"THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE"

THE UNSOLVED MYSTERY… THAT WASN’T

What do we make of people who simply disappear one day and are never seen again? That’s long been of particular interest to me – so interesting that I’ve penned several books on the subject. As I’ve long noted, there are numerous reasons why people vanish – murder, abduction, suicide and voluntary escapes from reality among them. And then there are the more unnerving cases, where no rational explanation seems to exist. How, or why, do such things happen?

Are they incidents linked to the supernatural, or could there be more mundane explanations for many of them? Over the years, I’ve collected dozens of stories of disappearances that seemed the strangest to me, the most inexplicable and in many cases, the most disturbing. I certainly do not claim to have collected every unsolved disappearance in history (far from it, which is disturbing in itself) and some readers will notice the glaring lack of inclusion in any of my writings for what some believe is a prominent paranormal disappearance mystery spot – the Bermuda Triangle.

The fact that the Bermuda Triangle is missing from all of my books was not an accident on my part. While the area of the Triangle is certainly marked by a number of strange occurrences, I don’t believe there is anything paranormal to it at all. In fact, after years of collecting stories of unsolved vanishings, it become readily apparent that Triangle boasts no more disappearances that other parts of the world’s oceans.

The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean in which a number of aircraft and surface vessels are alleged to have disappeared in mysterious circumstances which fall beyond the boundaries of human error, piracy, equipment failure, or natural disasters. Popular culture has attributed some of these disappearances to the paranormal, a suspension of the laws of physics, or activity by extraterrestrial beings, but in many cases, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Documentation shows that many of the incidents have been inaccurately reported or embellished by later authors – something that happens far more often than most of us care to admit.

Of course, this is not to say that there have not been strange disappearances in the area, or that unsolved disappearances don’t exist, it’s just that the mythos surrounding the area is much greater than it deserves to be. 

The boundaries of the Bermuda Triangle are allegedly from the Atlantic coast of Florida to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and on to the mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda. Most of the alleged disappearances are concentrated along the southern boundary around the Bahamas and the Florida Straits.

But just how dangerous is this area? Apparently, not very…

The area is one of the most heavily-sailed shipping lanes in the world, with ships crossing through it daily for ports in the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean Islands. Cruise ships are also plentiful, and pleasure craft regularly go back and forth between Florida and the islands. It is also a heavily flown route for commercial and private aircraft heading towards Florida, the Caribbean, and South America from points north. If this was some sort of paranormal “wormhole,” wouldn’t disappearances occur much more often?

That would certainly seem to be the case, so how did such stories get started in the first place? The seeds of the Bermuda Triangle legend were first planted by an Associated Press dispatch on September 16, 1950, in which reporter E.V. Jones took note of what he characterized as “mysterious disappearances” of ships and planes between the Florida coast and Bermuda. Two years later, in a FATE magazine article by George X. Sand recounted “a series of strange marine disappearances, each leaving no trace whatever, that have taken place in the last few years” in a “watery triangle bounded roughly by Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico.”

M.K. Jessup picked up some of the stories for his 1955 book, The Case for the UFO, which suggested that aliens were responsible for the disappearances, an idea that was echoed by other authors. It was Vincent H. Gaddis who actually coined the catchphrase that entered popular culture when he wrote an article for the February 1964 issue of Argosy called “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle.” Soon, nearly every new book on true mysteries included chapters on the Bermuda Triangle and claims began to be made that the area was populated by an intelligent, underwater civilization, which was stealing ships, plans and people from our world.

The first book to be written about the Triangle was a self-published work called Limbo of the Lost by John Wallace Spencer. It was re-published as a Bantam paperback in 1973 and attracted a huge audience, as did the 1970 documentary, The Devil’s Triangle. Bermuda Triangle fever peaked in 1974 with the publication of The Bermuda Triangle, a major bestseller by Charles Berlitz and J. Manson Valentine. Two other paperbacks, The Devil’s Triangle, by Richard Winer, and No Earthly Explanation, by John Wallace Spencer, also racked up impressive sales.

The heart of the Bermuda Triangle mystery seemed to revolve around the alleged “scores” of vessels that had vanished in the region. Among the most notable were:

Flight 19

United States Navy Flight 19 was a training flight of TBM Avenger bombers that went missing on December 5, 1945 while over the Atlantic. The squadron's flight path was scheduled to take them due east for one hundred and twenty miles, north for seventy-three miles, and then back over a final one hundred and twenty-mile leg that would return them to the naval base. The flight, however, never returned. The impression is given that the planes encountered unusual phenomena and anomalous compass readings, and that the flight took place on a calm day under the supervision of an experienced pilot, Lt. Charles Carroll Taylor. Adding to the intrigue is that the Navy's report of the accident was ascribed to "causes or reasons unknown." Adding to the mystery, a search and rescue Mariner aircraft with a thirteen-man crew was dispatched to aid the missing squadron, but the Mariner itself was never heard from again. Later, there was a report from a tanker cruising off the coast of Florida of a visible explosion at about the time the Mariner would have been on patrol. While the basic facts of this version of the story are essentially accurate, some important details are missing. The weather was becoming stormy by the end of the incident, and naval reports and written recordings of the conversations between Taylor and the other pilots of Flight 19 do not indicate magnetic problems.

Mary Celeste

The mysterious 1872 abandonment of the brigantine Mary Celeste is often but inaccurately connected to the Triangle (perhaps in an effort to give credibility to the Triangle by placing a real-life mystery there), the ship having been abandoned off the coast of Portugal. The event is possibly confused with the loss of a ship with a similar name, the Mari Celeste, a paddle steamer that hit a reef and quickly sank off the coast of Bermuda on September 13, 1864.

Ellen Austin

A ship called the Ellen Austin supposedly came across an abandoned vessel and attempted to salvage it in 1881. A crew was placed on board and the derelict was sailed for New York. According to the stories, the derelict disappeared while en route. A check of Lloyd's of London records proved the existence of a ship called the Meta, built in 1854. In 1880, the Meta was renamed Ellen Austin. There are no casualty listings for this vessel, or any vessel at that time, that would suggest a large number of missing men placed on board a ship that later disappeared.

USS Cyclops

The incident resulting in the single largest loss of life in the history of the United States Navy, not related to combat, occurred when USS Cyclops, under the command of Lt Cdr G. W. Worley, went missing without a trace with a crew of three hundred and nine men, sometime after March 4, 1918, after departing the island of Barbados. Although there is no strong evidence for any single theory, many independent theories exist, some blaming storms, some capsizing, and some suggesting that wartime enemy activity was to blame for the loss.

Theodosia Burr Alston

Theodosia Burr Alston was the daughter of former United States Vice President Aaron Burr. Her disappearance has been cited at least once in relation to the Triangle. She was a passenger on board the Patriot, which sailed from Charleston, South Carolina, to New York City on December 30, 1812, and was never heard from again. Both piracy and the War of 1812 have been offered as explanations and her ship was well outside the Triangle when it vanished. Once again, a prominent personality was included in the stories of the Triangle in order to give the location more credibility.

Joshua Slocum

The same thing was done with Joshua Slocum and his famous ship, the Spray. The once-derelict fishing boat was refitted as an ocean cruiser by Joshua Slocum and used by him to complete the first ever single-handed circumnavigation of the world, between 1895 and 1898. In 1909, Slocum set sail from Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, bound for Venezuela. Neither he nor the Spray were ever seen again. There is no evidence they were in the Bermuda Triangle when they disappeared, nor is there any evidence of paranormal activity.

Carroll A. Deering

A five-masted schooner built in 1919, the Carroll A. Deering was found hard aground and abandoned at Diamond Shoals, near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, on January 31, 1921. Rumors at the time indicated the Deering was a victim of piracy, possibly connected with the illegal rum-running trade during Prohibition.

Douglas DC-3

On December 28, 1948, a Douglas DC-3 aircraft, number NC16002, disappeared while on a flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Miami. No trace of the aircraft or the thirty-two people onboard was ever found. From the documentation compiled by the Civil Aeronautics Board investigation, a possible key to the plane's disappearance was found, but barely touched upon by the Triangle writers: the plane's batteries were inspected and found to be low on charge, but ordered back into the plane without a recharge by the pilot while in San Juan. Whether or not this led to complete electrical failure will never be known.

Star Tiger and Star Ariel

G-AHNP Star Tiger disappeared on January 30, 1948 on a flight from the Azores to Bermuda and G-AGRE Star Ariel disappeared on January 17, 1949, on a flight from Bermuda to Kingston, Jamaica. Both were Avro Tudor IV passenger aircraft operated by British South American Airways.

SS Marine Sulphur Queen

The Marine Sulphur Queen, a T2 tanker converted from oil to sulfur carrier, was last heard from on February 4, 1963 with a crew of thirty-nine near the Florida Keys. The Marine Sulphur Queen was the first vessel mentioned in Vincent Gaddis' 1964 Argosy Magazine article, but he left it as having "sailed into the unknown," despite the Coast Guard report that not only documented the ship's badly-maintained history, but declared that it was an unseaworthy vessel that should never have left port. Other authors embellished the story even further, making it a part of Triangle lore.

