Ghosthunting Illinois. John B. Kachuba
to talk to us about the castle ghost.
“No one is really sure who she is,” Pat said. “People have seen a young woman dressed in white, something like a nightgown. Some say she is the ghost of a girl named Clara, one of the students here when this place was the women’s college. They say she died in the 1930s from influenza.”
I wondered if a young female ghost from a women’s college would be so rude as to clump around upstairs and make the thumping sounds I had heard.
“Have you ever seen her?” Mary asked.
“No,” Pat said, “but some of the old-timers have. There’s another theory,” Pat continued, “that she may be the ghost of Eleanor Veil, a woman who lived here during the Depression.”
Although I was carefully listening to what Pat was saying, I was distracted by the glass jar she held in her hands. “Can I ask you what you’ve got in that jar?” I finally said.
“Oh, this?” She laughed and held up the jar so I could see inside it. There were a few green leaves and some fuzzy little, I don’t know…things.
“What am I looking at?”
“These are monarch butterfly caterpillars,” Pat said, “and the leaves are milkweed. That’s the only thing the caterpillars will eat.”
I wondered why she had brought the caterpillars to church, but before I could ask her, she said, “You should talk to Fran Johnson. I’m sure she’s got a ghost story for you.”
No sooner had Pat spoken her name than Fran came over to us. Mary and I recognized her as someone we had spoken to earlier, although we didn’t get her name the first time.
“Are you talking about me?” Fran said, with a smile.
“They’re interested in ghost stories about this place, and I told them you might have one for them,” Pat said.
Fran looked at me quizzically.
“I’m writing a book,” I said.
Experience had already taught me that most people, contrary to what I would have expected, would pour out their hearts to me once I told them I was writing a book. Maybe they felt sorry for me, or maybe I was just cheaper than a therapist. In any case, Fran was willing to talk.
“It was during an evening meeting of the Ladies of the Castle,” Fran said. “We were meeting upstairs on the second floor. Since there was no one else in the building except our group, the lights were off down here on the first floor.”
As the ladies were talking, they heard faint tinkling sounds from downstairs. The sounds grew louder and became recognizable as someone playing the piano.
“There wasn’t supposed to be anyone down there, so I went downstairs to check it out,” Fran said. “I could hear the piano clearly. I threw on the lights and the sounds stopped, but there was no one there.”
Fran was shaken, but she went back upstairs and the ladies resumed their meeting. They froze in mid-conversation only a few minutes later when the piano began playing again. Fran crept back downstairs a second time, thinking that there must be an intruder in the building. When she got to the bottom of the stairs, she quickly turned on the lights and the music stopped. She was alone in the room.
“Not only was I alone, but there was simply no way the piano could have played. The cover had never even been removed. It was still on the piano.”
We had been standing beside the piano as she told her story. There had been no music during the service and the piano was completely hidden beneath a heavy quilted cover. It would be impossible to strike a single note from it with the cover in place.
“What do you think happened?” Mary asked.
Fran could not offer any explanations for what she and the Ladies of the Castle had heard, but said that other unexplainable sounds, such as the tinkling of silverware and glasses, and disembodied voices, were sometimes heard in the building.
Fran offered one more story about yet another female ghost. During a New Year’s Eve party at the castle, a woman dressed in red was seen descending the stairs from the second floor to the first. The partygoers saw the woman move across the room toward the door, which opened of its own accord as she drew near. She passed through the door and out across new-fallen snow. She disappeared in the night and left no footprints.
The Reverend Leonetta Bugleisi is no longer the minister at the Beverly Unitarian Church, having moved to new pastoral duties in Michigan, but she had several ghost stories of her own while she was there.
Leonetta was talking with some friends and her husband at a church reception in 1994. “I saw two thin woman’s arms wrap around my husband’s waist,” she told me, “and I thought someone was hugging him to say goodnight for the evening. When I looked around him I did not see a face. I said, ‘Michael, are you okay?’ And he said, ‘Yes, why?’ I asked him if he felt anything around his waist and he said no. Then the arms disappeared.”
Leonetta said that a former custodian had heard the piano playing when no one else was in the building. Another custodian suddenly died in the nursery school hallway while waxing the floors. The summer after his death Leonetta was alone in the upstairs library, sorting through some books. She came across a book about death and dying by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and put it aside before going downstairs. When she came back up to get the book, it had disappeared and she never found it again. “My theory,” Leonetta said, “is that Kevin, the custodian, was still inhabiting the castle he loved so much and took the book as a sign of his existence.”
Another time, Leonetta was upstairs with a church member. While Leonetta was in a storage room the other woman was in the apartment area. The woman went down to the first floor unbeknownst to Leonetta, who called out to her.
“When I looked out towards the apartment door I saw a distinct black shadow—and this was in broad daylight—flow down the stairs past me and go to the second floor,” Leonetta said.
The fellowship of the Beverly Unitarian Church may never learn the identity of the ghosts who haunt its church, but it doesn’t really matter. Those ghosts will always be accepted there and offered haven.
Biograph Theater
CHICAGO
JOHN DILLINGER LIVES. NOT THE FLESH-AND-BLOOD gangster, of course, but his ghost, who has been seen outside the place where Dillinger drew his last breath—the Biograph Theater on North Lincoln Avenue.
By the time Dillinger was gunned down by FBI agents on July 22, 1934, he had become Public Enemy No. 1, his notorious exploits ballyhooed in newspapers across the country on an almost daily basis. While much of the American public viewed Dillinger as something of a modern-day Robin Hood, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had issued a “shoot to kill” order on the gangster as well as a $10,000 reward. Each of the five states in which Dillinger and his gang had robbed banks also offered $10,000 rewards.
Born in Indianapolis in 1903, John Dillinger was not known as a troublesome youth. Rather, he was quiet, a good student, and a talented baseball player. But in 1923 he was refused permission to marry his sweetheart by the girl’s stepfather and, in a rage, he stole a car, abandoning it only a few hours later. Afraid that he might be arrested for the theft, Dillinger enlisted in the U.S. Navy. The Navy wasn’t to his liking, however, and he went AWOL several times, finally jumping ship for good in Boston. Listed as a deserter by the Navy, Dillinger made his way back home to Indiana. It wasn’t long before he fell in with men who would set him on a life of crime.
In 1924 Dillinger was involved in a robbery in which the victim was accidentally shot. He was convicted and sent to the Indiana State Reformatory. Just as he did in the Navy, Dillinger tried to escape several times, but was always caught. Dillinger became good friends with bank robbers Harry Pierpont and Homer Van Meter, both of whom were shortly after transferred to the state