Lore - Episode 89: Fanning the Flames

Episode Date: June 25, 2018

Some cities experience a single tragedy and then live with that pain and loss for generations. They are built on a dark foundation, and everything new takes on a flavor of the past. But there are other places where that tragedy is spread out over time, like a slow-burning fire that never fully consumes but always leaves its mark—and I’d like to take you on a tour of one. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

They said it was absolutely fireproof. They'd spent over a million dollars building the place, and it showed. Architectural critics hailed it as beautiful, elegant, and ready-for-large, wealthy crowds. There was an asbestos curtain that could be dropped onto the stage, and a large skylight that could vent flames and smoke away from the crowds. They said the Iroquois Theater was as safe as you could get in the city of Chicago. The theater could seat a little over 1,600 people across three levels. That's a lot of people crammed into a small space, and while the owners bragged about

how fireproof the place was, it was poorly designed for the quick exit of a sold-out audience. So when a fire broke out in December of 1903, right in the middle of a matinee performance of Mr. Bluebeard, they quickly realized they had a problem. It didn't help that the show had been vastly oversold. Close to 500 additional standing room-only tickets had been made available, bringing the audience to nearly 2,200 people. That's over 2,000 people all trying to run to an exit at the same time.

As of people fighting for an open window or a crammed doorway, a quarter of them would never make it out alive, making it the deadliest theater fire in America. During the recovery efforts, first responders spent over five hours carrying the dead out of the building. Over 150 charred corpses were piled there, sometimes 10 bodies high, on the brick alleyway behind the theater. Today, if you're using Crouch Place as a shortcut between the Chicago Theater and the Goodman Theater, keep your senses on alert.

Between reports of disembodied voices and the scent of burned flesh, it's a crowded place. The Windy City is a wonderful place full of art and beauty and deep historical diversity. But it's also a community plague by tragedy and haunted by stories from the past. From fires and murder to old mansions and well-worn streets, history runs deep and dark in Chicago. Let's go explore it, shall we? I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

As far as American cities go, Chicago isn't necessarily the oldest in the country. Considering the sale in which trials took place in 1692 in a community that had been there for three generations, the incorporation of Chicago in 1833 makes it look like a baby by comparison. That's not a bad thing, mind you, and as we're about to learn, a city doesn't have to be ancient to have darkness in its veins. Humans have actually lived on the land now occupied by Chicago as far back as we can dig.

The Native American tribe known as the Illinois were there when the first Europeans rolled up and it's from them that we get the city name. Well, sort of. Turns out, Chicago is a really bad French version of an Illinois word for a kind of wild garlic. Next time you have garlic on your Chicago deep dish pizza, just think about how very meta that is. In 1833, there were just 200 people there, but that grew quickly.

By 1850, that had exploded to 30,000, and two decades later, it had gone up again, hitting 300,000. And you can't grow like that without problems. Too many people too quickly, it has a way of gumming up the system and creating tragedy. The fire of 1871 is a perfect example. The most common story associated with the great Chicago fire of 1871 was that a poor Catholic Irish immigrant named Mrs. O'Leary owned a cow who kicked over a lantern, setting the barn on fire.

But the reporter who first circulated that story admitted 20 years later that he made the whole thing up. It was just one more bit of anti-Irish prejudice in a country full of racism toward Irish immigrants. Still, it's stuck around. Another theory said that the fire did indeed begin in the O'Leary barn, but it was an accident caused by a group of young men playing a craps game that got out of hand. The most unlikely theory, however, suggests that a meteor shower caused the inferno. But that one has been shot down by the scientific community.

No pun intended. The results of the fire, though, were horrific. A huge patch of the city, roughly a mile wide and four miles long, was burned to the ground. A third of the city was destroyed, and as a result, over 100,000 people were left homeless. I'm actually surprised that the loss of life wasn't higher than the 300 on record, considering just how widespread and complete the damage was. Still, it would take Chicago decades to recover from it all. Which presents us with a bit of a problem.

