test run in the Chicago River. Phillips' family said, decades later, that the submarine found in the river was undoubtedly one of his.
That the Fool Killer was a Lodner Phillips creation seems to be backed up mainly by family legend, which is not always reliable; another Phillips family legend states than when Phillips refused to sell one of his boats to the British Navy, they sank it, a story that is almost certainly not true. And the letter Phillips wrote to the Navy in 1853 indicates that the submarine he built in 1847 was a success - no mention is made of it sinking (though the letter was an attempt to sell his latest boat to the Navy, and talking about failed models wouldn't have been much of a selling point).
But that the Fool Killer was one of Phillips' subs is still the best explanation that has yet been offered for the origin of the mysterious submarine. No drawings or diagrams for his second submarine survive, but drawings of Philips' subs from the 1850s do strongly resemble the pictures of the Fool Killer that eventually came to light.
So, could the submarine have been beneath the river since the 1840s? It's entirely possible, especially if the reports about the ship being from 1870 are incorrect, as has been suggested. Some recent articles have stated that Phillips sold the submarine in 1871 to a man who promptly sunk it, explaining the early newspaper reports of the sub being from that era, but Phillips was busy being dead by this time.
Who, then, was the poor man who died onboard? Since Peter Nissen died onboard a different ship, not a submarine, and William Nissen seems to have been alive when the sub was raised, the identity of the ship's poor victim remains a mystery.
It's possible that the bones were planted on the submarine when it was raised in 1915 as a publicity stunt to get more people to come see it on exhibition. After all, complete skeletons were not found - just skulls and a few other bones. What happened to the rest of them? The Phillips' family legend about the sub sinking in the river don't include anything about anyone being onboard at the time. Also, Phillips first and third models were known to have escape hatches - why wouldn't the second one have had one?
William Deneau does seem to have been a bit of a showman - in 1958, on the anniversary of the Eastland Disaster, Deneau told reporters that he had just been onboard the repaired Eastland - which, he said, was still sailing under another name - for a cruise from California to Catalina the year before. In fact, the ship had been scrapped years before. Like most great showmen, Deneau may have been willing to fudge the facts a bit in the name of a great story.
While it's likely that we'll never know the truth about the bones, many of the questions about the submarine and its origins could surely be answered today if anyone knew where the submarine was now - but unfortunately, this is another mystery.
In May of 1916, the submarine was listed in newspapers among the attractions at Parker's Greatest Shows, a traveling carnival run by Charles W. Parker, which had arrived for a weeklong engagement in Oelwein, Iowa. It was listed as "The Submarine or Fool Killer, the first submarine ever built," being exhibited along with "skee ball, a new amusement device," but it was merely listed among other top draws, including "The Electric Girl, The Vegetable King, Snooks, the smallest monkey in the world (the paper was especially enchanted with the monkey, who delighted crowds by sucking his thumb), the fat girl, and the Homeliest Woman in the World." The Fool Killer was mentioned in the papers almost daily, though one can imagine that it didn't take much to make the papers in the town of Oelwein in 1916. In any case, it does not seem to have been as big a draw as the monkey. No mention was made of the bones, which may not have traveled on with the submarine.
By 1917, Parker's Greatest Shows had replaced the sub with a new submarine that could demonstrate manuevers in a giant glass tank, leaving historians to speculate Parker sold the old submarine for scrap, but no one really knows what happened to it - it could still be out there someplace today, as far as anyone knows!
We here at Weird Chicago are continuing our search for more information about the craft and what became of it - but it's likely that the riddle of the fool killer will never truly be solved!
SEE ALSO:
The Fool Killer Submarine - our first post on the subject!
The Fool Killer Ad our post featuring the Tribune ad
The Fool Killer: More Evidence - a post comparing a drawing of one of Phillips' subs to photos of the foolkiller
Fool Killer Clue? - speculating that newspaper reports that the sub dated to the 1870s might have been mistaking it for OTHER experimental subs.
Phillips appears to have designed at least four submarines in his lifetime - according to his descendants, his third model, built in 1851 and known as the Marine Cigar, was stable enough that he was able to take his family on fantastic underwater picnics (this was probably the one he lost in 1853 while trying to salvage the wreck of The Atlantic in Lake Erie - it's still lost in the lake today). A fourth model had torpedo mechanisms added. These third and fourth models were improvements of his earlier, less successful boats; the first, built in 1845, was a fish-shaped apparatus that sank in Trail Creek near Michigan City. The second just may have been the Fool Killer.
While actual details are scarce, family legend has it that Phillips' second model was a forty-foot cigar-shaped submarine that was built in the late 1840s (in an 1853 letter to the Navy, Phillips did mention building a sub in 1847). According to these family stories, the machine lacked a decent mechanism for propulsion and sank on a test run in the Chicago River. Phillips' family said, decades later, that the submarine found in the river was undoubtedly one of his.
