From the Weird Chicago Blog:

As the holidays roll around, let's consider a REALLY weird piece of Chicago history - the snowman that allegedly came to life in Logan Square in 1958. According to legend, the snow man became sentient after children placed a mysterious black hat on his head, and, after beginning to dance around, he ran away through the square, disobeying traffic cops and threatening to come back again someday.

Some insist that the story was true, but evidence is slim. Olga Durlochen's "Good Grief, More Chicago Spooks" lists three eyewitnesses, but census data indicates that at least two of them never existed. Newspapers of the day don't seem have picked up the story, leaving us with very little documentary evidence beyond the usual hearsay. Researchers, who note the similarities between this story and the Jewish legend of the Golem, generally believe it to be little more than an urban myth, but some people can still be found poking around soil samples in Logan Square, trying to find "proof."

Others wait for the day when "Frosty" fulfills his own prophesy and returns, but there have been no sightings in the last half century.

Happy Holidays from the Weird Chicago gang!

Here's Ken, one of my partners, plugging us on WGN TV!

(This is cross-posted from The Weird Chicago Blog, where three parts of the series have already been posted).

've been doing some research on Chicago hotels and run across the DAMNEDest story - one of those "how in the hell didn't i know this whole story" sort of things.



In January, 1944, Mrs. Adele Born WIlliams, a 58 year old society "matron" walked up to her apartment at the Drake Hotel with her daughter and found the door unlocked. Inside, they found a gray-haired woman in a black fur coat. Without a word, the woman pulled from her curse an antique pistol and fired two shots at Williams' daughter. She missed, then left the bathroom and fired several shots at Mrs. Williams, eventually hitting her in the head, causing a wound that would prove fatal within hours. The fur-coated woman then walked out of the room and was seen by a couple of men before Williams' daughter cried for help. "I could have tripped her," one of them men later said, "but I'm not in the habit of tripping strange women."

And so began a case that got stranger and stranger. Among the twists in the tale:

- Police launched a massive search of the hotel and found nothing. However, four hours later, the murder weapon was found, shattered, in a stairwell, apparently having been dropped from a high floor. Police had search that place - then gun had apparently been returned to the scene of the crime!
- Similarly, a spare key to Williams' room was reported missing from the front desk at the time of the murder. Mysteriously, it appeared back on the desk at 10 o'clock that evening!
- Mrs. Williams had $100,000 in cash in a safety deposit box for reasons unclear.
- No jewelry or valuables were taken.
- Just before the murder, a phone call had been placed from Mrs. Williams' room to a fish and ale house two blocks away.
- The girl who worked the desk was a convicted hold-up girl with a bizarre past.

The mystery remains unsolved. There was never a suspect, and though various motives were suspected, none of them really held up. It was a huge story in 1944, and mentioned at least once a year on the anniversary in newspapers for at least a decade later (interestingly, as of the late 1950s, the Trib was still spelling "clue" c-l-e-w.). Today, it's been totally forgotten - until Weird Chicago came along, of course!

This case is quite a corker - this will be the first of a series on it! Consider it an addendum to The Weird Chicago Book - which, of course, is what this blog was intended to be!

For the record, I've never heard anything about the Drake being haunted other than some vague rumors. Anyone have any stories about it?

I've done 40 in all. Here're a few more:

Working on the Weird Chicago book is totally unlike doing stuff for Random House. for one thing, the turn around time between finishing it and having it for sale is going to be a matter of weeks. We intend to have it out shortly, and we still have time for new ideas.

The cover, like most of our print ads, is based on old EC Comics:


Just the other day we got the idea to have some comic-type ads in it that related to the content, so I've spent the last couple of days happily crankin' 'em out. Here're a few:








We intend to have a page at the beginning of each chapter, mixing in a few actual newspaper ads for events that ended in disaster, performances of Hamlet downtown starring John Wilkes Booth, etc. I've made about 30 so far.

Working!

- Weird Chicago and the new Weird Chicago Blog are taking up plenty of time - on Wednesday, I spent all day in the newspaper archives digging through defunct Chicago papers for information to use in an upcoming Weird Chicago Ebook on the H.H. Holmes "Murder Castle" that I'm editing. I did the typesetting and layout yesterday. Also putting together a route for our "Chicago Anarchy Tour," which is available to school groups as the "Chicago Political Tour."

- Biking around. Got my bike spruced up for spring with a new chain and a fresh coat of paint. Yesterday I biked out to document a location that's on the Weird Chicago blog today. The day before I rode all over downtown. THis is the first time I've been anxious for spring to start in over a decade. I'm out of shape compared to where I was four months ago, though.