Raifuku Maru

One of the more famous incidents that allegedly occurred in the Triangle took place in 1921, when the Japanese vessel Raifuku Maru went down with all hands after sending a distress signal which allegedly said, "Danger like dagger now. Come quick!" or "It's like a dagger, come quick!" This has led writers to speculate on what the "dagger" was, with a waterspout being the likely candidate. In reality, the ship was nowhere near the Triangle, nor was the word "dagger" a part of the ship's distress call, which was actually “Now very danger. Come quick.” The ship actually left Boston for Hamburg, Germany, on April 21, 1925 and got caught in a severe storm and sank in the North Atlantic with all hands.

Connemara IV

This vessel was a pleasure yacht that was found adrift in the Atlantic south of Bermuda on September 26, 1955. It is usually stated in the stories that the crew vanished while the yacht survived being at sea during three hurricanes. The 1955 Atlantic hurricane season lists only one storm coming near Bermuda towards the end of August, hurricane "Edith;" of the others, "Flora" was too far to the east, and "Katie" arrived after the yacht was recovered. It was confirmed that the Connemara IV was empty and in port when "Edith" may have caused the yacht to slip her moorings and drift out to sea.

Unfortunately, the articles and books on the subject showed little evidence of original research and it was obvious that each of the chroniclers were merely re-writing each other’s work. In 1975, Lawrence David Kusche, a research librarian from Arizona State University, published a devastating debunking of the Triangle with a book called The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved! He called it a manufactured mystery and did the archival digging that many other writers had neglected. Weather records, reports of official investigators, newspaper accounts and other sources showed that Triangle literature had played very loose with the evidence. 

In the book, he concluded that the number of ships and aircraft reported missing in the area was not significantly greater, proportionally speaking, than in any other part of the ocean. Also, in an area often hit by tropical storms, the number of disappearances that did occur was not disproportionate, unlikely or mysterious. Oddly, though, most of the Triangle writers failed to mention such storms.  He also found that the number of disappearances had been exaggerated by sloppy research. A boat listed as missing would be reported, but its eventual (if belated) return to port may not have been mentioned. Other disappearances that were cited never occurred at all. For example, one plane crash was said to have taken place in 1937 off Daytona Beach, Florida, in front of hundreds of witnesses but a check of the local papers revealed nothing.

Other, official sources supported Kusche’s findings. In April 1975, Lloyd’s of London noted that, according to their records, four hundred and twenty eight vessels had been reported missing throughout the world since 1955. “Our intelligence service,” officials at the legendary insurance company wrote, “can find no evidence to support the claim that the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ has more losses than elsewhere. This finding is upheld by the United States Coast Guard whose computer-based records of casualties in the Atlantic go back to 1958.”

In the wake of these statements, only silence was heard from the proponents of the Bermuda Triangle mystery. They were unable to mount a credible defense and because of this, the claims that the area was an authentic anomaly began to suffer. Despite occasional reappearances in supermarket tabloids and the long memories of paranormal buffs who read about the region when they were first getting interested in the unexplained as children, the Bermuda Triangle survives as only a footnote in the history of passing sensations.

Or at least that’s how it should be…

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS

THE DEATH OF H.P. LOVECRAFT

The early years of the twentieth century – the heyday of the pulp magazine era – saw the rise of some of the greatest horror and fantasy writers of all time. Men like Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, Hugh B. Cave, Robert Bloch and many others unleashed a torrent of words on their terrified readers. But of all of the great writers of the era, few could compete with an eccentric young recluse named Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who died in relative obscurity at age 46 on March 15, 1937.

Today, Lovecraft’s name is known around the world and has become synonymous with a genre of horror that involves brooding old New England houses, creeping monsters and unspeakable horrors that lurk just beyond what he called “the thin wall of darkness separating reality from the unplumbed gulfs of madness.” His dark tales have appeared in hundreds of books and anthologies and have been made into dozens of films.

H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft wrote some 60 stories and short novels that revolutionized weird tales, many of which were part of what is called the “Cthulhu Mythos,” a term coined by Lovecraft’s friend August Derleth. The stories are a blend of horror and science fiction which has been continued by many modern authors. The premise of the Mythos involved demon gods that came to Earth millions of years ago to dominate the oceans, valleys and remote regions of the planet. In time, these creatures were driven from the Earth by a race of kindly disposed Old Ones. Although imprisoned on far-flung worlds (or in the case of the winged, tentacled Cthulhu, at the bottom of the ocean), the evil influence of the ancient outsiders lingers in certain repellent myths of antiquity, and in backwater places where they are worshipped in horrific rites. It is the struggle between the demon “outsiders” and the vulnerable human beings that moves the Mythos stories along, often to horrifying conclusions. A continuing theme is the constant threat of Cthulhu’s return.

Lovecraft’s stories worked because he knew how to keep the most horrific elements off-stage, allowing the reader’s imagination to fill in the rest. He buttressed his works with references to invented sources – spurious quotations from ancient texts and references to fictional anthropological and archaeological studies, many of them undertaken by professors from the equally fictional Miskatonic University. He intrigued and baffled his readers by mingling fact with fiction and citing passages from “forbidden” grimoires like the Necronomican, written by the “mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred. The Necronomican didn’t exist, but that didn’t stop Lovecraft fans from searching for it in libraries and bookstores. Today, at least four versions of the Necronomican have been created.

In spite of his lurid tales about demon gods, monsters, cannibalism and rotting corpses in remote farmhouse cellars, Lovecraft was a shy, frail and sensitive man, so squeamish that he often fainted at the sight of blood. He was an eccentric who didn’t fit in with twentieth-century life, frequently expressing the regret that he hadn’t been born two hundred years earlier. Most readers of Weird Tales, where many of his stories appeared, would have been shocked to know that such an odd, reserved fellow had written such tales of bracing horror.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island. His mother, Sarah Susan Phillips, was descended from proud English stock and his father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, was a traveling salesman for the silverware manufacturer Gorham & Co. When Lovecraft was three years old, his father suffered a nervous breakdown in a hotel in Chicago and was brought back to Butler Hospital in Providence, where he remained for five years before dying in 1898. His father’s death left Lovecraft to be raised by a trio of doting women -- his mother and two aunts. The boy withdrew into a dream world in which the peaceful hills and forests of New England transformed into a weird landscape where strange creatures moved in the eerie mists and the rush of gigantic wings floated down from the night skies.

Lovecraft was a highly gifted child, reciting poetry at age two and reading at age three. He made his first attempt at writing weird fiction, a story called “The Noble Evesdropper,” when he was six or seven. His earliest enthusiasm was for the Arabian Nights stories, which he read by the time he was five. It was at this time that he adopted the pseudonym of “Abdul Alhazred,” later to become the author of the mythical Necronomican. The next year, however, his Arabian interests were eclipsed by the discovery of Greek mythology, gleaned through Bulfinch’s Age of Fable and through children’s versions of the Iliad and Odyssey. Around this same time, Lovecraft discovered the works of Lord Dunsany and Algernon Blackwood. Lovecraft considered Blackwood’s story “The Willows,” about another dimension impinging on our own, to be the best “weird tale” of all time.

Lovecraft was as eccentric as he was precocious. His hatred of foreigners – especially the “verminous hordes of distorted aliens” that flocked to New York – knew no bounds, as did his distaste for all things modern and mechanical. Even though he was married once, he avoided women (except for his relatives) and all things sexual.

As a boy, Lovecraft suffered from frequent illnesses, many of them apparently psychological. He only sporadically attended school and never received a high school diploma, but this didn’t stop him from soaking up information. At about the age of eight he discovered science, first chemistry, and then astronomy. He began to produce science journals that he distributed amongst his friends. In 1906, his first writing appeared in print as letters to the editor and columns in local newspapers.

In 1904, Lovecraft’s grandfather died and the subsequent mismanagement of his affairs caused terrible financial problems for the family. Lovecraft and his mother were forced to move out of their lavish Victorian home into a cramped apartment. Lovecraft was devastated by the loss of the house in which he had been born and some say that he contemplated suicide. In 1908, just before he was to have graduated from high school, he suffered a nervous breakdown, which caused him to leave school without a diploma. This fact, along with his consequent failure to start at Brown University, were sources of great shame for Lovecraft in later years. From 1908 to 1913 Lovecraft was a virtual hermit, doing little save pursuing his astronomical interests and writing poetry.