Between the fire in 1871 and the World's Columbian Exhibition in 1893, Chicago transformed itself, and it wasn't all good. Remember, it was in the build-up to that exhibition that a local landlord named H.H. Holmes began his own building project, constructing a block-long apartment building with ground floor retail space. And as we know, that building served a darker purpose as his very own murder mansion, complete with body shoots, gas chambers, and a basement for dissolving the evidence with acid. Tragedy would haunt the city in the decades to come.

In 1915, over 2,700 employees of Western Electric boarded a steamship called the Eastland. They and their families were going to spend a Saturday traveling to Michigan City, Indiana for a summer getaway. Before it even left port, the ship capsized in the Chicago River, killing over 800 passengers. In 1929, a different kind of darkness fell over the city. On February 14th, snow was falling on the ground as seven men arrived at a warehouse on Clark Street to receive a delivery. They worked for a man named George Bugs Moran, a rival of mobster Al Capone, and the man

who had recently had one of Capone's top men assassinated. The delivery was a trick, and five of Capone's men soon arrived dressed as police officers. They lined the seven men up against a brick wall inside, and then opened fire on them. Most historians today refer to the events of that day as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, but it was also a turning point for Capone. While he might have been far away from the Chicago warehouse, the murderers cast a spotlight on his business dealings, eventually leading to his arrest and imprisonment. What a lot of people don't know is what happened to that warehouse in the years following

the massacre. For a while, someone tried to sell antiques out of the space, but in 1967 the building was in such poor repair that it was just torn down. That's when a Canadian man offered to buy the bricks that had made up the wall used by the firing squad. Bricks, according to the story, had still had dark stains on them from the blood of those seven men. If the stories are true, he sold each of those bricks for $1,000, but those plans didn't

work out so well. The few customers he found said they experienced a whole array of personal tragedy after buying the bloody bricks, and most were sent back. Whether they received a refund or not, I have no idea. Multiple tragic fires, explosive population growth, and an underbelly full of mobsters and hate crimes. All of it has left a mark on the city of Chicago, like bricks stained with blood. And even as the majority of the city tries to ignore it all and just get on with their

daily lives, past has rarely been willing to step aside. Sometimes, in fact, it's gone out of its way to get attention, taking innocent people along for the ride. It had been a lover's quarrel, according to the people who spread the story. She and her boyfriend had been dancing with the rest of the people inside Chicago's O'Henry Ballroom when the young couple stopped moving and started yelling at each other. The place was loud, so no one was quite sure whether the two were sane, but their body language made it very clear that neither of them was very happy.

Apparently it was the young woman who decided to leave the dance hall, so she stormed outside and stood in the cold night air. That's when she realized that her boyfriend, the man she had just been fighting with, was her ride home. So she decided to do the only thing she could think of. She would hitchhike. She walked to the side of the street and raised her hand toward oncoming traffic. Surely, one of the passing cars would see her white dress in the darkness and pull over.

But after a few minutes, she became frustrated. Perhaps she stepped a bit farther off the curb, or maybe the next car was just a bit too far out of their lane, but a moment later, tragedy and the speeding car struck. This was 1934, according to the legend, or maybe it was 1933. It could have been earlier too, but that's because no one really knows if it all happened. There are no police records of a woman struck by a car outside of the O'Henry Ballroom in the 1930s, and the story doesn't give us names to go on. All it does is give us the backstory to a much more popular tale.

For decades, drivers on Archer Avenue, a road that leaves Chicago to the southwest and heads toward Joliet, have reported picking up a woman on the side of the road. When she climbs into the car and they ask where she's headed, she always gives an address that keeps the car headed north on Archer. When they pass the old Resurrection Cemetery just a few miles away, the driver is always startled to see his passenger is gone. These are stories, local legends that have been handed down from generation to generation over the last few decades.

They are that sort of local folklore that becomes a part of the cultural fabric of the area. If you grew up in Chicago's southwest suburbs, you've probably heard some version of these stories at some point in your life. But again, they're just stories, and stories of ghosts can't have an impact on the real world. Can they? I'm not so sure about that.