That the Fool Killer was a Lodner Phillips creation seems to be backed up mainly by family legend, which is not always reliable; another Phillips family legend states than when Phillips refused to sell one of his boats to the British Navy, they sank it, a story that is almost certainly not true. And the letter Phillips wrote to the Navy in 1853 indicates that the submarine he built in 1847 was a success - no mention is made of it sinking (though the letter was an attempt to sell his latest boat to the Navy, and talking about failed models wouldn't have been much of a selling point).
But that the Fool Killer was one of Phillips' subs is still the best explanation that has yet been offered for the origin of the mysterious submarine. No drawings or diagrams for his second submarine survive, but drawings of Philips' subs from the 1850s do strongly resemble the pictures of the Fool Killer that eventually came to light.
So, could the submarine have been beneath the river since the 1840s? It's entirely possible, especially if the reports about the ship being from 1870 are incorrect, as has been suggested. Some recent articles have stated that Phillips sold the submarine in 1871 to a man who promptly sunk it, explaining the early newspaper reports of the sub being from that era, but Phillips was busy being dead by this time.
Who, then, was the poor man who died onboard? Since Peter Nissen died onboard a different ship, not a submarine, and William Nissen seems to have been alive when the sub was raised, the identity of the ship's poor victim remains a mystery.
It's possible that the bones were planted on the submarine when it was raised in 1915 as a publicity stunt to get more people to come see it on exhibition. After all, complete skeletons were not found - just skulls and a few other bones. What happened to the rest of them? The Phillips' family legend about the sub sinking in the river don't include anything about anyone being onboard at the time. Also, Phillips first and third models were known to have escape hatches - why wouldn't the second one have had one?
William Deneau does seem to have been a bit of a showman - in 1958, on the anniversary of the Eastland Disaster, Deneau told reporters that he had just been onboard the repaired Eastland - which, he said, was still sailing under another name - for a cruise from California to Catalina the year before. In fact, the ship had been scrapped years before. Like most great showmen, Deneau may have been willing to fudge the facts a bit in the name of a great story.
While it's likely that we'll never know the truth about the bones, many of the questions about the submarine and its origins could surely be answered today if anyone knew where the submarine was now - but unfortunately, this is another mystery.
In May of 1916, the submarine was listed in newspapers among the attractions at Parker's Greatest Shows, a traveling carnival run by Charles W. Parker, which had arrived for a weeklong engagement in Oelwein, Iowa. It was listed as "The Submarine or Fool Killer, the first submarine ever built," being exhibited along with "skee ball, a new amusement device," but it was merely listed among other top draws, including "The Electric Girl, The Vegetable King, Snooks, the smallest monkey in the world (the paper was especially enchanted with the monkey, who delighted crowds by sucking his thumb), the fat girl, and the Homeliest Woman in the World." The Fool Killer was mentioned in the papers almost daily, though one can imagine that it didn't take much to make the papers in the town of Oelwein in 1916. In any case, it does not seem to have been as big a draw as the monkey. No mention was made of the bones, which may not have traveled on with the submarine.
By 1917, Parker's Greatest Shows had replaced the sub with a new submarine that could demonstrate manuevers in a giant glass tank, leaving historians to speculate Parker sold the old submarine for scrap, but no one really knows what happened to it - it could still be out there someplace today, as far as anyone knows!
We here at Weird Chicago are continuing our search for more information about the craft and what became of it - but it's likely that the riddle of the fool killer will never truly be solved!
SEE ALSO:
The Fool Killer Submarine - our first post on the subject!
The Fool Killer Ad our post featuring the Tribune ad
The Fool Killer: More Evidence - a post comparing a drawing of one of Phillips' subs to photos of the foolkiller
Fool Killer Clue? - speculating that newspaper reports that the sub dated to the 1870s might have been mistaking it for OTHER experimental subs.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
The Fool Killer Submarine - Part 2!
excerpted from the Weird Chicago book
Inititially, the Tribune reported that the ship had been first launched in 1870 as a floating craft and sank to the bottom of the lake the first time it was submerged. According to their first article on the sub's re-discovery, it was believed to have been bought and raised by Peter Nissen, the accountant-turned-daredevil, around 1890, who sank it the first time he tried to use it. The next month, when the skulls were found, the Tribune reported that the ship had been purchased and raised in the 1890s by a man named WILLIAM Nissen - since then, most people have assumed that the skeleton onboard was his.
However, this is hard to verify - census records indicate that there WAS a William Nissen in Chicago in the 1890s, but he was still alive as of the 1920 census, five years after the bones were discovered! This William Nissen seems to be no relation to Peter Nissen, leaving one to speculate that the report had been a typo, and that the reporter meant to say "Peter," not "William."