It was writing that forced Lovecraft to begin interacting with the outside world again. Having taken to reading the early “pulp” magazines of the day, he became so incensed at the insipid love stories written by author Fred Jackson in The Argosy that he wrote a letter, in verse, attacking Jackson. This letter was published in 1913, and evoked a storm of protest from Jackson’s defenders. Lovecraft engaged in a heated debate in the letter column of The Argosy and its associated magazines, Lovecraft’s responses being almost always in the form of rollicking poems. The controversy was noted by Edward F. Daas, president of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), a group of amateur writers from around the country who wrote and published their own magazines. Daas invited Lovecraft to join the UAPA, and Lovecraft did so in early 1914. He began publishing his own paper, as well as contributing a large body of poems and essays to other journals. Later, Lovecraft became president and official editor of the UAPA, and also served briefly as president of the rival National Amateur Press Association (NAPA). Lovecraft always believed that this experience was what saved him from a life of unproductive solitude.

Having found his niche in the world of amateur magazines, Lovecraft began writing fiction again, something he had abandoned in 1908. W. Paul Cook and other writers noted the promise in some of Lovecraft’s early tales and urged him to take up the pen again. Lovecraft did, writing “The Tomb” and “Dagon” in quick succession in the summer of 1917. He continued to write fiction, although poetry and essays continued to occupy most of his time. During this time, Lovecraft developed his greatest friendships. His friends were scholars, poets and writers – men with whom he stayed in constant contact through letters, some of which were more than 50 pages long. He eventually became one of the most prolific correspondents of the twentieth century, writing some 87,500 letters. Typically, he had a habit of dating his letters 200 years earlier than the actual date.

It’s through his letters that we know most of what we do about this complex and enigmatic man who, even though he never published a single book during his lifetime and died a pauper, became one of America’s most celebrated horror writers. Today, Lovecraft and his mythical creations turn up in such diverse places as episodes of South Park and songs by Metallica. He even has a Facebook page. Like his hero Edgar Allan Poe, whom he called “my god of fiction,” Lovecraft did not live long enough to savor his fame. It is because of the friendships that he developed through his letter writing, especially that of August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, co-founders of Arkham House, the publishing company that introduced Lovecraft to the masses, that his work has survived.

Lovecraft’s mother suffered a nervous breakdown in 1919 and was admitted to Butler Hospital. Her death on May 24, 1921, resulted from a bungled gall bladder operation. Lovecraft was shattered by the loss of his mother, but in a few weeks had recovered enough to attend an amateur journalism convention in Boston on July 4, 1921.

It was at this convention that he first met the woman who would become his wife. Sonia Haft Greene was a Russian-born Jewish widow who was seven years older than Lovecraft. In spite of the age difference and Lovecraft’s usual dislike of foreigners, the two seemed happy together, at least at first. Lovecraft visited Sonia in her Brooklyn apartment in 1922, and the news of their marriage in St. Paul’s Chapel in Manhattan on March 3, 1924, was not entirely a surprise to their friends. However, Lovecraft’s aunts, Lillian D. Clark and Annie E. Phillips Gamwell, were notified of the ceremony by letter after it was over. Lovecraft moved into Sonia’s apartment in Brooklyn, and initial prospects for the couple seemed good. Lovecraft was starting to see a small amount of success from the acceptance of several of his stories by Weird Tales, the celebrated pulp magazine that was founded in 1923, and Sonia was the owner of a successful hat shop on Fifth Avenue.

But trouble soon found the couple -- the hat shop went bankrupt, Lovecraft turned down the chance to edit a companion magazine to Weird Tales that would have forced him to move to Chicago, and Sonia’s health collapsed, forcing her to spend time in a New Jersey sanitarium. Lovecraft tried to find work, but there was little work available for a 34-year-old man with no job experience. On January 1, 1925, Sonia moved to Cleveland to take a job there and Lovecraft moved into Brooklyn’s seedy Red Hook neighborhood.

Although Lovecraft did have friends in New York, he became increasingly depressed by his isolation and the “foreigners” that surrounded him in the city. His fiction turned from the nostalgic (“The Shunned House,” which is set in Providence) to the bleak (“The Horror at Red Hook” and “He,” which lay bare his feelings about New York. Finally, in 1926, he made plans to return to Providence, which he missed badly. He had no idea how Sonia fit into his plans. Although he continued to profess his affection for her, he went along with his aunts when they barred her from coming to Providence to start a business. They refused to allow their nephew to be tainted by the stigma of a wife who was a tradeswoman. The marriage was essentially over and they divorced in 1929.

When Lovecraft returned to Providence in 1926, he did not hide away from the world as he had done before. In fact, the last 10 years of his life were his best years, both as a writer and as a human being. His life was relatively uneventful. He traveled widely to various antiquarian sites around the eastern seaboard. He wrote his greatest fiction, from “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) to “At the Mountains of Madness” (1931) to “The Shadow out of Time” (1934–35) and he continued his vast correspondence. He had not only found his niche as a New England writer of weird fiction but as a man of letters. He nurtured the careers of many young writers, became concerned with political and economic issues, and he continued absorbing knowledge on a wide array of subjects, from philosophy to literature to history to architecture.

The last two years of Lovecraft’s life were filled with hardship. In 1936 his beloved aunt, Lillian Clark, died, and he moved into a house with his other aunt, Annie Gamwell, soon after. His later stories, increasingly lengthy and complex, became difficult to sell, and he was forced to support himself largely through the “revision” or ghost-writing of stories, poetry, and nonfictions works. In 1936, the suicide of Robert E. Howard, one of his closest correspondents, left him confused and saddened. By this time, the intestinal cancer that would cause Lovecraft’s death had already progressed too far for treatment.

He grew weaker and by February 1937, emaciated and in great pain, Lovecraft was confined to bed. He continued to write, propped up on pillows, but his cancer was so painful that he had to be fed intravenously and frequently sedated with morphine. He carried on for as long as he could but was finally compelled to enter Jane Brown Memorial Hospital on March 10, 1937, where he died five days later – pen and notebook in hand.

He was buried on March 18 at the Phillips family plot at Providence’s Swan Point Cemetery, a graveyard filled with ancient trees and crumbling tombstones that once likely served as inspiration for his fevered tales.

HAUNTED JACKSONVILLE: "THE CITY'S MOST DEADLY FIRE"

HAUNTINGS OF THE HOCKENHULL BUILDING

On January 15, 1966, seven people were killed when a fire raged through the apartments above Walgreen’s drug on the east side of Jacksonville, Illinois’ downtown square. This was, by all known accounts, the greatest loss of life from fire in the city’s history. Investigation later ruled that the fire had been an accident, started by a burning cigarette, but the eerie result was that it left a haunting in its wake – a chilling presence that still makes its presence known in the building today.

Warga’s (the name of the Walgreens store) in Jacksonville was still located on the downtown square in 1966. It was a remnant of what had once been a thriving shopping district during the heyday of the smaller, family-owned businesses that once dominated commerce in every American city. Jacksonville was no exception. Anything that you could possibly want could be purchased downtown during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. After World War II, a shift in where people shopped began to occur, but before that, you could buy everything from suits to dresses, furniture, tools and auto parts in downtown Jacksonville. Many locals purchased toiletries or had prescriptions filled at Walgreens, which was located in what was known as the Hockenhull Building.

 The Hockenhull Building on the downtown square.

John and Robert Hockenhull arrived in Jacksonville in 1839. Both men had been apothecaries in England and they opened a small drug store on the city square. They prospered and soon opened a dry goods store on East State Street. In 1866, Robert branched out further and with Raymond Kind and Edward Elliott, opened the Hockenhull, King and Elliott Bank. By this time, Robert had purchased a home on Grove Street and had become a trustee for Illinois College and for the All-Female Academy, that later became known as MacMurray College. He was one of the most important men in the city and one of the wealthiest. In 1891, he expanded his holdings with the construction of the Hockenhull Building on the east side of the square. The towering stone building still looms above the sidewalk today, although any business that would have been known to Robert Hockenhull has long since vanished from Jacksonville.

Warga’s was just one of the many businesses still operating during the fading days of the old square. Before its recent revitalization, the square declined for decades, much like most downtown business districts across the country. As new businesses opened along Morton Avenue, downtown Jacksonville slowly began to die. Many of the remaining stores had apartments over the shops, often cramped and dingy lofts that were as weary as the declining businesses below them. In the Hockenhull Building above Warga’s, there were apartments on the second and third floors – apartments that became death traps on a cold winter’s night in January 1966.

According to newspaper reports at the time, the scene at the fire was chaotic. Residents in the building frantically tried to escape the flames while firefighters were working to extinguish the blaze and save the tenants. One man, Robert Lee Brown, 18, who was sleeping with his family in one room of their four-room flat, was rescued by firefighters who used an aerial ladder truck to whisk five people from the upper part of the building within five minutes of their arrival on the scene. The only other member of the Brown family to escape death that night was one of Robert’s younger siblings. The rest of them perished from asphyxiation from the smoke.

The Warga's drug store on the lower floor of the Hockenhull Building on the night of the deadly fire in January 1966. 