Take the experience of William in 1935. He had borrowed his father's car for the evening and was driving along Archer Avenue at night when a woman in a white dress stepped off the curb near the O'Henry ballroom and into his lane. William swerved to avoid her and crashed the car into a utility pole. When he looked back to the curb, there was no one there. Four years later, another area man had his own sighting of the ghostly hitchhiker. Jerry Palace met a young woman in a white dress at a nearby curb.

He claimed to have danced with her and even kissed her before she asked for a ride home. Jerry wrote the address down and then headed north up Archer Avenue. When they came within sight of the Resurrection Cemetery, however, his passenger asked him to be let out there. According to Palace, the woman exited the car and walked up to the gates of the cemetery and then simply vanished. He probably waited for her to return, expecting it to be some sort of practical joke. But she never did.

She finally drove away, but the experience never really left him. The following day, he pulled out that slip of paper with the address on it and drove to the house to see if the young woman had made it home. The woman who answered the door was old enough to be his mother, but Palace asked about his friend anyway. According to the story, she told Palace that her daughter had died many years before in an accident on Archer Avenue. She even took him inside and showed him a photograph of the young woman.

Palace claimed she was the very same person he had met at the dance the night before. Then the woman added this one final detail. Her daughter, she said, was buried nearby in Resurrection Cemetery, of course. Today the legend has a name. Most people refer to her as Resurrection Mary, and the stories about her are almost as plentiful as there are cars on Archer Avenue. It's one of those tales that has been told so often, and by so many people, that it feels like it must be true.

Sadly, there's no way to prove any of it. It's much more likely that we, like the hitchhiker in the stories, have probably been taken for a ride. But Chicago has much more to offer to us than tales of ghostly women and late night drives. A story that is much more concrete and historical. But that doesn't mean it's safe. When he had the mansion constructed in 1856, it sat on one of the most desirable parts of old Chicago.

Charles had been in Connecticut back in 1820, but his mother died during birth, and his father skipped town a short while later. As a result, he was raised by his grandmother in New York. But he didn't let the challenges of his childhood hold him back. He wanted to make a name for himself, and he did. After meeting his future wife, Millicent, the couple married and moved to the growing city of Chicago, where he began to build his reputation as a real estate developer. Success came easy to Charles Hull, and so in 1856, he built his mansion.

The couple moved into the massive brick house and began life there as a family. They had three children, two sons and a daughter, and Charles continued to build his fortune. The tragedy was standing in the shadows, just waiting for the moment to tear it all apart. First, the couple's youngest son died in 1852 at the age of one, then Millicent herself passed away in 1860. Six years later, their oldest son died at the age of 19, followed by the last remaining child, Frederica, just eight years later. Sometime after that, Charles decided to move away.

The house was just too full of the ghosts of the past for him to ever find happiness there. When he left, the neighborhood collapsed in his wake. The wealthy upper class all decided to rebuild their lives on the open property that had been cleared by the Great Fire of 1871, and factories, brothels, and drug dens took their place around the mansion. The old house itself even became a sort of business park with storerooms and offices where living rooms and bedrooms once were.

By the time Jane Adams found the house in 1889, it had a factory and a second-hand furniture store inside it, and something else too. It was full of stories, tales of shadows, and barely visible shapes that had been seen moving throughout the house. Some believe that the ghosts of the past that drove Charles Hull away from his mansion just might have been real. At the very least, enough people had witnessed them to make a strong case for it. Adams wanted to use the building for something better, and she petitioned the Hull estate

to give her a 25-year lease so she could use the mansion as a settlement house, a sort of community center where she and others would live and work among some of the most poverty-stricken European immigrants of the area. And it worked. Today, Jane Adams is seen as the founder of modern social work in America, and her dedication to the cause earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, the first ever awarded to an American woman. She changed lives, transformed the community, and gave the old Hull mansion a second life

that would have made Charles Hull proud. But their work in that house wasn't without mysteries. The stories predated Jane Adams' time in the house. Even before Charles Hull moved away, rumors were already swirling that the bedroom once occupied by his wife, Millicent, had become home to unusual experiences and the sightings of a pale woman. Others claimed that noises could be heard at night, like the pounding of footsteps on the nearby stairs.

