Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps Read online

  Still, even with his assurance that the place was pretty spooky, I was quite leery of investigating the tattoo parlor, since it seemed like just another somewhat spooky place where people get wasted and think they’re seeing stuff. But our investigations were almost always great fun. If nothing else, a ghost investigation is a great excuse to go poking around old buildings looking for cool stuff like secret passages, hidden chambers, and nifty antique furnishings. And Ken assured me that Odin still had plenty of architectural details from the days when it was the Klemundt Funeral Home, which the building had served as for several decades.

  The records we have on the place contradict each other, which is not uncommon in Chicago, where hardly a building went up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries without some worker or another needing to cover his tracks. But it appears that the Klemundt Funeral Home building was built around 1923 and that it was built over the foundation of an earlier undertaking parlor that is said to have been built in the 1880s. The original foundation is still present, functioning as the spooky basement that no haunted house is complete without.

  There was plenty left in the tattoo parlor to remind visitors of the building’s history, like stained-glass windows, woodwork said to have been salvaged from a ruined South Side mansion, and a gorgeous mosaic fireplace in the entryway. Rumor has it that the gate on the front door had been the doorway to the German village in the 1933 World’s Fair. Rumor also has it that there had once been a graveyard out back, near the former stable (which is now a garage), serving as a resting place for somewhere over thirty bodies. Given the fact that the building was an undertaking establishment, this is quite likely to be true. And given the fact that it’s Chicago, it’s also quite likely that the bodies are still there. Chicago has a real habit of moving tombstones and leaving the bodies buried beneath them behind.

  On the day of the investigation, Ken and I began with a quick survey around the premises. The first thing that struck me as interesting was the fireplace in the entryway—the mosaic work on it was done by the Tiffany company, we were told. Inside the fireplace, where one would normally put firewood, there was a gravestone dated 1957.

  “We found that in the attic,” said Nick, a tattoo artist. “But it made us all nervous having it be up there, so we brought it down where we could keep an eye on it. It took, like, five of us to move the thing.”

  It was an elegant building, full of ancient stonework, wooden archways, and all of the other classy touches that one expects in an old funeral parlor. But, for contrast, it also had tattoo facilities, loud music, spooky masks on the wall, a lot of things that looked voodoo-related, and a whole bunch of cool Star Wars stuff, including a life-sized statue of Yoda wearing a fedora, which is the kind of thing that you don’t see in nearly enough funeral parlors. I’ll just say right here that when I die, there had better be a life-sized Yoda at the funeral. I’m flexible on the fedora—a bowler cap will do—but I’m adamant about the Yoda.

  Gradually, the rest of the crew for the evening showed up. Hector, an improv comic who usually drove the bus for me on the tours I ran, was there. Also joining us were two teenage girls that I hadn’t met before.

  “This is Kaytlyn and Keegan,” Ken said, indicating the girls. “They’re both very good natural psychics. I’ve known them since they were babies. Both of them are clairaudient, which means they hear things, and Keegan is clairsentient, like me, which means she feels things. And they tend to have stronger powers when they’re around each other.”

  Kaytlyn couldn’t stay on the investigation long, since she was leaving for China the next morning, where she’d be attending a cheerleading camp. For a second there, I sort of felt like one of those sitcom characters who finds out that the doctor performing his coronary bypass is a twelve-year-old prodigy. I’m skeptical of psychics to begin with, and I’d had perhaps a dozen teenagers on the tour who had convinced themselves that they were psychic. Most of them were real pains in the ass.

  But at least they weren’t old enough to be senile, like most of the supposed psychics I met. And, as Hector pointed out to me, Ken could be rather arrogant about his psychic abilities and tended not to believe that anyone else was psychic. His seal of approval on Keegan and Kaytlyn was a pretty big deal.

  “Isn’t Olga coming?” I asked Ken.

  “She’ll be along later, I hope,” said Ken. “I haven’t heard from her, though. And Ray’s back in town.”

  We were all a bit nervous about Ray, Olga’s husband, who had been let out of prison a few days before. Ray was, shall we say, a gentleman of somewhat uncertain character.

  About a year or so before, Ray had had a bit of an episode. According to newspaper reports, he had stabbed Olga’s mattress with a knife, left a note saying she was next, and left a message on an answering machine belonging to her brother, a police sergeant, threatening to do all sorts of colorful things to him with a screwdriver. He then set fire to a portion of the church where the tour bus was parked when not in use. One can imagine how we’d be a bit wary about the guy. Olga herself had said at his trial that he’d “keep doing this forever.”

  Ken and I were about halfway sure that Olga and Ray were going to restart the company from scratch, putting Ray in charge and doing all the tours themselves, and putting us out of our jobs. I was a lot more nervous about this than I was about running into a ghost that night. But we had to keep this out of our minds for the moment—we had an investigation to do.

  When everyone, except for Olga, had arrived, we were introduced to Tapeworm, the owner. He had come into possession of the parlor a few years before, naming it after his son, Odin.

  “You’re Santeria, aren’t you?” said Hector when they were introduced.