John Yeager, his wife and two children were trapped in their third floor apartment, but remaining calm, he managed to get them out of a rear window and to a roof below. Tragically, an elderly couple, Alice Leggett and Charles Souza, who lived just on the other side of the Yeagers’ wall, were not so lucky.

Authorities believed that about a dozen people escaped from the apartments on the second and third floors, including Kathryn Wease, 19, and her two children, ages 13-months and 6-weeks. The janitor of the building, Virgil Duncan, managed to make it out with two unidentified tenants, who lived above Barney’s gift shop. Those who died in the blaze were Leota Mae Brown, 46; her four children, Ray, 15; Donna, 14; Rickey, 10; and Jimmy, 2; along with Leggett and Souza.

Elsie Brannan, 76, was the first to realize that something was wrong in the building around 1:30 a.m. Unable to sleep, she repeatedly thought she smelled smoke, opened her door and saw the flames in the hallway. Although elderly, Elsie reached a window transom, some six feet off the floor, and managed to pull herself up over the door and through the narrow opening. She dropped to the floor in the dense smoke and made her way through a storeroom above the drug store, breaking a window to reach the roof. Several people who escaped from the fire later told reporters that they heard someone yelling “in back, and ringing what sounded like a bell or someone banging on pans.”

Mrs. Brannan would later admit that she did what she could to rouse the other sleeping tenants. She then broke out a window at the rear of Birdsell’s tailor shop, making her way through the darkness to a window above East State Street, which she promptly shattered. Waving a piece of cloth from the tailor shop, she was eventually spotted by a motorist driving past.

Gary Strubbe, who was driving around the square a few moments later, saw Clara Davis, her daughter, Kathryn Wease, and her two young children frantically screaming for help from an upper floor. He went immediately to the police department and sounded the alarm. Within minutes, the fire department was on the scene. When firefighters arrived, Clara and Kathryn were each holding a child out of the apartment windows and rescue workers at first thought they might throw them from the second floor. Mrs. Davis later explained that they were holding the infants outside of the window to keep them out of the dense smoke. Firefighters used the aerial ladder to save the women, children and Robert Brown and then to work looking for other survivors.

Led by Assistant Fire Chief Alvin Smith, a crew equipped with oxygen masks groped their way through the smoke to the third floor. Meanwhile, other firefighters battled their way to the second floor, where they discovered the origin of the fire and quickly began trying to douse the flames that were roaring up the wall to the third floor. By this time, nearly 100 people had gathered in the square and many of the men assisted the firefighters in moving hose lines.

A cheer went up as survivors were brought to safety, but then a hush fell over the crowd when someone called out that there were still people trapped on the third floor. By this time, though, the crew led by Assistant Chief Smith had reached the victims and were carrying the bodies out onto a roof at the rear of the building. The departure of several ambulances without their emergency lights bore mute witness to the fact that some of the people trapped in the building had not escaped with their lives. “On Saturday morning,” one news reporter wrote, “Jacksonville asked why and how?”

Fire Chief Dale Bond attempted to answer the questions. The fire, he stated, had started in the second-floor apartment, occupied by a woman named Alice McCausland. She had been found semi-conscious in a lower floor hallway between Warga’s and Edward’s jewelry store. When Police Officer John Irlam asked her at the scene how she escaped the fire, she reportedly told him, “There’s no fire up there, I put it out.”

According to Chief Bond, the fire spread from McCausland’s bedroom up the wall. The intense heat shattered a transom window and spread up the hallway wall to the third floor. Damage to the building was estimated in excess of $50,000.

Later that month, at a coroner’s inquest, Chief Bond testified that, during two separate interrogations, McCausland confessed that she had dropped a lighted cigarette in bed, which caught fire, starting the blaze. Bond stated, “She said ‘I dropped a cigarette in bed, and when I found it, smoke was coming from the covers. Then I put it out.’” Bond then said that he asked her what she did next and she replied, “'went to bed.’”

During later questioning, the chief said that McCausland would not repeat her earlier confession and firmly told him that she made it a rule not to smoke in bed. According to Charles Runkel, the police chief at the time, no charges were ever filed against McCausland for the deaths of the seven people killed in the fire. Officially, the blaze was listed as accidental.

But accident or not, seven people, including four children, died that night in the rundown apartments above the drug store. According to scores of people who have experienced the haunting that lingers in the Hockenhull Building, those who perished in the fire do not rest in peace.

In the middle 1990s, life began to return to the downtown square. Old buildings saw new activity as coffee shops, art galleries and small shops began seeking out the nostalgia of yesterday in the brick buildings and ornate structures from Jacksonville’s past. The lower portion of the Hockenhull Building was opened as a pet store and later, an art gallery – although the upper floors remained as jarring reminders of the building’s tragic past. Evidence of the fire remained starkly visible, from burned floors and walls to even charred clothing that still hung in the closets.

And it wasn’t just physical reminders of the past that could still be found. Stories soon circulated of strange shadows, footsteps, laughter and the eerie voices of children – perhaps the same children who died in January 1966. The artists on the first floor had their own experiences, speaking of cold chills, lights that turned on and off by themselves, office equipment that operated on its own and the smell of cigarettes when no one was smoking in the building.

My friend Loren Hamilton, who leads American Hauntings ghost hunts in the building, has had more than his share of strange experiences at the Hockenhull. Guests who have accompanied him for these outings have witnessed and recorded many strange things, from disembodied voices, unexplained knocks, unknown shadows, apparitions and more.

To this day, the Hockenhull Building remains one of Jacksonville’s most notorious sites. It is a place where the past truly comes back to life and where the dead are unafraid of making their presence known to the living.

The Hockenhull Building is just one of the many stops on the Haunted Jacksonville Tour, which returns in May 2014 to the American Hauntings roster of tours. Click Here to see More about the Tour!

"THE BLACK GHOST"

THE DECATUR GHOST SCARE OF 1903

A recent blog delved into the mystery of the phantom that preyed on the people of O’Donnell Heights, a neighborhood in Baltimore, in 1951. [click here to see the “Horror of the Heights”] I’ve always had an affinity for weird stories of “phantom attackers,” which arrive to terrorize a neighborhood or community and then abruptly vanish without a trace. It’s possible that my fascination with such tales stems from stories that I heard about the “Mad Gasser of Mattoon” when I was growing up. Mattoon, Illinois was less than an hour away from me and the story was once from the not so distant past. But the “Mad Gasser” was not the only phantom attacker from my neck of the woods. Even my hometown of Decatur had its own mysterious figure, who wreaked havoc for one week of sheer terror in November 1903.

Downtown Decatur, Illinois in the early 1900s

It began on November 13, and for the next week; fear gripped the city of Decatur, Illinois. According to reports, a chilling apparition in a black robe, with a veil covering its face and “awful eyes that burned like fire” began terrorizing the residents of the city’s west side. Some claimed the unknown monster it was a man dressed in women’s clothing while others swore that it was a demon from hell. Whatever the creature was, it generated a panic in Decatur like nothing that had ever occurred before.

The first sighting occurred on Tuesday night. A young lady was walking alone along West Wood Street when a black-shrouded phantom appeared from between two houses near Union Street. The “black ghost,” as it was later dubbed, came quickly toward her and she began to scream. Just at that moment, a carriage drove out of a nearby barn and the creature fled. The young woman reported the incident to the police, who assumed that it was nothing more than a prank – until more sightings began to be reported on the West Side. More black ghost appearances were noted, on West Main Street, West Wood and along Pine Street. Who, or what, this specter might be was unknown, but it terrified people as it lurched from the shadows and then vanished without a trace.

News of the ghost quickly spread throughout the city. Sightings were reported in the newspapers and the phantom became a heated topic of conversation in restaurants, saloons, barbershops, billiard halls and schools. The police admitted to being perplexed by the weird sightings and the average people in the city were intrigued – and a little unnerved.

Two additional black ghost encounters took place on November 14 when dozens of people were out looking for the monster. The first occurrence took place during the early evening hours when a young man called the police from a grocery store on the West Side, claiming that he had seen the black ghost. Although the caller never gave his name, the authorities took the call seriously and dispatched two officers to the store. The witness left before the officers arrived and a search of the neighborhood revealed nothing out of the ordinary.

Millikin University on Decatur's West Side in 1903

Henry Ray, a student at Millikin University, was out that evening, having taken a streetcar from the college to a downtown theater. He stayed late and the streetcars had stopped running before he needed to return to Millikin. Content to travel on foot, he had reached Haworth Avenue when he told police that he encountered the black ghost crouching in the shadows along the north side of the street. The creature appeared to have a club in its hands and when it saw Ray walking alone, it got up and started toward him. Ray said that he first thought he would confront the ghost, but then he changed his mind and began to run south on Haworth Avenue. He claimed that the creature had chased him as far as Dr. Lonergan’s home on West Decatur Street and then had disappeared.

