Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps Read online

  About the Author

  Adam Selzer is the author of several books for young readers, including the forthcoming Smart Aleck’s Guide to American History and I Kissed a Zombie and I Liked It. Because writing only keeps him occupied until about 10 a.m. most days, he has spent much of his time working as a professional ghost investigator since 2005. He is the chief historian for the Weird Chicago company and sits on the board of the American Ghost Society, in addition to running ghost tours and historical tours both for Weird Chicago and privately for student groups. He lives in Chicago (of course) with his wife and plays in a rock band called The Broken Chimneys. Check him out online at www.adamselzer.com.

  Llewellyn Publications

  Woodbury, Minnesota

  Copyright Information

  Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps: True Tales of an Accidental Ghost Hunter © 2009 by Adam Selzer.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  First e-book edition © 2012

  E-book ISBN: 9780738722320

  Chapter art by Llewellyn Art Department

  Cover art © iStockphoto

  Cover design by Kevin R. Brown

  Photograph on page 264 © Ronica Selzer, all other photographs © Adam Selzer

  Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  Llewellyn Publications does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

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  Llewellyn Publications

  Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Contents

  Prologue

  “If I Die in This Place . . .”

  Who Do I Think I Am?

  Working with Ghosts

  Babies and B.S.

  Through the Ages

  The Science of the Supernatural

  Coffee with a Psychic

  Abandoned by All but the Ghosts (and Ghost Hunters)

  Meet the Weirdos

  Meanwhile, Back at the Tattoo Shop

  The Ghosts Check In . . .

  The Ghosts Keep Coming

  So You Wanna Hunt for Ghosts . . .

  Proof?

  Map Key

  1. Old Town Tatu (formerly Odin Tatu)

  2. Our Lady of the Underpass (the Virgin Mary Salt Stain)

  3. H. H. Holmes’s “glass-bending factory”

  4. The Liar’s Club (a haunted bar; frequent tour stop)

  5. Biograph Theatre/“Dillinger’s Alley”

  6. St. Valentine’s Day Massacre site

  7. Old City Cemetery/the Couch Tomb (the last remaining crypt in City Cemetery)

  8. Weird Chicago Tours starting point

  9. Old courthouse/jail/gallows site (fewer ghosts than you’d think!)

  10. Adam’s neighborhood

  11. Eastland disaster site

  12. Iroquois Theater/Death Alley

  13. Congress Hotel

  14. Hull House

  15. Lincoln funeral train stopping point

  16. Home of Bad, Bad Leroy Brown

  17. Union Stockyards

  18. H. H. Holmes’s “murder castle” site

  19. 1893 World’s Fair site

  Prologue

  One of the more popular stories on the ghost tours I run in Chicago is “The Legend of Dillinger’s Ding-a-ling.” It’s not a ghost story exactly, but it’s too good a story not to tell.

  When we run the tour on routes that go past the alley in which John Dillinger, the Depression-era bank robber, was shot, I usually tell people the popular urban legend that Dillinger’s twenty-three-inch penis is on display somewhere in the Smithsonian Institute. Then I show off the picture that started the legend—a newspaper shot of Dillinger’s corpse on public display at the morgue, covered from the neck down by a sheet. Rigor mortis had caused his right arm to be bent at a ninety-degree angle, resulting in a large, tentlike protrusion in the sheet just about level with Dillinger’s crotch. It does look for all the world like Dillinger’s corpse is phenomenally well endowed and awfully happy to be there on the slab. Most of the onlookers surrounding the stiff (pun intended) in the picture look pretty impressed, except for one woman who looks distinctly unamused.

  It is, in fact, just his arm causing the protrusion, not his wiener. No chunk of Dillinger is actually on display in the Smithsonian. One nurse—presumably the unamused woman in the picture—who tended to the corpse claimed that she peeked under the sheet out of curiosity and found that there was nothing remarkable about ol’ Johnny in the crotch department. But the rumors inspired by the picture persist to this day, and the picture is usually a big hit.

  However, every now and then, there’ll be a crowd for whom that story isn’t particularly appropriate—a crowd with a lot of young kids, for instance, or a crowd of insecure guys who might get jealous. Or sometimes the traffic keeps us from moving at normal speed, so the story is done before we even get to Diversey Avenue. Whichever is the case, it creates a few minutes of quiet time as the bus travels between Dillinger’s Alley and the old factory where Adolph Luetgert, the original sausage king of Chicago, murdered his wife. I have to kill time somehow.

  “Well,” I ask, “are there any questions? Even if it’s a totally off-the-wall question. This is Weird Chicago Tours, after all.”

  One person raises her hand, and I point at her with a flashlight. I already have a pretty good idea what’s coming.

  “So, do you really believe in ghosts, or what?” she asks.

  I take a deep breath.