- BOOKS! Finished the draft of "Lost and Found," worked on the history book, got a LOT done on "Ghost Hunting for Skeptics," which I hope to finish as soon as I have a good ending for it, and have been tinkering with a synopsis for a fantasy book.

- cleaning. Ronni moves in in three days! YAY!

- listening to The Ike Reilly Assassination, the local heroes who opened for the Pogues. Man, can this dude write. I'm coming to realize that almost all of my favorite "new" bands either remind me of early Springsteen or Meat Loaf, the exception being that I also finally listened to the Zwan album and LOVED it. Then I got a Zwan acoustic bootleg and loved it even more.

I also got a Kirkus review of Pirates of the Retail Wasteland that was very positive. Oddly, though, given that this is a book where a couple of side characters try to convince the gym teacher to kill himself by slipping depressing beat poetry into his office, the reviewer says that it's a good book to float toward "tweener sitcom fans."

I can take this three ways:
1. Being sort of offended.
2. Thinking the reviewer is suggesting that librarians get "tweener sitcom fans" expand their horizons.
3. Seeing dollar signs.

If I go for #1, it's only because of my lingering distaste for the word "tweener." They were just starting to toss it around when I was 13, and I found it highly offensive. I still think it's a pretty stupid word. I do like some of the "tweener sitcoms" in circulation, though. I'm more of a teen-nick guy than a disney channel guy, I guess, but there's some good stuff out there. I guess "Ned's Declassified" is over now, but it was a really fun show, and "Naked Brothers Band" is occasionally hilarious (and, Nat Wolf is really writing his own songs, which I think he is, that guy has chops)(I'm sure I would not have said so at 13 for fear of looking uncool, but I'm old enough now that I can listen to whatever I damn well please).

My desk is done!



New features include....

... a couple of the cubbies were removed (no small task) to make room for the laptop
... recessed under-cabinet lighting installed under the top drawers with an on-off switch near the speaker volume control knob.
... a small hole in the side now allows for cords and cables
... four prints from Suzuki Beane in the backboard, along with a Dickens shrine.
... the middle drawer pulls out to reveal a writing tray, underneath which are various desk supplies
... a 3 shelf unit (stained to more-or-less match the desk) on top
... the white thing on the lip of the rolltop is a Bob Dylan quote ("he not busy being born is busy dying") to motivate me to stay busy being born. I thought about getting a wood-burning kit to engrave it, or maybe have it engraved on a small metal name-plate, but that's all still up in the air.


I still need to install a lock, but I had to order one specially made for roll-top desks. It should arrive soon.

TOTAL COST:
Desk - $40 (what a deal!)
Van rental/gas - $120 (including the tons of tolls along the way to Indiana)
Furniture Polish - $5
New hand saw to remove cubbies - $9
Wood Stain - $5
Wood Putty - $4
Lighting setup - $30 (including a couple of things that didn't work)
Velcro - $3 (for mounting the picture frames on the backboard)
lock - $20
Drill - $30

total: 236 (not counting the drill, since I needed to get one anyway). Not bad! I intend to use it for years and years and years.

Since I turned in the draft of Spell 2 yesterday, I sort of intended to take the next few days off, but that never quite works out - I'll probably do some work on one of the three nonfiction books I have in the queue for this year (Ghost Hunting for Skeptics - Llewellyn 2009, Weird Chicago - with Troy Taylor and Ken Melvoin-Berg, White Chapel Press 2008, and The Wisenheimer's Guide to History - Random House 2010). The Ghost Hunting one is the easiest of the three; it's going to be in the vein of a Bill Bryson book about my time in the ghost busting industry and my quest to figure out if all this ghost stuff is real, all nonsense, or if it all just comes down to semantics.

Meanwhile, I need to re-read Devil in the White City. We've started doing tours based on the book, and they've been REALLY fast sell-outs. I'm running one of them in a couple weeks, the week after my non-ghost-based Forgotten Chicago tour, where I'll take people to old millionaire's rows, old red-light districts, bohemian hangouts, and other places where you can still see some footprints of the city as it was a century or so ago.

I am now recovering from the first WEIRD CHICAGO zombie pub crawl!



I was all decked out as Zombie Ned Flanders:



It wasn't really a pub crawl, in that we didn't hit any more pubs than we'd hit on many regular tours. We spent our time:

- Getting out of the bus at crowded spots (Michigan Avenue, theaters that were just letting out, etc) and roaming around shouting "BRAAAAAINS!"

- Going "zombie caroling" (which is like regular caroling, only the word "brains" is thrown into the song at every possible opportunity) before crashing a party at DJ CarrieMonster's house.

- Doing the Thriller dance at the metro

- having a BIG snowball fight on Lake Shore Drive. Traffic was at a total standstill when it got close to time for the fireworks at navy pier, so we all got off the bus and had a fine snowball war with the other people who were stuck in traffic and with the people stuck on the street down below (we had the high ground, giving us a distinct advantage).

