No city not only in Illinois, but in the entire Midwest of the United States can compare with Chicago in terms of the number of sinister legends. True, almost all of them tell about the ghosts of people who lived in these places relatively recently, in the late 19th - early 20th centuries.
For unknown reasons, human memory has not preserved either Indian myths or legends about the first Europeans who settled here. However, researchers of paranormal phenomena explain this forgetfulness by the peculiarities of Chicago itself - a city with a "double bottom", standing on several geopathogenic zones.
Chicago, like St. Petersburg, was built on swamps: the territory chosen by the first French and then English settlers abounded with rivers and rivulets, on the swampy banks of which wild onions grew - its Indian name "schicacoa" is immortalized in the city's name. Accordingly, the construction technologies used here are in many respects similar to the St. Petersburg technologies.
Thus, the famous 443-meter high Willis Tower skyscraper, which at the time of construction in 1974 was considered the tallest building in the world, was erected on piles driven into subsoil basalt. And the huge theater "Auditorium" still rests on a foundation floating in soft clay.
Initially, the city was almost on a par with Lake Michigan, and already in the 1850s it became clear that this made it difficult to establish the normal operation of the sewer system.
Then it was decided to correct this mistake: the streets were raised by an average of one and a half meters, and in some places by two and a half. The work was carried out at the expense of the owners, so many offices, hotels and supermarkets in the southern part of the center simply acquired additional entrances on the second floor. This is how the "second bottom" of Chicago arose: at the top is a noisy street with elegant houses, and at the bottom - its dark double.
Here is an example of such a double intersection: Michigan Street crosses Grant Street with an arched bridge. It seems to be nothing surprising, but at the bottom, it turns out, there is another intersection: you can go down the narrow stairs and cross Grant Street from below. Down there, cars are scurrying too, people are walking, the doors to restaurants are open …
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Most of the two-layer streets are on the south bank of the Chicago River, although there are also on the north side. All cafes and shops are equipped with two entrances - upper and lower.
The building of the studio, which became famous for the ultra-popular in the USA "The Oprah Winfrey Show", is also located in a two-layer area of Chicago, not far from the busy main streets and the former pier.
This building is known for the fact that inside its walls you can hear strange sounds: in the hall, for example, you can often hear the steps of dozens of people, and on the floors sometimes doors are slammed or opened, from the corridors and rooms one can hear voices, sometimes children's laughter and funny conversations, sometimes clinking glasses and light dance music, then crying and screaming. Some program staff have seen a ghostly woman walking around the premises, as if looking for someone …
These are all echoes of the tragedy of July 24, 1915, when the luxurious pleasure ship Eastland, chartered by Western Electric for a picnic, overturned right at the pier. About two and a half thousand people boarded the ill-fated ship, and more than eight hundred of them died.
Recovered from the flooded compartments and raised from the bottom of the river, the bodies were taken to a temporary morgue - an empty armory, which subsequently changed several owners and was finally acquired by Oprah Winfrey.
Another reminder of the monstrous event is the unusual phenomena near the Clark Bridge: under it the bodies of the drowned people who drowned on the Eastland were being pulled out. They say that sometimes here, in calm weather and serene water, screams, noise, splashing are heard, and sometimes a huge wave suddenly splashes onto the embankment, and in it you can see someone's dead faces. Tourists and residents of the city are reminded of the tragedy of Eastland by a memorial plaque installed on the site of the former pier.
In the years when the old Chicago acquired a "double bottom", it was decided to move some elements of the city infrastructure to other places. For example, in 1870, the old town cemetery, a Victorian necropolis from what is now Lincoln Park, was moved. As a result of the luxurious park graveyards there were two - "Rosehill" and "Graceland".
Both of them are now considered old and are famous for the mass of stories about the ghosts living within them. For example, every year on May 1 at Rosehill, mystic lovers can admire the blue light streaming from the mausoleum of Darius Miller - the man who, together with Howard Carter, looked into the freshly opened tomb of Tutankhamun. Miller's mausoleum, by the way, is a copy of the temple of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the underworld.
And at the Graceland cemetery, you can see the ghostly wolf at the grave of Ludwig Wolfe, the statue on the grave of Dexter Graves coming to life at night, and, according to rumors, even the ghost of Elvis Presley.
No less interesting is the younger Rezurekshn cemetery, founded in 1890. There they talk about a vampire and his fiancée, about unfortunate lovers, about businessmen quarreling and after death.
This cemetery is located on Archer Avenue, a street that is considered a powerful geopathogenic zone and became famous thanks to the legends about the resurrected Mary. This is the name of the ghost of a blue-eyed beauty in a snow-white dress and brand new dance shoes, appearing on cold winter nights. Even now she is sometimes brought up by late motorists, taxi drivers and even policemen, they dance with her, kiss her, talk … but she invariably disappears near the Resurection cemetery.
The story is told about this girl: during her lifetime she often went to the O. Henry Ballroom Ballroom Dancers' Club (now Willowbrug Ballroom), opened by the Verderbar family in 1921. On the ill-fated winter evening of either 1928 or 1929, Mary had a serious quarrel with her companion, ran out of the club, without even putting on her coat, began to catch a car … and she was hit by a truck. The dancer was buried at the Rezurekshn cemetery.
Near the old Catholic Church of St. James and the adjacent cemetery, you can meet the ghosts of Irish monks. In fact, there is no Irish community in this part of Chicago, but it is known that in the early 19th century Irish workers participated in the construction of the Illinois-Michigan Canal.
Upon completion of the work, most moved to the southern states, and some remained to live in the community, later cursed for dissent by a priest of St. James Church. The curse of the priest led the settlement to complete extinction, and the memories of it were erased from the memory of people. And only ghostly monks have been praying for the lost souls of their compatriots for many years.
From the book: "The Cursed Places of the Planet." Yuri Podolsky