The ghost returned again on November 15. Fred Travis and Dell Hooey, two young men who worked for the Chicago, Bloomington & Decatur freight house, encountered it on North Monroe Street, just north of the Cerro Gordo Street intersection. The two men were on their way home from the freight house around 8:30 p.m. They had just turned north from Cerro Gordo on the east side of Monroe and were about halfway to the railroad tracks when they met the specter. They were busy talking to one another when it appeared and startled them both.

“There it is,” Hooey shouted to his friend. “Let’s find out what it is!”

The young men’s description of the creature matched what had been reported by other witnesses. It was black from head to foot and was draped in apparel that was like that of a nun, except that the face was covered by a black veil. Its motion was not like that of a person walking, but rather a gliding movement, as if on wheels or rollers. Travis later stated that it seemed to have a shiny object, like a fork or small rake, in its right hand. Its other arm was folded across its chest, hunching the monster’s broad shoulders.

Both of the men gave chase to the ghost. Travis, who had recently placed for a semi-professional baseball team, was regarded as one of the fastest men in the city. Regardless, the ghost easily outpaced them. Travis had been carrying a board with him, which he planned to take home and burn in his stove, but when he saw the ghost was getting away, he hurled the board at it. He was sure that if the phantom had been a material being, the board would have hit it. Instead, it passed through the ghost and fell to the sidewalk. Moments later, he said, the specter disappeared.

Later that same night, a man named Theodore Fowler also encountered the black phantom, this time on West Decatur Street. He was in the 900 block, walking east on the north side of the street at about 10:30 p.m., when he saw a black-shrouded figure appear ahead of him. It glided along for about a half block and then abruptly vanished. This convinced him that the figure had been a ghost.

By this time, the stories of black ghost sightings were sweeping through the city and the people of the West End, especially women, were becoming terrified. Many of them were too scared to leave their homes at night but, unfortunately, even staying indoors was not enough to protect them from visitations from the ghost. The phantom appeared at the residence of Elmer Wood at 1120 West Macon Street on November 16. Three young women from Millikin University, who were boarding at the house for the school year, were talking and having a good time in the parlor. They heard a noise on the front porch and one of them went to the door to see who was there. When she looked through the glass, she let out a bloodcurdling scream. The black ghost was lurking on the front porch with its veiled face pressed to the glass of the front door. At the sound of the scream, the phantom fled from the porch and went straight across the street to a house on the other side. It rattled the doorknob with great ferocity and when the woman of the house came to the door, she saw it and ran away screaming. The black ghost vanished into the darkness.

Later that same night, Mrs. Jake Lehman was terrified by the creature near her home on West Macon Street. She had walked to a nearby store on an errand and was on her way back home when the ghost appeared from the shadows. She let out a scream and the creature chased her all of the way home. She burst through the door and fell down, much to the surprise of her family. “I was so badly frightened,” she later said, “that I was hardly able to tell what was the matter.” Someone looked out the window and saw the black ghost, which hurried past the house and then disappeared.

These were not the last sightings on this night. Edward Freemont spotted the black ghost sliding along North Monroe Street and then two young women, who were walking home from church in the 300 block of West Decatur Street, also saw the phantom. It was standing in a yard a short distance away from them and as they approached, it turned and floated around the corner of a house without a making a sound. Although it made no threatening gestures, or chased them, as it had so many others, the girls were terrified and immediately ran home and called the police.

By November 17, the city was in a frantic state. Plainclothes police officers were put on patrol on the West Side, looking for any sign of the black ghost. They didn’t track down the creature, but they did give stern words of warning to several pranksters, who thought it would be fun to dress up in a black overcoat and jump out and scare people. Unsure of what to make of the sightings that could not be explained away, police officials dismissed the ghost as a female “morphine fiend” who went crazy when she couldn’t obtain her drugs. Of course, this failed to explain the mysterious disappearances of the creature or how a board could be thrown at the “morphine fiend” and pass through her as if through thin air.

The people of Decatur were convinced that a real ghost was in their midst and search parties were organized to try and track the monster down. Early in the evenings, crowds of men and boys could be found in every part of the West End. Eldorado and Monroe streets were thoroughly searched. All of the search parties went armed with sticks and clubs, apparently hoping to thrash the ghost if they managed to catch it. They roamed the streets and alleys for most of the night, shouting and laughing to one another. The only thing these “ghost hunters” managed to find was trouble since sleeping residents began reporting their behavior to the police around midnight.

But not every ghost hunting party was made up of local ruffians and teenagers. Dr. L.E. Conradt and about twenty members of the respected Iroquois Club took up the search for the black ghost. They armed themselves with clubs and went all over the West Side of town, exploring behind signs, down fence rows, in orchards and down alleys. They searched for more than two hours but were unable to find anything that resembled the phantom.

No additional sightings of the black ghost occurred on November 18, although the search parties were still out on the hunt. The people of Decatur remained on edge and women were still terrified. In fact, they were so scared that talk of the ghost was blamed for two women almost burning themselves to death. A Mrs. M.M. McDonald of Stonington was spending the night of November 18 with her friend, Mrs. Gates, who lived at 531 North Monroe Street. The ladies were alone in the house, reading about the ghost sightings in the newspaper and talking about the mysterious creature, and had become very nervous by bedtime. When they retired, they placed a lighted lamp on a chair beside the bed so that they could see which way to run in case the ghost decided to call during the night.

 Around 2:00 a.m., Mrs. McDonald awoke and found that her nightdress was on fire. The lamp had somehow tipped over and had set fire to the sheets. She screamed and awoke Mrs. Gates, who managed to get her into the bathroom, soak her with water, and put out the fire. Her friend’s sleeve had been burned away and her arm was badly scorched. Meanwhile, the bed itself was still on fire and Mrs. Gates managed to wrestle the bed covers into the bathtub and extinguish the flames. The fire department was summoned, but the blaze was already out. Dr. F.M. Anderson arrived to dress Mrs. McDonald’s wounds and pronounced that both women were very lucky. Needless to say, the whole incident was blamed on the black ghost.

The ghost might have been at the Gates house “in spirit,” so to speak, but it was certainly not making its presence known anywhere else. After the rash of ghost hunting parties, which started on November 17, no sightings of the ghost were ever reported again. Whoever, or whatever, the creature had been, it had apparently left Decatur for good, never to return. The excitement over the “ghost attacks” subsided and the wandering gangs of ghost hunters soon found other things to do. Eventually, the Decatur Ghost Scare was largely forgotten.

Who, or what, was this strange creature? Was the black ghost merely a prankster who entertained himself by scaring people on Decatur’s West Side and then decided to give up the joke when too many people started looking for him? Or was the specter really just that: a genuine supernatural being? It’s certain that we can blame at least some of the sightings on the hysteria that swept through the city that long ago November, but can we dismiss them all? How do we explain the rational accounts of a ghost that disappeared without explanation, or the thrown board that passed through it?

The mystery of the black ghost will likely never be solved, but it certainly managed to establish Decatur as a weird and haunted place, even back in 1903. 

Check out the Haunted Decatur Tours, now in our 21st season of the ghosts, hauntings, spirits, scandals and sins of Decatur, Illinois! Click Here!

THE HORROR IN THE HEIGHTS

THE “BOOGEYMAN” OF BALTIMORE 1951

The summer of 1951 was a weird time in the city of Baltimore. The city sweltered under a heat wave and only the wealthiest residents of the region could afford air conditioners at the time. And there were no air conditioners to be found in O’Donnell Heights, a housing project on the southwest side of the city. This was a place where steel mill and shipyard workers lived with their families. For those folks, though, the steamy heat was less of a worry than the specter that was stalking their streets.

At some point in July, a tall, thin figure, dressed all in black, began sprinting across the rooftops of O’Donnell Heights. It leapt on and off buildings, broke into houses, attacked people, enticed a young girl to crawl under a car and played music in the nearby graveyard. Groups of young men patrolled the streets, while others waited by their windows at night, keeping a sleepy watch for the “Phantom Prowler” that eluded his pursuers and vanished into the cemetery before he could be caught. By the end of the month, police were arresting people for disorderly conduct and carrying weapons, but the phantom had disappeared and was never seen again.

What in the hell happened in O’Donnell Heights in the summer of 1951? To this day, no one knows.

O’Donnell Heights was only eight years old when the mysterious stranger began making his appearances. Built as a housing project for defense industry workers at Bethlehem Steel, Martin Aircraft and Edgewood Arsenal during World War II, it was never meant to be either durable or attractive. Tightly-spaced, two–story row houses went up on sixty-six acres of what used to be farmland, a brickyard that belonged to the Baltimore Brick Co. and part of St. Stanislaus Kostka Cemetery, one of several graveyards in the immediate area. The others included Evangelical Trinity Lutheran Congregational, Mount Carmel, St. Matthew’s and Oheb Shalom Congregation Cemetery, but the phantom would show an affinity for St. Stanislaus and often appeared nearby.