  “Yeah,” said Tapeworm, with a knowing nod. “You too.”

  Santeria is an Afro-Caribbean religion not unlike voodoo in many ways, except that, unlike voodoo, it actually does involve some animal sacrifice. Neither Hector nor Tapeworm actually practiced it; but both Hector and Tapeworm were of Cuban descent—Tapeworm was born in Havana—and had been raised around aunts and grandmothers who spoke about it frequently. And they spotted it in each other right away. Hector claimed that people from the Santeria tradition could always spot each other.

  Of course, Ken claimed that Hector didn’t know anything about Santeria. “He’s not even Cuban, he’s Puerto Rican,” Ken said when I asked him about it later. Ken and Hector picked on each other to no end—they were like brothers. But, like brothers, they were fiercely protective of each other. If anyone else picked on Hector, Ken got mad.

  Hector may have guessed that Tapeworm had some connection to Santeria because he recognized some of the masks and symbols that were set up around the parlor—Tapeworm was especially fond of Chango, a Santeria orisha (spirit) known as the god of thunder and lightning. I knew nothing about Santeria, except that it was known to involve animal sacrifice and that, according to Ken, there was a temple for it in the backyard of an apartment about four blocks from mine. I was never sure if Ken was serious, but if there was anybody in Chicago who knew where to go to see a chicken sacrificed, it was Ken.

  As usual, after scoping the place out, we started out the investigation by interviewing the people who worked in the building, starting with a new guy who told us that he’d recently heard something going “Whoooo” in the basement, where they used to do all of the embalming. As soon as he said this, Hector and I looked at each other, trying not to laugh.

  One of the jokes we liked to play between stops on our tours was having customers play “scare the tourist” by making ghost noises out the windows of the bus at the passers-by on Michigan Avenue. Invariably, they would all go “Whooooooooo,” and the passers-by would look on, halfway between amused and annoyed (except for one Amish couple, who were just plain annoyed). I would then point out to the people that I had never, ever heard of an actual ghost that made a noise like that. You hear of moaning noises now and then, but “Whoooo” is the kind of noise ghosts only make in cartoons.

  I’m pretty sure that all ghost hunters, believers and skeptics alike, will agree with me when I say that, if a witness says the ghost went “Whoooo,” it means one of three things:

  1. The witness is lying (or stoned) (or both).

  2. It is, in fact, just the wind blowing through a hole in the wall or something, creating an effect not unlike the one you get by blowing over the rim of a pop bottle or moonshine jug.

  3. It’s not a ghost at all—it’s Old Man Peters, the man who ran the haunted amusement park! And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids!

  So this guy was not only quite likely lying, he wasn’t even doing a very good job of it.

  Most of the rest of the staff, however, told more plausible stories. Some of them told stories about poltergeist-style activity—shelves falling apart inside of glass display cases, ashtrays flying across the room and landing upside without spilling a single ash. One of the scarier masks—a Japanese one that Keegan found especially frightening—had a tendency to fall off of the wall and onto the floor.

  A couple of people had more interesting stories than this. Some told of seeing, hearing, or “feeling” the ghost of a little blonde girl in the front entryway, near the fireplace, and the stairway that led to the apartment upstairs. But Tapeworm, perhaps a bit predictably, had the most interesting stories.

  He told us about seeing a woman in a white gown walking up to the counter and a guy in a powder-blue suit that he’d seen walking across an archway near the main studio—apparently the ghosts of some poor sap who died in the 1970s.

  “There’s also this guy I’ve seen twice who wears a brown suit,” he said. “Looks like he’s in his sixties or seventies, and he’s dressed, I don’t know, like it’s the nineteen twenties or thirties. I saw him a couple of weeks ago, standing there, like he was looking at me while I was over here tattooing. And I stopped what I was doing and tried to motion for other people to look, but I wouldn’t take my eye off him for one second, man, cause I knew that if I looked away for a second, he’d be gone. And he was! The second I looked away, he vanished.”

  I was reasonably sure, at the time, that Tapeworm’s stories were either lies or based on hallucinations—the woman in white, in particular, was a bit of a giveaway. When people tell me about a ghostly woman in white (which they frequently do), it’s a pretty safe bet that they’re just telling me what they think I want to hear.

  I once spoke to a police officer who told me that when people tell police that they were attacked by a “stranger with bushy hair,” the police assume that they’re lying. Similarly, people who are making up a ghost story almost always seem to go with either a woman in a long white gown or a little kid playing with a ball. Of course, this doesn’t mean I can brush off the stories automatically; just as the police know that there must be a handful of bushy-haired strangers out there committing crimes, I have no way to know that there isn’t some celestial bureaucracy that issues white dresses to dead women and rubber balls to dead children. Maybe it’s the same place that gave Jacob Marley his chains.

  And it was impossible not to like Tapeworm. His enthusiasm for his work and the building were infectious, and he was a much better storyteller than anyone else we met that day. He was, at the very least, quite a character. One of my favorite things about the job was meeting people like him. You really do meet the weirdos when you work in the ghost business.

