The residents of Hull-House were not the poor immigrants from the neighborhood. Rather, they were young, idealistic men and women, mostly college educated, who came to live and work at Hull-House and direct its programs. They did this as volunteers, without pay. Many of these residents were women who in all likelihood would not have found a suitable outlet for the application of their college education had they not worked at Hull-House. In the Dining Hall, these bright and energetic young people had the opportunity to socialize with each other and to exchange ideas and opinions in ways that they might not have had in the general public.
The Dining Hall, with its wood paneling, paintings, carpeted floors, and long tables, seemed like a comfortable enough place to dine and chat, but now it was quiet and still, devoid of any ghostly presence.
I glanced at Mary and she shook her head. She didn’t feel anything either.
We left the Dining Hall and went back out to Hull-House. The dead bird was gone.
Back inside Hull-House, we were free to explore the downstairs rooms at our leisure. Jane Addams had wanted to restore the fine old house as best she could, to make it a warm and welcoming place for the poor people of the neighborhood. She succeeded admirably.
Richly carved moldings outlined the tall doors and long windows and framed the ceilings. In the center of the back parlor, Addams’s desk, a simple Colonial style in cherry wood with three rail-back chairs, stood on a Persian rug. A bright brass chandelier with six tulip-shaped glass globes hung above the desk. The walls were covered with gold-flocked wallpaper. On one wall was a marble fireplace surround. A portrait of Jane Addams in a gilded frame hung above it. A glass-front bookcase stood against another wall. Sunlight streamed into the quiet and peaceful room through the sheer curtains covering the windows.
If Mrs. Hull was floating around in that room, she didn’t make her presence known to either Mary or me.
The smaller room adjoining the back parlor was called the octagon room, for obvious reasons, and was the “nerve center” of the Settlement. A pigeon hole desk, now only collecting dust, years ago would have been stuffed with messages for Hull-House volunteers. An old-fashioned two-piece phone stood silently on the desk. Nearby, an ancient typewriter slowly rusted away.
These rooms were interesting from a historical perspective, but my imagination was continually drawn to the stairs in the foyer. I stood there before the velvet rope that blocked access to them and looked up. There wasn’t much to see, only the light gradually fading into gloom at the top of the stairs.
Although I didn’t see anything that day as I peered up into the darkness at the head of the stairs, others have seen strange things. Dale Kaczmarek, a Chicago-area ghosthunter, once took a photo of the stairs, using a standard 35mm camera with infrared film. Although the stairs were empty when he took the photo, four shadowy monk-like figures appeared on the print after the film was developed. This is interesting because there are no known connections between monks and Hull-House, yet monks, or at least dark, hooded figures, are common ghostly apparitions, even in locations in which no monks were ever known to have lived. Other people have reported seeing similar dark and hooded figures in the windows of Hull-House. Who these figures may be, and why they are at Hull-House, remains a mystery.
While the ghostly encounters at Hull-House were originally attributed to Mrs. Hull, some believe that the ghost of Jane Addams herself may also be roaming the rooms in which she spent so much of her life. Perhaps her work there is not yet finished.
Museum of Science and Industry
CHICAGO
CHICAGO’S MUSEUM OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY, located at 57th Street and Lake Shore Drive, is one of the country’s pre-eminent centers for informal science and technology education.
It is also home to at least three ghosts.
The beautiful domed and columned building was originally built as the Palace of Fine Arts for the 1893 Columbian Exposition and is the only surviving structure from that exposition. The museum, which is situated along the shore of the Jackson Park lagoon, looks more like an ancient Greek temple than it does a center of science and technology. Perhaps it is that feeling of antiquity that draws the ghosts.
One of the museum’s most famous ghosts is that of Clarence Darrow, the celebrated lawyer whose battle with William Jennings Bryan in 1925 over the issue of teaching evolution in schools—a trial known as the Scopes Monkey Trial—has become a landmark case in the annals of jurisprudence and was also the inspiration for the play and movie Inherit the Wind. Darrow figured prominently in many other high-profile cases, including the 1924 Leopold and Loeb case, in which he defended two stone-cold teenage murderers of a fourteen-year-old boy and won them life imprisonment instead of the electric chair.
Darrow lived in the Hyde Park neighborhood that includes the museum. He died in Chicago in 1938 and his cremated remains were scattered in the Jackson Park lagoon as he had requested. Every year a wreath-laying ceremony honoring Darrow is held at the bridge spanning the lagoon. In 1957 the bridge was dedicated in his memory and is now known as the Clarence Darrow Memorial Bridge.
Dale Kaczmarek, a Chicago ghost investigator who also operates area ghost tours, reported that a man on one of his tours took photos of the lagoon and captured the smoky image of a face near the bridge. Could it have been the ghost of Clarence Darrow?
“His ghost has been seen here in the museum as well,” said Travis*, a docent my wife, Mary, and I met at the Burlington Zephyr exhibit inside the museum. Travis was a rosy-cheeked young man whose new beard was just starting to grow in. Travis wore the blue uniform and cap of a train conductor, but he looked more like a kid on Halloween trick-or-treating as Captain Kangaroo.
“People have seen an elderly man dressed in a suit, walking in the hall by the windows that overlook the lagoon. They say he matches the description of Clarence Darrow. He’s there for just a moment, then he disappears,” Travis said.
Travis told us how the ghost interrupted a children’s Halloween storytelling session he was conducting at the museum. “I looked up and there he was. In the next second he was gone.”
We were standing before the gleaming engine of the Burlington Zephyr, one of the country’s first diesel streamlined trains, as we spoke. The stainless steel Burlington Zephyr seemed to glow in the vast, dark hall of the museum. Three cars were attached to the engine: a mail car, a passenger car, and a passenger lounge at the rear of the train that featured a curved exterior and panoramic windows. Travis said he had more to tell us, but it was time for him to lead the next tour through the train. Mary and I climbed aboard with him and a handful of other visitors.
The tour began in the mail car, with the history of the Burlington Zephyr given to us by Zeph, a robotic figure in the form of a talking burro so lifelike that some of the little children in the group patted its nose and tried to feed it some hay while it talked. The real Zeph joined the Dawn to Dusk Club of eighty-four distinguished passengers on the Zephyr’s maiden run from Denver to Chicago on May 26, 1934. Zeph came on board when the Rocky Mountain News offered the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad (CB&Q) a “Rocky Mountain Canary” as a mascot for the trip. It was only when the burro was delivered that Ralph Budd, CB&Q president, understood he had accepted a burro and not a bird. Budd quickly ordered hay to be placed on board for Zeph, remarking, “One more jackass on this trip won’t make a difference.” Zeph sped off into history as the Zephyr broke all train speed records of the day, traveling 1,015 miles in 13 hours and 5 minutes, the longest nonstop train trip the world had ever witnessed. The Zephyr’s average speed was 77.5 miles per hour, although it peaked at 112.5 miles per hour.
The Zephyr’s sleek styling and incredible speed made it an instant celebrity, and the train starred in the 1934 movie