Baltimore Row Houses

By the time that the local newspapers realized that something very strange was happening in the Heights, the panic was almost over. Most of the stories that remain today come from the back pages of the Baltimore Sun and Evening Sun, which printed a handful of articles between July 25 and July 27, when the sightings came to an end. Reporters approached it as a “tongue in cheek” story with cartoon illustrations. No one seemed to know when the events had started, but on July 24, Agnes Martin told a reporter that the phantom had been seen for “at least two or three weeks.”

The first definite date discovered by researcher Robert Damon Schneck was on July 19, although the figure had undoubtedly been seen a number of times prior to that. On this date, though, there was a full moon and nighttime temperatures were in the 70’s. It was around 1:00 a.m. when William Buskirk, 20, ran into the phantom. He reported, “I was walking along the 1100 block of Travers Way with several buddies when I saw him on a roof. He jumped off the roof and we chased him into the graveyard…” One of the other boys interviewed with Buskirk stated that, “he sure is an athlete. You should have seen him go over that fence – just like a cat.” The fence that surrounded the cemetery was six feet in height and trimmed with barbed wire around the top. According to the witnesses, the figure in black had leapt over it with ease.

Hazel Jenkins claimed that the phantom grabbed her some time the same week. She saw it twice at close-range and may have been attacked when the figure tried to break into the Jenkins home (the article isn’t clear) but her brother, Randolph, saw it soon after. He told a reporter, “I saw him two nights after he tried to break into our house… He was just beginning to climb up on the roof of the Community Building. We chased him all the way to Graveyard Hell.”

The phantom next visited the family of Melvin Hensler, breaking into their house on July 20, but stealing nothing. After this unnerving experience, the family went to stay with Mr. Hensler’s brother, but Mrs. Hensler returned to the house the next day and found “a potato bag left on the ironing board,” which she was convinced belonged to the intruder. Mr. Hensler was so exhausted from staying awake that his eyes ached and he had started talking in his sleep.

Storms on July 23 lowered the temperatures, but had no effect on the phantom. In fact, on July 24, he was especially active. Newspapers reported, “At 11:30 p.m. officers Robert Clark and Edward Powell were called to the O’Donnell Heights area where they were greeted by some 200 people who said that had seen the oft-reported ‘phantom.’ Clark said that they pointed to the rooftops and someone yelled: ‘The phantom’s there!’” The police drove around and arrested a twenty-year-old sailor carrying a hammer. He was fined $5.

A reporter from the Sun found thirty of forty people waiting around the back stoop of a house on Gusryan Street, waiting for the sun to come up. One of them, Charles Pittinger, had armed himself with a shotgun. He interviewed several of them, who passed along rumors and told of their own experiences. Some of them claimed the phantom lived in the graveyard and a woman who lived on Wellsbach Way, adjacent to St. Stanislaus, suggested that the phantom was doing more than jumping fences and breaking into houses: “One night I heard someone playing the organ in that chapel up there. It was about 1 o’clock.”

The phantom was also reportedly seen beckoning to Esther Martin from underneath an automobile, saying, “Come here, little girl.”

The consensus of the crowd was that the phantom easily leaped from two-story buildings, flew over fences and was a general nuisance in the neighborhood. A man named George Cook admitted having mixed feelings about what was happening. He did not deny the reports of the phantom, just the possibility that something extraordinary was involved. In the end, he blamed the media. “It’s ridiculous to believe that a man can jump from a height and not leave a mark on the ground. Yet this character does it all the time. It’s my idea that when this thing is cleared up… it’ll turn out to be one of these young hoodlums who has got the idea from the movies or the so-called funny papers, and is trying to act it out. This sort of thing appeals to detective story readers who are mainly looking for excitement.”

Meanwhile, the police were busy ignoring the phantom and rounding up the “usual suspects.” On the morning of July 25, they arrested four boys on disorderly conduct charges at an unidentified cemetery. Around 10:00 p.m. that same night, officers arrested three boys on an embankment near the cemetery. Their six companions, all on the lookout for the phantom, fled the scene. An hour later, the police responded to a call from a resident who heard footsteps on his roof, but nothing was found. At some point the next day, Mrs. Mildred Gaines heard the sound of someone trying to break into her house and ran outside barefoot screaming, “It’s the phantom!” It was actually the police breaking down the door to serve a search warrant on the premises. Mrs. Gaines and four male companions were arrested on bookmaking charges.

By this time, the newspaper coverage – which had started off with reporters as baffled as the residents of O’Donnell Heights – turned humorous. The stories poked fun at the sightings, reported pranks by neighbors pretending to be the phantom, and carried a story about a phantom sighting on a rooftop that turned out to be a ventilation pipe. On July 27, the Evening Sun announced there were no more reports and that, “Police think it might be a teenager.” The phantom was gone, but the heat was back, with high humidity and temperatures in the middle 90’s.

Like most bizarre “flaps” of this type, there was no satisfying resolution to the panic created by the Phantom of O’Donnell Heights. An unofficial version claimed that residents finally chased it into the cemetery, where the phantom jumped into a crypt and vanished for good.

No one can say who, or what, this figure may have been, although based on the sheer number of sightings, something weird was happening in the neighborhood. Descriptions of the phantom were fairly consistent, considering that that the encounters were brief, took place in the dark, and he was usually moving at a good clip. William Buskirk said, “He was a tall thin man dressed all in black. It looked like he had a cape around him.” The only one who mentioned the phantom’s face was witness Myrtle Ellen, who said it was horrible. She also agreed about the dark costume. The newspapers described the phantom as “black robed,” suggesting long, loose-flowing clothes. Mrs. Melvin Hensler, discoverer of the discarded potato sack, saw the phantom three times and said that during one sighting, it looked as though he had a hump on his back.

Theories abound about the “Horror of the Heights.” Sociologists have described the events in O’Donnell Heights as an example of an “imaginary community threat,” suggesting that the 900 families living there experienced some type of mass hysteria, whipped up by rumors and the media. It’s true that misconceptions undoubtedly played a part in the events, but they don’t explain the relatively straightforward experiences described by William Buskirk and other witnesses. The police never denied that people were seeing something but, like George Cook, thought it would turn out to be a “young hoodlum.” But if it was, he was never caught, exposed or confessed.

It’s also hard to accept that the newspapers played a part in creating any hysteria. The two local papers ran only six articles on the phantom, two of them mere fillers, and they were printed as the sensation was coming to an end. The only one that might be called “sensationalistic” ran on July 25 and included the experiences of a number of witnesses. However, it ended on a sober note: “The question of the prowler of O’Donnell Heights continued to be not one of the phantoms, but of people reacting to (and possibly creating) the unknown with their imaginations.”

Some have taken the phantom’s affinity for St. Stanislaus as evidence that it was an actual ghost. Part of O’Donnell Heights was built on land that once belonged to the cemetery, which contains a great many unmarked graves from the influenza epidemic of 1918. Also, bodies were exhumed and reinterred when Boston Street was extended in the 1930s, but it’s hard to see how this would stir up a spirit in July 1951.

There has also been the suggestion that the phantom was some sort of mysterious entity like the “Mothman” of West Virginia or the “Mad Gasser of Mattoon,” which plagued a small town in Illinois in 1944.

Whatever it was, it remains a mystery and one that – like far too many others – will simply never be solved.

THE MYSTERY OF JOHN HAMILTON

DEATH & MYSTERIOUS AFTERLIFE OF A DILLINGER GANG MEMBER

Little is known about the life of John “Red” Hamilton previous to his criminal career and his association with famed bank robber, John Dillinger. Perhaps even less is known about what happened to him following the ill-fated FBI raid on the lodge known as Little Bohemia in April 1934. Despite an astonishing lack of evidence, speculation about his death runs rampant and rumors persist about where he died, if he died at all and whether or not his ghost still haunts a house in Oswego where he may have breathed his last.

John “Red” Hamilton

“Red” Hamilton (who was also sometimes known as “Three-Fingered Jack”) was a small-time hood from Canada when he lucked into meeting John Dillinger while serving time at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City. On March 16, 1927, he had been convicted of robbing a gas station in St. Joseph, Indiana, and sentenced to 25 years. While incarcerated, Hamilton became friends with a number of prominent bank robbers, including John Dillinger, Russell Clark, Charles Makley, Harry Pierpont, and Homer Van Meter – the men who would go on to comprise the original Dillinger gang.

John Dillinger

Dillinger was paroled in May 1933, but swore that he would break his friends out of prison. Using a list that had been compiled by Hamilton and Pierpont, Dillinger began robbing banks to finance the escape. In September of that same year, he managed to get a barrel filled with guns smuggled into the penitentiary and a total of 10 armed men, including Hamilton, escaped out the front gates.

Soon after they escaped, the gang learned that Dillinger had been arrested and was being held at the Allen County Jail in Lim, Ohio. Determined to free him, they, in turn, needed cash to finance the escape and robbed the First National Bank at St. Mary’s, Ohio, on October 3, 1933. They escaped with $14,000. Nine days later, Hamilton accompanied Charles Makley, Harry Pierpont, Russell Clark, and Ed Shouse to the Lima jail where Dillinger was being held. However, he did not go inside of the building and did not participate in the murder of Sheriff Jess Sarber, which Makley and Pierpont would later be convicted for.

