Ghosthunting Illinois. John B. Kachuba

      SOCIAL REFORMERS JANE ADDAMS AND ELLEN GATES Starr founded Hull-House on Chicago’s Near West Side, a once-fashionable area that had become by 1889, a run-down industrial neighborhood, rife with poverty, crime, sickness, and illiteracy. It was a neighborhood full of smoky factories, squalid sweatshops, saloons, and crumbling tenement houses inhabited mostly by poor immigrant Germans, Greeks, Italians, and Polish and Russian Jews. There was no better neighborhood for these pioneering women to test the purpose of the Hull-House charter, as Addams herself defined it in her book, Twenty Years at Hull-House: “To provide a center for higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago.”

      The original building in the Hull-House Settlement, which eventually grew to a dozen sprawling buildings by the time the facility closed in 1963, was the Charles Hull house built in 1856, in what was then one of the affluent suburban areas of Chicago. By the time Addams and Starr came across the house in 1889, the bucolic suburbs had been swallowed up by the rapidly growing city of Chicago. Sandwiched between a saloon and undertaker’s establishment, the ground floor of this faded beauty of a home was rented as office and storage space for the factory behind it, but the women were able to rent the second floor and one room on the first floor to begin their venture.

      It is in this house that the ghost stories originate.

      Charles Hull was a Chicago real estate promoter whose wife died in the house he had built at 800 South Halsted Street shortly after the family moved in, leaving him a widower with two small children. His wife’s cousin, Helen Culver, moved in to take care of the children, although she left them during the Civil War to serve as a nurse. Sometime after her return, the children became ill and, despite her nursing abilities, died. In 1868, Hull closed up the house and moved out.

      Even though it was abandoned, the house somehow survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Culver inherited the house when Hull died, and she rented it out to several tenants, including the Little Sisters of the Poor, who ran a home for the elderly; a used furniture store; and the factory that occupied it when Jane Addams first saw it.

      All that time, the house was haunted.

      Addams mentioned the fact that the house was haunted in Twenty Years at Hull-House. She wrote: “It had a half-skeptical reputation for a haunted attic, so far respected by the tenants living on the second floor that they always kept a large pitcher full of water on the attic stairs. Their explanation of this custom was so incoherent that I was sure it was a survival of the belief that a ghost could not cross running water, but perhaps that interpretation was only my eagerness for finding folklore.”

      A bucket of water is not running water and the resident spirit, believed to be that of Mrs. Hull, apparently had no qualms about wandering around the house. Later stories tell of strange footsteps in the night, especially in a second-floor bedroom occupied by Addams, which was the same bedroom of the dead mistress of the house. After enduring several nights of loud footsteps in her otherwise empty bedroom, Addams finally gave the room back to the ghost of Mrs. Hull and moved to another room.

      Guests of Hull-House also encountered the ghost. Helen Campbell, who was herself a successful author and social reformer with her book, Prisoners of Poverty, spent a night in the haunted bedroom. Sleeping fitfully, she awoke and in the dim light saw an unidentifiable figure standing by her bed. She leapt out of bed and turned up the gas jet to illuminate the room, but the apparition had vanished. A dream? Perhaps, but could it not have been Mrs. Hull watching over her guest?

      Louise Bowen was a lifelong friend of Addams and she too had the same kind of encounter with the ghost of Hull-House. The same things happened to Jane and Mary Smith, and to Canon Barnett of Toynbee Hall, from the English settlement house upon which Hull-House was modeled. Each of them said they were visited by a lady dressed in white who was able to pass through closed doors.

      The docents at the Hull-House Museum, which is now owned by the University of Illinois at Chicago, are forbidden to talk about the ghost. Despite that injunction, Sara*, the young graduate student who guided my wife, Mary, and me through Hull-House, confided that many people who worked there had experienced strange things—sounds for which they could find no source, motion detectors that went off without anyone being there, strange shadows, and a sense of uneasiness, as if one should quickly look over his shoulder before whatever it is that is there, disappears. The kind of feeling that truly makes your hair stand on end.

      Another strange story that attached itself to Hull-House was the tale of the Devil Baby. Sometime in 1913, a rumor spread through the neighborhood that a devil baby, complete with horns and a tail, had been born at Hull-House, and that it was being kept alive in the locked attic of the house by Addams and her staff. No one knows how the rumor began, but it persisted for several years and Addams herself, baffled by the rumor, spent much energy in debunking it. Over a period of time, it died out, although the story provided the inspiration for Ira Levin’s 1967 best-selling novel, Rosemary’s Baby.

      It was a warm and sunny August day when Mary and I visited Hull-House, not at all the kind of day one would consider even remotely creepy. We were the only visitors at that time, despite the fact that beyond the windows, outside, we could see streams of students hauling mattresses, TVs, clothes, and computers from their cars to the dorms as they moved in to begin the new school year.

      Sara told us that we were welcome to tour the ground-floor rooms of Hull-House but that the second floor, the floor on which Mrs. Hull’s bedroom was located, was off-limits to visitors. An elegant wood-carved staircase in the foyer, carpeted with a red rug, led to the second floor. I was tempted to go up anyway, but decided to obey the rules. Since I didn’t see any buckets of water on the stairs, I thought maybe the ghost would come down to visit with us.

      Sara said that she would show us a brief video about the history of Hull-House, and we followed her out the back door to the adjoining residents’ Dining Hall, which was reconstructed in 1967, as was the main house. The Dining Hall and Hull-House itself are the only two buildings left of the many buildings that made up the Settlement. Just as she approached the door to the Dining Hall, Sara stopped abruptly.

      “Oh, dear,” she said, looking down at the sidewalk. There lay a dead bird, its barred wings spread wide as if in flight.

      A good omen, I thought.

      Sara paused for a moment, then stepped around the little corpse and unlocked the door to the Dining Hall. “I’ll call someone from maintenance to pick it up,” she said.

      She