  That’s a loaded question.

  What, exactly, is a ghost, anyway? If I say I believe in them, are the people on the bus going to think I believe every story I hear about ghostly kids pushing cars over railroad tracks, every story about guys in white sheets who rattle chains and go “Whoooo”? Will they think I believe that a translucent version of me is floating around in my body, ready to fly free when I die?

  I spend a lot of energy trying to keep from seeming like a total nut, and saying I believe in ghosts—any kind of ghosts—will make me look like a nut to many people right away.

  When we say “ghost,” we usually think of the Hollywood model: a translucent version of a dead person that floats around wearing ghostly clothes that, while translucent themselves, still manage to cover up the ghost’s hoo-hoos perfectly. According to the stories attached to ghosts, this is usually supposed to be the soul of t
he dead person; either the soul is unable to “move on” or it’s back from some celestial plane to sort out unfinished business. Do I have to believe in that stuff to believe in ghosts?

  And what about the similar apparitions that we call “residual” hauntings—these look like Hollywood ghosts, but they aren’t thought to be conscious entities. They’re sort of like video recordings that play over and over again, no more aware of themselves than, say, the wind or the waves in Lake Michigan. Some theorize that these residual hauntings are caused by some sort of energy exerted at the moment of sudden, traumatic deaths, creating a sort of “mental picture.” If that’s true, do these count as ghosts, too, or do ghosts have to be intelligent, thinking beings to qualify?

  In fact, those are just two of the countless kinds of ghosts that people talk about. You need a whole encyclopedia to cover all of them.

  There are poltergeists—ghosts that can’t be seen, but manifest by turning lights off and on, throwing things around the room, tugging at your clothes, and generally making nuisances of themselves.

  There are figures so lifelike that you can dance with them all night and never realize that they’re not regular, living people until they disappear out of your car as you drive them past the suburban cemetery on South Archer Avenue.

  There are vague voices heard in empty houses and hallways. Sometimes they seem intelligent enough to communicate; sometimes they just seem to repeat the same word or phrase over and over again.

  There are mysterious phantom houses that appear near a cemetery, disappear, then show up again on the other side of the graveyard.

  Spooky faces that just appear for a split second in the mirror. Spookier faces that jump out of the mirror and try to bite you.

  Strange forces that cause people to get hang-up phone calls from a number once owned by a long-dead friend or cause a grandfather clock to stop with its hands frozen at 3:10, the time when the clock’s owner passed away.

  Residual emotional energies that leave “bad vibes” in a place where a murder or disaster took place. Some say that these same energies cause the feelings of fright that come to people in darkened rooms with creaking doors and creeping shadows.

  Which of these count as ghosts? Are any of them “real” to begin with, or are all of them just figments of overactive imaginations? If it’s the latter, is there any value in telling stories about them at all or in researching them scientifically? Am I just wasting everyone’s time or, worse, encouraging people to jump to supernatural explanations for everyday occurrences by taking them on ghost hunts?

  Without question, most of the ghost reports I hear can be explained away with the knowledge you’ll find in any eighth-grade science book. Any ghost hunter worth his salt will tell you that at least 80 percent of all ghost reports can be dismissed very quickly.

  But others are a bit harder to account for. Science may eventually find a way that a traumatic, sudden death can produce some form of energy that will, under certain unusual conditions, manifest as an “apparition.” Anything’s possible.

  Some scientists say that for ghosts to exist, we’d have to rearrange physics, but for some ghosts, we may just have to learn more about physics.

  Or perhaps we don’t need to rearrange physics at all; we just need to rearrange semantics. Whether ghosts are real or not depends a lot on what counts as a ghost and what doesn’t. One thing I can say for sure is that there are weird things in the environment that can have the psychological effect of making you think there’s a dead person hanging around. Should the wind making a moaning noise by blowing over a hole in the roof count as a ghost? It certainly functions as a ghost for all practical purposes, after all.

  I’m a skeptic. Or, anyway, I try to be. I think that just about everything (except for Bob Dylan) can be explained by science. Even the stuff that we can’t explain yet will probably be explained eventually. And it’s a good thing I’m a skeptic; I’ve had my palm read twice, and both readers told me I’d die in a bus accident. On the tours, I stand up at the front of a bus for long stretches of time—with the door open in summer.

  But there are only a few blocks of space between the end of the “appropriate for all audiences” version of the John Dillinger story and the sausage factory. I don’t have time to explain all of this. I just have time to break out a quick stock response.

  “Well,” I say, “I don’t believe everything I hear, but I have seen some pretty weird stuff.”

  I have, in fact, seen some strange things. I’ve seen shadows cast next to my own on the wall when there was no one next to me. I’ve heard weird voices and ghostly music. I’ve heard gunshots ringing out in empty hallways. I’ve felt invisible hands tapping me on the shoulder and flicking my ear.