Over the course of the next couple of months, Hamilton took part in a number of daring robberies with Dillinger and the rest of the gang. After a profitable robbery in Wisconsin, the gang went down to Florida for a time and then went west to Tucson. Hamilton, however, decided to go to Chicago instead, where, on December 13, 1933, he took part in the robbery of a local bank. A day earlier, Hamilton had left his car at a Chicago garage for some bodywork. For some reason, the garage’s mechanic called the police with his suspicion that the vehicle was a “gangster’s car.” When Hamilton returned to pick up the car, he was confronted by Sergeant William Shanley and two other officers. Hamilton opened fire, killing Shanley, and managed to elude capture by the other officers.

Meanwhile, Dillinger and the others had been apprehended by the authorities in Tucson, leading to disaster for several members of the gang. A short time later, Dillinger managed to escape from the Crown Point, Indiana, jail and mustered a new gang, which included Hamilton, Homer Van Meter, Tommy Carroll, Eddie Green, and Baby Face Nelson.

Hamilton subsequently accompanied the gang on a string of lucrative but chaotic bank robberies, including a heist that resulted in Hamilton being wounded. The robbery occurred at a bank in Mason City, Iowa, which allegedly had over $240,000 in its vault. The gang arrived at the bank on March 13, 1934. Nelson stayed with the getaway car while inside the bank, the rest of the gang ran into one problem after another. When the bank president, Willis Bagley, saw Van Meter walk in carrying a machine gun, he thought that a "crazy man was on the loose." He ran into his office and bolted the door. Van Meter, knowing that Bagley had the keys to the vault, fired a number of shots through the door, but gave up trying to break in and helped his associates clean out the teller drawers.

Moments later, a guard in a special steel cage above the lobby fired a tear gas shell at Eddie Green. It hit him in the back and almost knocked him down. As he swung around, he fired off his machine gun and several bullets clipped the guard.

At the same time, a female customer, who was missing a shoe, ran out of the bank and down the alley outside, where she ran directly into a short man wearing a cap. She begged him to call for help -- the bank was being robbed. Unfortunately for her, the short man was Baby Face Nelson and he sent her back into the bank.

Meanwhile, John Hamilton was having his own problems. Cashier Harry Fisher had barricaded himself in the locked room with the vault. Since Hamilton could not open the door, he ordered Fisher to start passing money to him through a slot in the door. Fisher began handing him stacks of one-dollar bills.

Dillinger was outside, guarding prisoners on the street. An elderly policeman named John Shipley spotted him from his third-floor office and took a shot at him. He winged Dillinger on the arm and the bank robber whirled around and fired a burst from his machine gun. The bullets bounced off the front of the building and Shipley ducked away unhurt. With that, Dillinger decided that it was time to leave. He sent Van Meter inside to get the others.

Hamilton was still having problems with Cashier Fisher. He could see the stacks of bills on the shelves inside the vault where Fisher stood. He demanded that the man open the door but Fisher told him that he couldn't do it without the key. Hamilton continued to threaten him with his gun and Fisher continued to load stacks of one-dollar bills into the bandit's bag. He was enraged when Van Meter came inside and told him that they were leaving as he had only about $20,000 in his bag and there was over $200,000 still sitting in the vault! Gritting his teeth in frustration, he turned and ran out of the bank, leaving the crafty Fisher to count his blessings. Hamilton later groaned that he should have shot the man -- just out of spite.

At the same moment that Hamilton ran out of the bank to join the others, Officer Shipley returned to the overhead window and started shooting again. He wounded Hamilton in the shoulder but the bank robber managed to get to where Dillinger and the others were waiting. They forced 20 hostages to stand on the running boards, fenders and hood of the getaway car, serving as human shields. The bank robbers piled inside and drove slowly away, the car groaning and creaking under all of the extra weight. The police were unable to shoot or try and stop them with all of the hostages on the vehicle so they were forced to follow at a distance. A few miles out of town, Baby Face Nelson climbed out of the car and fired his machine gun in their direction, finally forcing the police to turn back. After following back roads at slow speeds for more than two hours, Dillinger dropped off the reluctant passengers and headed for St. Paul. What should have been a prosperous raid had netted the outlaws a disappointing $52,000.

After a close call with the authorities in St. Paul, Hamilton and Dillinger made a discreet visit to Hamilton’s sister’s house in Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, on April 17. Looking for a place to lie low for a while, Pat Reilly, a fringe member of the group, told Dillinger about a quiet Wisconsin resort that he knew of called Little Bohemia. It was a remote fishing camp that was not due to open until May and would make the perfect place to hide out for a time. Over the next day or two, the gang drove into the Wisconsin woods and checked into the Little Bohemia Lodge to plan their next robbery.

Little Bohemia Lodge

Little Bohemia seemed to be just the answer for the gang but somebody talked and soon, Melvin Purvis, the head of the FBI office in Chicago, received a tip from a rival resort owner in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, that Dillinger was at Little Bohemia. Within hours, Purvis moved dozens of agents from Chicago and St. Paul to the forests of Wisconsin. They planned a raid on the lodge for April 22, 1934.

On the night of the assault, Purvis moved his agents into position at the front of the lodge just as three men were emerging and getting into a parked car. As the engine started, Purvis shouted for the men to stop but they never heard his warning. Seconds later, the FBI agents unleashed a hail of gunfire and ripped the car apart. Eugene Boiseneau, a Civilian Conservation Corps worker, was killed instantly and his two fishing buddies were both wounded.

Hearing the gunfire outside, Dillinger, Van Meter, Carroll and Hamilton ran out the back of the lodge and disappeared into the woods along the lake. Baby Face Nelson, who was staying in a nearby cabin with his wife, ran outside, fired some random shots at the agents and also vanished into the trees.

Chicago FBI agent Melvin Purvis

  

Purvis, believing that Dillinger was still inside the lodge, ordered the assembled agents to continue firing into the building. They pounded the lodge all night long, shattering windows and splintering the walls, floors and ceilings with bullets. When morning came, and there was no resistance, they entered the building to capture the gang's girls, who had been hiding in the basement all night.

While FBI agents were pouring more than 1,000 bullets and thousands of pellets of buckshot into the empty floors of Little Bohemia, Dillinger and the gang were stealing cars at neighboring farms and resorts and heading off in different directions. Nelson killed one federal agent and wounded another, as well as a local officer, at a nearby resort. Tommy Carroll eluded everyone and Dillinger, Hamilton, and Van Meter stayed together.

In Park Falls, Wisconsin, they commandeered a Ford coupe and headed towards St. Paul. The trio ran into Rusk County Sheriff Carl Nelson at the Flambeau River Bridge near Ladysmith, Wisconsin, and Van Meter managed to slip past the sheriff and his deputies long enough to hit Wisconsin Route 46, cross the Mississippi River, and enter Minnesota at Red Wing. On U.S. 61, they headed for St. Paul. The tired gangsters were not thinking clearly and were heading back to the same city from which they had escaped before. The authorities were thinking much faster and Dakota County deputies spotted their Wisconsin license plates on a bridge at Hastings, just 15 miles from St. Paul. Officers gave chase, only to be blocked by a slow-moving cattle truck on the two-lane bridge. Once they could pass, they managed to track down the blue Ford about 10 miles further north at St. Paul Park.

Deputy Norman Deiter leaned out the window with a .30-30 rifle and fired at one of the Ford’s rear tires. The slug punched through the thin body of the automobile between the fender and the spare, tore through the rear seat, and drilled into John Hamilton’s back. He screamed in agony and slammed forward against the front seat of the car.

Dillinger smashed out the window behind Hamilton and returned fire with his .45, shattering the windshield of the police car just above Deputy Joe Heinen’s head. The daring officers stayed with the fleeing vehicle and the two cars traded 40 or 50 rounds for the next 50 miles or so, until finally the bandits managed to lose them about two miles from where the chase started. They continued their journey, doubling back through St. Paul Park and crossing the Mississippi River once again. 

With Hamilton losing blood from the gaping wound in his back, and the local police surely on to them by now, Dillinger decided to head to Chicago and find a doctor for his friend. First, though, they would need a faster and less- recognizable vehicle. Van Meter cut off a 1934 Ford V8 Deluxe at City Road 10 and Fifth Avenue. Power company manager Roy Francis, his wife, Sybil, and their 19-month-old son, Robert, were ordered out of the car as the bandits tossed their belonging into the flashy roadster. After the injured Hamilton managed to get himself inside, Dillinger ordered the Francis family back inside, as well. Sybil Francis recognized Dillinger right away, but he smiled at her reassuringly. He told her, “Don’t worry about the kid. We like kids.”