  Tapeworm might, in fact, have had a checkered past, but he was now apparently living clean and was a respected member of the neighborhood. Neighbors who had been apprehensive about having a tattoo parlor in their midst (as opposed to the incessant cheeriness of a funeral home) were won over by his personality, as was everyone on the investigation. No one who actually knew him personally, rather than by reputation, seemed to have a bad thing to say about him.

  Ken, Hector, and I all decided right away that most of the people in the building weren’t making up the ghosts, exactly—they’d probably seen a few things that they couldn’t explain, but some of the things they were telling us were likely just the result of their imaginations taking over after they heard that the place was haunted. Only one story has to be true to make a place haunted for real, though.

  “Now, here’s what really freaks me out,” Tapeworm said, continuing to regale us with ghost stories. “Check out those stairs over there.”

  He pointed over to the main staircase. The old, art deco–tiled stairs led up to a stained-glass window where the staircase curved around.

  “I remember being a kid in this neighborhood, and you could see those stairs in the window. I was always all superstitious about it, because of what the place was, you know. It was where the dead people were.”

  I sympathized. A natural outgrowth of my childhood fear of cemeteries had been a general fear of funeral homes. I hated going with my family to pick up my brother at Little League practice, because his team practiced near a funeral home, which meant there was a chance that I might see an actual coffin. I still don’t know how they managed to get any baseball practice in with that place looming behind them.

  “So I tried to avoid looking at it,” Tapeworm continued. “And now, you know, things change around, and lo and behold, thirty years later, I’m living here. And twice, when I’ve been walking down those stairs, I felt like something was trying to push me!”

  “Like, push you down the stairs?” I asked.

  “Yeah!” he said. “And that fuckin’ freaks me out, because everyone knows you can’t fight back with these cats! So, the first time it happened, I just looked up and shouted, ‘Listen, motherfucker! If I fuckin’ die in this fuckin’ place, it is fuckin’ on!’”

  Naturally, those stairs were the first place we wanted to investigate. And even though I had my doubts about Tapeworm’s stories, the place turned out to be as spooky as all get-out that night. In fact, it was probably the spookiest place I’d ever investigated.

  My job on investigations, besides doing historical research and attempting to explain away anything weird that happened, was to be in charge of electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), which meant walking around with audio gear to see if we pick up any strange sounds that might be audible on recordings, but not to the naked ear. On television, the EVP guys are usually the ones who wander around waving microphones in the air and saying, “Are there any spirits here who have a message for us?”

  For the record, I don’t normally do that—I’d feel like a real dork going around talking like that—but every now and then I’ll say something out loud just to see if there’s a response. That way, I can just analyze the audio for a couple of seconds after the question instead of listening to the whole thing for strange voices, which can be a pretty dull process.

  I had recently modified my gear a bit to speed things up—I had set it up so the microphone was farther away from the recording unit, so that it wouldn’t pick up any noise from the unit itself, and had set it up with a pair of signal-boosting earphones that allowed me to hear what I was recording in real time. Using a sensitive microphone, it wasn’t unlike wearing a set of high-powered hearing aids. This allowed me to make a note of any unusual sounds as they happened, rather than trying to find them later.

  The recorder began to act up on the staircase—it might have just been related to the air vents or the nearby neon sign, but there was an abnormal humming noise that would almost overwhelm me whenever we started going up the stairs—much more noise than I’d normally expect from a neon sign. There was something odd about that staircase, all right.

  Upstairs was the main living area, where Tapeworm actually lived. It was a bit of a mess, decorated with even more life-sized Star Wars statues. But there was an undeniable spookiness about the place—some sort of “weight” in the air, like a humidity, which I attributed primarily to the fact that it was summer in Chicago and the building didn’t have any air conditioning.

  But some places just have a “haunted” vibe about them—something you can’t define, but you can sure as hell feel. And everyone present noticed it in Tapeworm’s apartment that night right away. As far as I’m concerned, these places that have that vibe count as haunted, even if the real cause is just humidity, wiring, low-frequency noise, or any of the other explanations we skeptics come up with. Once you’ve got a good story and that haunted vibe, all that remains is to gather some cool “evidence” and a good backstory, and you’ve got yourself a building that functions as haunted for all practical purposes.

  That vibe, the “haunted” feeling, comes and goes at any given location. Even the most famously and reliably haunted places don’t have the feeling about them all the time. On the tours, I got to where I could tell the minute we stepped off the bus whether a location was going to be “active” that night or not. Ken described this as a form of psychic ability, but I just thought of it as something similar to being able to step outside and tell whether it was raining or not.

  Of course, the question to ask ourselves here is whether this feeling comes from ghosts, or if it’s caused by regular ol’ environmental effects (humidity, barometric pressure, etc.) that just make you think the place is haunted. But, for all we really know, maybe those environmental effects are what allow ghosts to manifest in the first place. You never can tell with this stuff.

  Whatever the cause of that haunted vibe, I was feeling it in that upstairs living area. If picking it up was like being able to tell when it was raining, it was pouring in there.