  In fact, I’ve experienced almost all of those things at one particular location.

  And it just happens to be the next stop on the tour.

  [contents]

  “If I Die in This Place...”

  ODIN TATU, 3313 W. Irving Park,

  Chicago, IL, June, 2006.

  When people become ghosts, they’re generally expected to haunt the places where they died. According to most of the scientific (well, pseudoscientific) theories that seek to explain ghosts, what we know as a ghost is probably caused by a jolt of some sort of mental energy, usually at the moment of a sudden, traumatic death, and this leftover energy will only be strong enough to manifest in a way that we’d be able to notice it at the place it was first exerted.

  However, by this logic, how do we explain the number of haunted cemeteries that are reported? Practically nobody dies in the cemetery, and, when they do, it can’t be all that traumatic—in fact, it’s sort of convenient, in a way. The same goes for funeral parlors; they might have had a few stiffs on the embalming table who weren’t quite dead yet, but, hey, you’re already on the slab, right? Might as well get embalmed while you’re there. Dying of being embalmed when you’re already in a coma probably won’t bring forth the same jolt of mental energy that dying of falling six stories into an alley when you’re already on fire would.

  But we do hear a lot about haunted cemeteries and funeral parlors. Some people think that the sheer outpouring of emotion that goes on in these places leaves a sort of impact on the environment that can “create” a ghost. Ghostly funerals aren’t unheard of. For instance, many people who lived near spots where Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train rolled through in the 1860s reported “ghost trains” appearing occasionally for more than a century after Lincoln had been buried. And some people think that there may be some mysterious earthly energies that led early settlers to put a graveyard or undertaking parlor in a given location in the first place.

  When I hear about haunted cemeteries, I don’t usually jump right into speculating that there’s some sort of emotional residue or mysterious energy in the air. I usually just assume that teenagers probably snuck in to get high and started seeing things that they thought were ghosts. And I’m almost always right. In fact, let’s call this Selzer’s First Theorem: Any remotely spooky place that people sneak into in order to get wasted will eventually turn up on a TV show, website, or book about ghosts.

  So, when Ken Melvoin-Berg, one of my partners in the ghost tour business, called me and told me we were going to investigate a haunted tattoo parlor called Odin Tatu, which used to be a funeral home, I figured it was probably just some place where the owners were seeing weird things in a drug-induced haze and blaming it on dead guys. It happens all the time.

  Hence, my first question to Ken was “What are they on?”

  “Oh, probably plenty,” said Ken. “The owner is a guy named Tapeworm. I don’t think he realizes that he knows me, though. I used to be a bouncer and roving psychic at a club where he hung out about five years ago.”

  I added this to my master list of Weird Jobs Ken Has Had, which, by now, also included Maroon Beret, EMT, soup chef,
game designer, incense salesman, and porn star. And psychic detective, of course. That was his regular day job.

  At the time, Ken, an author named Troy Taylor, and I were running Olga Durlochen’s Chicago Spooks ghost tour company. Troy had taken over the business end of the company about a year or so before when Olga’s husband went to jail for arson. He handled reservations, marketing, and stuff like that, while Ken and I took turns running the tours aboard a bus.

  On the side, we also conducted investigations of supposedly haunted places around the city. We weren’t one of the more formal ghost-hunting groups around; we didn’t have uniforms or a team name or company song or mission statement or anything like that, like many groups do. Honestly, we thought that those were sort of corny. Part of the reason I got into the ghostbusting business was so that I could quit working for companies that had lame mission statements. If someone really pressed us for a name, we’d say we were called Captain Spooky McGuffin and his Paranormal Posse. We took turns being Captain Spooky.

  Troy Taylor’s name was particularly well known in the ghost business. He had, at the time, written over thirty books on history and hauntings. His books generally focused more on the history behind the ghost stories than the “evidence,” so I could read them as a skeptic and not think he was a maniac.

  Ken Melvoin-Berg, who had brought me into the company some time before, had a reputation of his own. His grandfather was a psychic of some repute, and he himself had been trained by Irene Hughes, who had made a name for herself by predicting the Kennedy assassinations. Almost needless to say, Ken is a little less skeptical about ghosts and other strange phenomena than I am.

  As a skeptic, I’m naturally quite suspicious of psychics. I get customers on the tours who claim to be psychic all the time. Usually, it’s fairly obvious that they’re really just nuts. Sometimes they’ll tell me there are fairies on my shoulder or a gremlin on the side of the bus. Others are clearly just using the same tricks phony psychics have been using for decades upon decades. Ken, however, has impressed me on enough occasions for me to at least give him the benefit of the doubt. If he tells me that the best place to investigate in a haunted house is some particular room or another, I have no reason not to give that room a shot.