“Any ghosts?” I asked, experience having taught me it was best to get to the point in paranormal matters.
Kerry gave me a sidelong glance and took a step away, as if I had given him a shove. “No ghosts,” he said, shaking his head.
I still had a few minutes before the house tour was scheduled to commence, so I continued to stroll through the courtyard. Kerry stuck by me, pointing out interesting architectural details. We stopped at the rear of the courtyard. I was looking up at the servants’ quarters above the kitchen in the west wing of the house.
“But some weird things have happened here,” Kerry said, almost in a whisper.
Bingo.
“Really? Like what?”
Kerry looked around to make sure we were still alone. “Both Glessners died in the house. Mrs. Glessner in 1932 and her husband in 1936.”
“That’s not weird,” I said, “just unfortunate.”
“But they’re still here,” Kerry said, “at least Mr. Glessner.”
We started slowly walking out to the front of the mansion. Kerry told me about the day he was in the mansion’s kitchen, located at one end of the west wing. He said that he suddenly detected the scent of Mr. Glessner’s favorite soap, a sample of which is on display in his dressing room. Glessner’s dressing room, located off the master bedroom, is at the opposite end of the mansion, a great distance from the kitchen. Unless Glessner’s favorite soap was Eau d’Skunk, it was unlikely its fragrance could be detected that far away under normal circumstances.
“It was intense,” Kerry said. “It was like someone held the soap right up under my nose.”
As strange as Kerry’s story sounded, olfactory sensations are frequently linked to ghostly manifestations. It is not unusual for people to detect a female ghost through the fragrances of a favorite perfume or flower. Male ghosts, at least those who smoked in life, may be recognized by the scent of a favorite cigar or pipe tobacco. I had never heard of soap fragrance as an indicator of a ghostly presence, but I supposed it was as plausible as the other scents.
Besides, John Jacob Glessner was the kind of man who would continue to make his presence known long after death. Glessner was born in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1834. As a young man he was employed by Warder, Bushnell and Glessner, manufacturers of farm machinery. The ambitious Glessner worked his way up through the corporate ranks and in 1870 was sent to Chicago to oversee the company’s operations there. That same year, Glessner married Frances Macbeth of Springfield, Ohio.
The Glessners occupied two different houses before constructing the Prairie Avenue mansion. Their son George was born in one in 1871 and their daughter Frances, called Fanny, was born in the second house in 1875.
It was in the fashionable lakeshore Prairie Avenue District that Glessner built his mansion, a home much different in style from those of his rich neighbors. This was a neighborhood of tree-lined streets and fabulous mansions that displayed the architectural genius of men such as Solon Spencer Beman, Daniel Burnham, Richard Morris Hunt, and John Wellborn Root. The Glessner house was neighbor to other lavish homes owned by men whose names defined commercial success in late-nineteenth-century Chicago. George Pullman, the railroad car magnate, had a fine Victorian home on the corner diagonally across from the Glessner house. The Kimball family, made wealthy by the Kimball organs installed in thousands of churches across America, lived directly across the street from the Glessners. Marshall Field’s department stores were located mostly in downtown Chicago, but his house was just down the street from the Glessners’, as was that of the Armour family, the famous meatpackers.
The lifestyle in these opulent mansions, filled with fine furniture, antiques, and art treasures from all around the world, was grand and it took an army of people to keep them functioning. There were servants, butlers, doormen, cooks, housecleaners, mechanics, and tutors continually engaged in some task or another. Many of these domestic servants lived in the mansions, receiving food and board as part of their compensation.
Strong competition in Glessner’s industry in the early 1900s threatened to destroy some companies, but Glessner was one of the men who successfully helped to merge the corporation with some of the leading firms of the day, including McCormick Reaper and Deering. The new corporation took the name International Harvester and was an instant financial success. John Glessner was rewarded for his services by being named a vice-president in the new organization; he went from being a merely wealthy man to a fabulously wealthy one.
The Glessners were prominent members of Chicago society. John Glessner served as trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Orchestral Association, was director of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society, and was president of the board of Rush Medical College. Frances Glessner, John’s wife, was a member of the Chicago Society of Decorative Art and founded the Monday Morning Reading Class for women; the group met weekly in the Glessner house for more than thirty years.
The Glessners loved their Prairie Avenue home and lived there for fifty years, even as many of the other grand old houses surrounding them were closing up because of the enormous costs in operating them. The neighborhood was changing and, one by one, the wonderful old mansions were either being pulled down or were subdivided into boarding houses.
Today, only five of these elegant Prairie Avenue homes remain, although the neighborhood is enjoying a revitalization of sorts as affluent Chicagoans are rediscovering it. The Glessner House is the best preserved of the old houses. Mary and I were about to see how well preserved the old mansion was; the house tour was about to start.
We joined the dozen or so people milling about on the sidewalk before the massive wooden front door of the house. Kerry stood off to the side since he was not leading this group. Our tour guide soon joined us. She was a thin, grim-faced woman with a sharp profile who set off around the house on a double-time quickstep that soon left the elderly and portly among the group panting somewhere far behind us. She was every bit as well informed about the house as Kerry, and I supposed she liked her job, but she never smiled so I was not at all certain.
We entered the house, the first stop being the basement, which was like no basement I had ever been in before. No leaking water heater. No smelly, smoky furnace. No insulation drooping down from exposed rafters overhead. No, the Glessner basement, at least the portion we saw on the tour, was carpeted, paneled in maple and furnished with beautiful bookcases, tables and chairs. Yellow pine beams supported the ceiling. This room was the schoolroom, built for George Glessner, who suffered severe allergies and was schooled at home. Architect Henry Richardson designed an effective cross-ventilation system especially for the schoolroom to help alleviate young George’s sufferings.
The upper levels of the mansion were designed in imitation of an English country manor. Red-oak paneling lined the halls, the parlor, the library, and dining room, and was also used in the wainscoting in the spiral staircase and upstairs passages. Huge oak beams held up the ceiling in the main entry hall, library, and dining room. So much wood would have made any house dark as a medieval castle, but Richardson solved this problem by having all the rooms face out to the courtyard in the rear and including large windows on that side of the house to let in ample light.
Much of the furniture and decorations in the house were not actually owned by the Glessners, but were authentic to the time and similar to the possessions the Glessners might have owned. The library, however, was an exception in that almost all of the books and furnishings in the room were original to the Glessners.
The tour guide led us into the library, trying to squeeze us all into the narrow aisle defined by the velvet cord separating us from the interior of the room. We had rapidly outpaced the stragglers. As she began to tell us about the library, more of them arrived, plowing into the group, rapidly squeezing the oxygen out of the room. I saw Mary disappear in a corner and thought I would probably never see her again.
From what I could see over the shoulders of those in front of me, bookcases