The fact that they called it The Foolkiller at all may indicate that they - or Deneau - had simply mistaken it for one of Peter Nissen's boats, which was an easy enough mistake to make. Nissen did build three experimental crafts, named the Fool Killer 1, Fool Killer 2, and Fool Killer 3 (seePeter Nissen: Chicago's Forgotten Hero), and, though none of those were submarines, buying, raising and testing a dangerous homemade sub sure seemed like the kind of thing Nissen WOULD have done!
Further complicating the matter is the Tribune's statement that the ship had first sunk in 1870, then raised again and sunk in either 1890 or 1897 (the date seems to change from report to report). One report in the Washington Post even said that it had claimed a number of victims around the time of the World's Fair. However, if in fact the ship had sailed before, the paper saw no reason to mention it at the time, even though the launch of a submarine in the great lakes in 1870 would probably have been an event noticed by papers all over the world, as later submarine launches in the lake were. Furthermore, if the submarine had sunk in 1870 on the first time out and raised after twenty years, who would be crazy enough to go sailing in it?
Most likely, all of the contemporary reports on the history of the craft were mistakes - no sources were ever given, and they seem to be the result of half-remembered stories of news items from decades before. Perhaps they were mistaking it for the submarine tested in Lake Michigan in 1892 by George C. Baker, which was about forty feet long - roughly the length of the Foolkiller - or the model Louis Gatham tested in the lake the next year. The Tribune also initially said that it was built to be floated, but pictures of the Fool Killer make it clear that it was never built to be a floating vessel.
But the Tribune also once reported that it was first owned by an "eastern man," and some have speculated that this might refer to Lodner Darvantis Phillips, a shoemaker from Michigan City, Indiana, who also happened to be a submarine pioneer. There were only a very small handful of submarines ever known to be in the Great Lakes in the 19th century- and Phillips just happened to build a few of them, including perhaps the only successful submarine built in its time.
Tomorrow: Evidence that Lodner Phillips built the craft!
Inititially, the Tribune reported that the ship had been first launched in 1870 as a floating craft and sank to the bottom of the lake the first time it was submerged. According to their first article on the sub's re-discovery, it was believed to have been bought and raised by Peter Nissen, the accountant-turned-daredevil, around 1890, who sank it the first time he tried to use it. The next month, when the skulls were found, the Tribune reported that the ship had been purchased and raised in the 1890s by a man named WILLIAM Nissen - since then, most people have assumed that the skeleton onboard was his.
However, this is hard to verify - census records indicate that there WAS a William Nissen in Chicago in the 1890s, but he was still alive as of the 1920 census, five years after the bones were discovered! This William Nissen seems to be no relation to Peter Nissen, leaving one to speculate that the report had been a typo, and that the reporter meant to say "Peter," not "William."
The fact that they called it The Foolkiller at all may indicate that they - or Deneau - had simply mistaken it for one of Peter Nissen's boats, which was an easy enough mistake to make. Nissen did build three experimental crafts, named the Fool Killer 1, Fool Killer 2, and Fool Killer 3 (seePeter Nissen: Chicago's Forgotten Hero), and, though none of those were submarines, buying, raising and testing a dangerous homemade sub sure seemed like the kind of thing Nissen WOULD have done!
Further complicating the matter is the Tribune's statement that the ship had first sunk in 1870, then raised again and sunk in either 1890 or 1897 (the date seems to change from report to report). One report in the Washington Post even said that it had claimed a number of victims around the time of the World's Fair. However, if in fact the ship had sailed before, the paper saw no reason to mention it at the time, even though the launch of a submarine in the great lakes in 1870 would probably have been an event noticed by papers all over the world, as later submarine launches in the lake were. Furthermore, if the submarine had sunk in 1870 on the first time out and raised after twenty years, who would be crazy enough to go sailing in it?
Most likely, all of the contemporary reports on the history of the craft were mistakes - no sources were ever given, and they seem to be the result of half-remembered stories of news items from decades before. Perhaps they were mistaking it for the submarine tested in Lake Michigan in 1892 by George C. Baker, which was about forty feet long - roughly the length of the Foolkiller - or the model Louis Gatham tested in the lake the next year. The Tribune also initially said that it was built to be floated, but pictures of the Fool Killer make it clear that it was never built to be a floating vessel.
But the Tribune also once reported that it was first owned by an "eastern man," and some have speculated that this might refer to Lodner Darvantis Phillips, a shoemaker from Michigan City, Indiana, who also happened to be a submarine pioneer. There were only a very small handful of submarines ever known to be in the Great Lakes in the 19th century- and Phillips just happened to build a few of them, including perhaps the only successful submarine built in its time.
Tomorrow: Evidence that Lodner Phillips built the craft!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