Van Meter followed in the other car to Robert Street and Willy Road, where the slower, bullet-riddled Ford was dumped. The Francis family was dropped off a short time later, a few miles outside of Mendota. The bandits wished them well and continued on toward Chicago.

When they arrived in the city, Dillinger desperately tried to find a doctor to treat his failing friend, John Hamilton. The wound in his back, which was the size of a silver dollar, was festering and starting to stink of gangrene. They managed to track down the unscrupulous Dr. Joseph Moran, the greedy practitioner who was well known for treating underworld characters and had previously hit up Dillinger for $5,000 after caring for wounds from a previous robbery. This time, though, Moran refused to lend his services at any price, possibly because he knew that Hamilton would never recover from his wound. Moran suggested that they take him to Elmer’s Tavern in Bensenville and let him die there. Hamilton, his agony increasing by the hour, spent a few days at Elmer’s, but he simply didn’t die. Finally, Dillinger took him to a Barker-Karpis gang safe house in Aurora at 415 Fox Street. The place was being rented by Volney Davis and his girlfriend, Edna “Rabbits” Murray. Edna took care of Hamilton as best she could, but he was a lost cause. Ravaged with gangrene and stinking up the house, Hamilton finally died on Thursday, April 26.

Dillinger, Van Meter, Volney Davis, and some of the Barker-Karpis crew buried Hamilton in a gravel pit near Oswego, Illinois, covering the body with 10 cans of watered-down lye to make identification more difficult. Dillinger delivered a eulogy, “Sorry, old friend, to have to do this. I know you’d do as much for me.” Davis placed a roll of rusty wire that he found nearby on the grave as a makeshift marker.

John Hamilton was left there to rest in peace – or so the story went. Legend, however, tells many different tales about his eventual fate.

Hamilton supposedly died in Aurora in the house that had been rented to Volney Davis. His girlfriend, Edna, had been ordered out of the house before Hamilton died and did not hear about his death and Oswego burial until she reunited with Davis later on that year.

But as far as the FBI knew, and despite the blood that was liberally splashed around the backseat of the car that he, Dillinger, and Van Meter had abandoned, Hamilton’s death was still uncertain, based on second- and third-hand accounts of others connected with Dillinger. None of those who talked had actually been there to see Hamilton die and all of seemed to have different stories to tell. One rumor claimed that he had been buried in the sand dunes of northern Indiana. Another claimed that he had been weighted down and dropped into an abandoned mine shaft in Wisconsin. It was not until Davis had been arrested, escaped, and arrested again that FBI agents learned of the unsuccessful efforts of Dillinger and Van Meter to get medical treatment for Hamilton from Dr. Joseph Moran.

It’s possible, though, that Dillinger persisted. After Dillinger was (allegedly) killed on July 22, girlfriend Polly Hamilton (no relation to John) said that Anna Sage had told her that Hamilton was being treated for a “badly infected wound” by Dr. Harold Cassidy. If this were true, then Hamilton was alive as of June 1934, and possibly later.

Nevertheless, Volney Davis, and others, stuck to the story that Hamilton had died in agony at the Aurora safe house, and he provided a general description of the burial site. There were inconsistencies of the actual time and place of Hamilton’s death and the persons involved in the burial, but more than a year later, on August 28, 1935, federal agents who went digging in an Oswego gravel pit found a badly decomposed body.

Before the body was found, the FBI had been receiving reports from police and individuals claiming that John Hamilton was alive and hiding out in northern Indiana. Since he had been reported killed on other occasions, the search continued until the body was found in Oswego, minus a hand and so corroded from the lye that had been poured over the remains that the agents had little to identify the corpse with besides some strands of hair and a belt size. The best they could do was to pull a few molars from the skull and send them to the physician at the Indiana state prison. He compared them to Hamilton’s dental chart, which showed some fillings, and declared that the FBI had found their man. This satisfied J. Edgar Hoover, who proclaimed the belated discovery of the last member of the Dillinger gang to every newspaper in the country. The case of John Hamilton was now officially closed.

The body that was taken from the gravel pit was buried in the Oswego cemetery and the funeral service was paid for by Hamilton’s sister from Michigan. Rumors spread around Oswego and some of them still linger today. According to some stories, Hamilton did not die in Aurora at all, but right there in Oswego. One story even pointed to a house in town where Dillinger and his gang allegedly holed up while Hamilton slowly died in agony. Past owners of this house reported to me first-hand that the house was definitely haunted and they believed the lingering spirit was that of John Hamilton.

But was Hamilton really dead at all?

Reports that claimed that Hamilton was still alive continued coming in to the FBI on a regular basis, but they were apparently disregarded. Most could be written off as cases of mistaken identity but at least one of them was particularly convincing. The letter was recorded by the FBI on August 24, 1936 (a year after Hamilton’s body was supposedly found). It was sent by a former prisoner who was known as “Happy.” He knew some of the gang members, as well as Arthur O’Leary, an investigator for Dillinger’s attorney, Louis Piquett. It is believed that “Happy” may have been an associate of Dillinger named Fred Meyers, who lived in Chicago.

The letter read:

Dear Sir:

Will you kindly advise how much you will guarantee in cash secret and confidential information about the movements of John Hamilton? There are three people who know that he is still living and happen to know the details concerning him.

If interested please make offer through personal column of Chicago Tribune as follows, HAP * Will buy ,000 bushels, meaning of course that many thousand dollars for this information and place ED after the word bushels. If this offer is OK you will be supplied with an amazing detail report on his present physical condition and movements. Money must be on deposit at your Chicago Office but will not have to be paid until this man is captured or killed or both. This information must be kept strictly confidential between you and I and must be kept out of the newspapers except code transmissions between you and I. I am a hardworking electrician and took considerable time and money to get this data and do not want to risk my life for the deal. Everything will be handled by correspondence and code in the Chicago Tribune. If your offer is accepted, I will make you proposals which must be guaranteed by you as a strictly gentlemen’s agreement.

The FBI received the letter, but there is nothing to indicate that J. Edgar Hoover ever saw it. There was likely no follow-up ever done because by the time that the body believed to be Hamilton was found, Hoover had won the national “War on Crime,” appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and was turning his attention to the communist threat.

Could the letter writer have been telling the truth? There are many who believe so. One of those who became convinced that John Hamilton survived his wounds and was never buried in Oswego was a nephew, Bruce Hamilton. Many years after the fact, he described a trip that was taken by family members in 1945 that resulted in the collection of a large amount of money. He was later told that the money had been stashed away by the Dillinger gang – the whereabouts of which was known to the gang’s only surviving member, John Hamilton.

After the trip was over, Bruce’s father, Wilton Hamilton, paid off the mortgage on his home in South bend, Indiana, bought a new house, and purchased the family’s first new car.

Less than a year later, Wilton planned a trip to Sault Sainte Marie on the Canadian border to see relatives at the home of John Hamilton’s sister, Anna. The journey was made by Wilton and his wife, Harriet, their older son Douglas, their daughter, Jane Margaret, and Bruce, then 15 years old. It was during this trip, which centered around a gathering of about a dozen relatives, that Bruce met the man that he was told afterward was his relative, John Hamilton. He and his brother and sister were told not to discuss the trip with anyone.

Around this same time, Hamilton’s brother, Foye, who was recently released from prison, came into a great deal of money. He used it to build a machine shop in Rockford, Illinois, and he also purchased Turtle Island in the Great Lakes area near Sault Sainte Marie, as well as boats and a seaplane to use getting to and from the island. Bruce suspected that a large cabin on the island provided a hiding place for his uncle John.

Bruce’s interest in John Hamilton increased with age and he learned more details about what had happened to him from his father. Apparently, the wounded Hamilton, after stopping in Aurora and then Chicago (where the FBI originally believed he had died), obtained treatment from Dr. Cassidy and then went into hiding with his brother, Sylvester, in East Gary, Indiana. Dillinger then returned to Aurora, while Sylvester took John to the home of William Hamilton, Bruce’s grandfather, in South Bend. William helped get him to a hideout previously used by the Dillinger gang, a nearby place called Rum Village Woods. Hamilton recuperated well enough to go to work as an electrician at a family-owned bowling alley in South Bend in 1936 and 1937. According to an elderly aunt of Bruce Hamilton, John later moved to Canada and died in the 1970s.

But if John Hamilton didn’t die in Aurora in 1934, then whose body was disinterred in Oswego in 1935? One possibility is that the body belonged to Dr. Joseph Moran, who disappeared shortly after refusing to treat Hamilton’s wound in Chicago. Hoover had continually pursued Moran for months after he vanished, and later declared that he had been killed and dumped in Lake Michigan. Alvin Karpis, one of the leaders of the infamous Barker-Karpis gang would only say that Moran had been murdered, and was buried, but he would not say where.

Was the decomposed corpse found in the gravel pit Moran’s? And if so, could he be the spirit who haunts the nearby house? These mysteries, like the death of John Hamilton, will likely never be solved.