The businesses that occupy the mansion before Jane's settlement house took over also felt as if there were other worldly forces in the upstairs rooms. They were said to keep a bucket of water on the stairs, a sort of barrier that was meant to keep the spirits from passing over the water and down to the main level. Even Jane herself experienced some of these disturbances. After moving into the haunted bedroom in 1889, Jane told her partner, Ellen, about footsteps and noises during the night. She moved to a different room a short while later.

Other guests at the house also saw things that disturbed them. One woman stayed in the haunted bedroom as a sort of challenge and claimed to have seen the figure of a woman standing beside her bed during the night. When she lit a lamp to get a better look, the figure, whoever it had been, simply disappeared. The most famous story, though, began in 1913. That was the year that a desperate mother was said to have appeared on the doorstep of the mansion and abandoned an unusual child. There are a few versions of her story, but the basic core tale goes something like this.

A local Catholic woman married a man who turned out to be an atheist. When he caught her hanging a painting of the Virgin Mary on a wall in their house, a husband tore it back down and made a powerful declaration. I would rather have the devil himself in this house, he shouted, than this awful painting. The legend says that it was a short time after this that the woman discovered that she was pregnant. Many months later, she gave birth, only to be horrified by what she saw. Her child was said to have been born with pointed ears and a tail, along with a full set of

pointed teeth and hooves where its feet should be. Overwhelmed by the horror of it all, the mother ran to Jane's house. For nearly two months in 1913, the door of the hull house never stopped knocking. Word had spread quickly of the devil baby and everyone wanted a glimpse. Jane, of course, turned all of them away and denied the story completely, but the crowds were passionate. Some made threats, while others offered money for a chance to see the unnatural child. Jane, however, stood her ground.

The stories persisted, as they have a way of doing. Some said that Jane herself tried to have the devil baby baptized, but it was so evil that it escaped the priest and danced away, shouting curses at them all. To protect themselves, the child was locked in the attic, where it was left to die and be forgotten. But no story is ever truly lost. The devil baby might have been hidden away like a box of unwanted photographs, but it's still there, thanks to the whispers that keep it alive.

True or not, it teaches us an important lesson. Through the power of story, a city can become home to a monster. Chicago is a resilient city. The people who live there are very good at standing back up and continuing life amidst all the tragedy. Sure, the city burned the ground a century and a half ago, but it was rebuilt more beautifully than ever before in the years that followed. Only all of the scars of that inferno are gone, washed away by the progress of time.

All that's left now is story. A great example is the old O'Leary Farm, still considered by most as the origin point of the great Chicago fire. Today, the farm buildings are all gone. The last of them were torn down in 1956 so that the city could build a new structure, the Chicago Fire Academy. If you don't see poetry in that change, I can help you. And yet there's another layer beneath that modern urban exterior.

After all, a third of the city is literally built on the ruins of tragedy and the rest of it. Well, it sort of comes with the territory. From killers like Al Capone and H.H. Holmes to unexpected tragedies like the great Chicago Fire or the sinking of the Eastland, there have been no shortage of loss and pain and grief. And that's the danger of stories, isn't it? Story, as we've seen, has a way of spreading and burning deep.

Whether it's the tale of ghostly hitchhikers or rumors of devilish creatures living in the attic of old mansions, some tales just have a way of smoldering beneath the surface, and they can do so for decades. Stories tease us with the possibilities of what might be true. They prey on our doubts and fears, and leave us unstable and insecure. The fact that the Hull House was surrounded by thousands of poor, religious, mistreated people who firmly believed that God dished out punishment in horrible supernatural ways only seems to have fanned the flames.