- toasting the new year and singing "Auld Lang Brains."


We are TOTALLY doing this again. Hope to have more pics and some video forthcoming!

One aspect of Chicago history (and a brief part of the tour) is becoming and obsession for me - the saga of The Fool Killer.

The Fool Killer was a submarine, one one of the first ever built, that was discovered in the Chicago River beneath three feet of mud in 1915, underneath the Rush Street bridge. When it was raised some time later, it was found to contain the bones of a dead guy and a dead dog. Shortly thereafter, the thing was on display on south State Street - for a dime, you got to see the sub AND the bones. Half price discounts were offered to groups of 10 or more children (imagine: "hey kid...wanna see a dead body?")

I've been scouring newspaper archives trying to get to the bottom of the whole thing. Who made the sub? Who died on it? And, most importantly, what happened to it?

It's a tricky business. When it was found, the Tribune said that it was built in 1871, and promptly sunk, but was raised by one William Nissen in 1890 - and promptly disappeared, presumably with Nissen on it. However, I've found no mention of the submarine being above the ground in 1871 or 1890 - the William Nissen thing may be the result of someone confusing it with Peter Nissen, a guy who had made a craft called, a tad clairvoyantly, The Fool Killer 3 in 1904. Nissen had gone over Niagara Falls in homemade crafts called the Foolkiller 1 and 2, and apparently decided that he just hadn't pushed his luck hard enough. His Foolkiller 3 was a giant canvas balloon that he planned to roll across Lake Michigan. If that worked, he planned to use the thing to discover the North Pole. He set off from Chicago to cross the lake in late November of 1904, and actually made it across - but not intact. His air hose broke, causing him to suffocate when he was nearly across.

So, who DID make the submarine? Most agree that it's the second of four subs made by the adventurously named Lodner Darvantis Phillips - but if that's the case, he didn't build in in 1871, by which point he was far too busy decomposing. Most likely, he built in and started testing it in the late 1840's - it's possible that it had been down there for over sixty years when they found it!

As for where it is now, I have no idea. There's a fantastic full page advertisement for the State Street exhibition (which we now have on the Weird Chicago bus) indicating that the display was sponsored by the Skee Ball company. The only mention of it after that comes three months later, when local papers list it among the attractions of a local fair in Oelwein, Iowa, along with "a new amusement device called Skee Ball." It was big enough news to be mentioned in the Oelwein newspaper every day that it was there (it's hard to imagine what WOULDN'T make the news in a place like Oelwein in 1916), but I've found no other mention of it in any other small town papers. After that, it seems to vanish from the record - perhaps some other fool took it out for a test drive!

I'm getting my costume together for Halloween - and for Saturday, November 24th's Weird Chicago Zombie Pub Crawl!". Spaces are still available, but going fast!

I'm still working on the makeup, but I'll be going as Zombie Flanders:

My project for the night was making a map to put up in the bus. Some time ago, I found out that Yahoo maps was listing such neighborhoods as "Shantytown" (in the location of the Gold Coast) and "Little Hell." Alas, they appear to have vanished from the yahoo maps now (good thing I saved it.

I wanted to print up a copy for the bus, but decided that it was sort of lacking. Hence, I spent my evening working on this:



It's more or less accurate; the boundaries of some of these places changed over time, and some overlapped a bit, leading me to have to move the names around slightly to keep them from bumping into each other.

Other points of interest:

- the Lexington Hotel was Capone's last headquarters. It's been demolished.
- The SMC cartage company is the location of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Also long gong, but still a popular tour stop.
- the Mcdonalds logo represents the usual opening spot of the tour.
- the Everleigh Club was the fanciest brothel in town - and by far the most respectable.
- The Levee District was Chicago's worst neighborhood before it was "closed" in the 1910s, but the area around it remained very bad for a long time. Bad, Bad Leroy Brown was born there in 1942, when it was still the baddest part of town.
- The Iroquois Theatre and Eastland Disaster sites are common tour stops, as are the Biograph Theatre and Tonic Room. Hull House comes up occasionally.
- The Marshall Field Jr. Mansion (recently restored after years of decay) is the mansion in which Field Jr. "accidentally" shot himself in the gut while cleaning a pistol he planned to take hunting. No one believed the story at the time, and no one does now, either. The whole street on which it sits was just one mansion after another at the time - all conveniently located near Bed Bug Row, which was blocks away. One rumor was that he'd been shot at the Everleigh Club. Another is that he shot himself after finding the tunnel leading to his dad's house and learned that his wife had been sleeping with his dad. Of the two rumors, the latter is the more likely. We swing down the street now and then on tours, but it's a bit off the beaten path of our usual route.