Like a lot of Chicago, the old Hull House that Jane Addams turned into an oasis for the broken and lost of the city has changed into something new. It's still there, on the eastern side of the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago on Halstead Street, part of the College of Architecture and the Arts. There is a museum inside, if you want to visit and stand in the house for yourself. But there are still stories that are whispered about the place. Even today, people claim to have an uneasy feeling inside, and more than a few people have walked by the mansion at night, only to see something that left them completely

unsettled. They claim to have seen things in the attic window at the top of the house. Specifically, people passing by have seen a child, pale and ghostly, who stares down at them from above. They say the child's face is disturbing, though, and it's somehow deformed or twisted, giving it the appearance of something evil. Something they say, like the devil. If the story of Resurrection Mary caught your attention, you aren't alone.

Her story and countless others like it have filled American pop culture for decades. What most people don't know, though, is that one of the earliest tales of a ghostly hitchhiker actually predates the automobile. Thankfully, though, it takes place in Chicago, and if you stick around after the break, I'll tell you all about it. It's true that stories about Resurrection Mary first appeared in the Chicago area sometime in the early 1930s. In fact, in the 1942 edition of the California Folklore Quarterly, there's an article that

says, before 1933. Clearly though, the tale could only exist in the world of automobiles, given the plot of each retelling. Or can it? It turns out, Chicago might be home to one of the oldest hitchhiker stories in America, and it's not the legend of Resurrection Mary. No, this one dates back to the end of the 19th century, 1897 to be precise, but it does still involve a dance hall and the busy stretch of Archer Avenue.

Here, I'll let you hear it for yourself. The story begins with two musicians, William Looney and John Kelly, who travel to Chicago to play at a community social event. The two men spent all day playing music, while crowds of locals danced and drank, and all around had a good time. But when the evening was over and the crowds finally went home, Looney and Kelly were too tired to make the trip a couple of miles north to the center of Chicago, so they camped out inside the ballroom.

Both men managed to get some sleep, for a while, at least. At some point in the middle of the night, both of them were startled awake by a loud noise outside the dance hall. There was probably a moment when Looney looked at Kelly and realized that a bad dream couldn't have woken both of them up at the same time, so they climbed to their feet and headed toward one of the windows to see what might be going on outside. And then they froze. There, outside in the middle of the road, stood the figure of a woman.

They later described her as dressed in all white, with long flowing black hair, and she was facing away from them, looking down the dark road into the night, just… waiting. And that's when the carriage appeared. It was easy to see because of the pair of white horses that led the way, pulling the black carriage behind them. Kelly and Looney were clear about what they saw. The woman in the road was facing the oncoming horses. There was no way she couldn't have seen them coming.

And yet there she stood, unmoving and afraid. The two musicians claimed that this mysterious woman simply raised her arms over her head. It was almost as if she were welcoming the horses and the rumble of the rough wooden carriage wheels as they careened toward her. And then they collided. The musicians probably screamed, unable to help as the horses overran the woman in white. If they did, though, it wasn't a scream that lasted long. Because as the horses moved forward, both men noticed something strange.

They were passing through the woman, not over her. It looked like two clouds of mist colliding and mingling and becoming one. But it didn't last long. A moment later, darkness seemed to swirl around them, before the whole scene sort of just collapsed in on itself, sinking into the road. Then it was gone. Resurrection Mary certainly has the benefit of modern technology and decades of evolution through whispers, rumors, and storytelling.

But if the tale of William Looney and John Kelly are any indication, Archer Avenue is no stranger to mysterious sightings. It always has been. And perhaps, it always will. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Marsette Crockett and music by Chad Lawson. If you're new around here, this is my friendly reminder that Lore is a lot more than just bi-weekly audio stories.

There is an ongoing book series from Penguin Random House, a television show available on Amazon Prime, a membership site with extra episodes, and so much more. And you can learn all about everything over in one place, theworldoflore.com slash now. You can also follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.