Weird Chicago Tours still has space available for many October tours - and our first "zombie pub crawl" next month! I'll be going as Zombie Flanders.

I biked up to Wrigley during the lone playoff game that was played there this year. It wasn't quite as festive as it might have been if the series were going better - or if they hadn't fallen behind in the game right away and never recovered. Still, it was a fun place to be.

Here we are, crowded around apartments that had TVs set up in the window.



The drunks didn't start to get out of hand until the last inning or so, which was nice. I was afraid they were going to have taken over before I got there.

I see this guy all over town, but mostly around my neighborhood. Nice guy!

Walking through an alley on my morning jaunt, I heard someone above shout out "gardyloo!" A second later, a whole pot of water was tossed to the street.

It's a damned good thing I knew what "gardyloo" meant (it's the traditional thing to shout in Scotland before throwing the contents of a chamber pot into the street - from the french "gare de l'eau" (sp?) which tranlates to "beware of the water") or I would have ended up rather wet.

And they call these things "useless facts....."

Today was the annual Bughouse Square debates - commemorating the days when people used to make speeches in Bughouse Square, a park I include on the Weird Chicago tours (and which appears in a couple of Daniel Pinkwater books). Speakers ranged from anarchist nuts all the way to great reformers such as Clarence Darrow and Emma Goldman.

I recorded the whole thing for the Weird Chicago podcase, served as a spokesmodel holding up sex toys (during a speech entitled "Why Your Neighborhood Needs a Sex Shop,") and was told by the program director that, while I'm not qualified to be the Mayor of Bughouse Square, I can be the "deputy mayor." I'm pretty sure that that's good enough to get me some kickbacks!

Among my interviewees:


- Leon Despres, alderman of Hyde Park during the 50s and 60s. In a council of 50 aldermen, he was often outvoted 49-1 for going against Mayor Daley (who often turned his microphone off). He attended Bughouse Square now and then, and knew Clarence Darrow personally. He's 99 now, but still talking.

- Joffre Stewart, who was the Beatnik Party's anti-candidate for President in 1960. He's actually mentioned in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" in the line about the guy passing out incomprehensible leaflets. He's still going strong today, passing out leaflets about anarchy and conspiracy theories to any and all comers. Interesting cat, to say the least.


above: Joffre Stewart passes out anarachist literature during one of the speeches.

Tonight, I saw the Bat Signal - all lit up and everything. I only got a glimpse before security told me I couldn't be where I was and sent me on my way.

Later, Jeff, Deborah and I went back to the set - from another vantage point that gave us a different view. Security at this place caught us after a while, but told us we could stick around. We could only see the signal from behind (and it wasn't actually beaming up into the sky or anything), but we saw Batman - in fact, we saw Batman take off his mask and start using his cell phone. Apparently, Batman was texting. Or possibily playing "Snake." And Deborah was pretty sure she saw him put his cell phone back in his utility belt when he was done. Awesome.

The streets were full of cops - half Chicago cops, half Gotham City cops (who have no REAL authority in these parts, seeing as how they're just extras). There was a prop table covered in TV news-type microphones (one was Gotham News, one was GTV). There were a couple of Batmobiles under the tarp.

When I started out this joint casing, my goal was to see Batman, OR the Batmobile, OR Joker, OR some cool Gotham City stuff. Now it's more of a checklist. I still need to see Joker, a Gotham cab, a Gotham police car, and some other stuff to be named later. Joker will surely be the hardest of the lot to see.

There'll be more stalking reports tomorrow - same bat-time, same bat-channel! (Man, I always wanted to say that!)

Also coming later - a more complete wrap-up of a GREAT weekend.

Had a really fun night scoping out the Batman set last night - my camera isn't much for night-zooming, so I couldn't get much of a shot, but here's the best I could manage:


We saw a couple of people (one of whom we think was Christian Bale) in Batman outfits up and walking around, and that large vaguely car-shaped blob is the Batmobile! There was also a spooky looking dude in what looked like a black hooded robe - couldn't tell who he was. Also found a trailer with a Harvey Dent poster in it. If you really want to reproduce the murky photo, go ahead, but please credit either adamselzer.com or weirdchicago.com

While we were first casing the joint, we were sitting next to someone who was reading the article about Weird Chicago in the Red Eye.

Here's our cool group!

left to right: me, Ronni, Deborah, Jeff

Last night was one of the rare times when both Ken and I did the tour, with me doing most of the talking and Ken driving the bus. I wasn't quite on my game, and Ken broke the ice at one point by pointing out a guy walking by in a hooded sweatshirt lugging a cart of busted electrical gear.

"Look!" Ken said. "A jawa!"

This led to me trying to tell the story both in Huttese and in the style of C-3PO in the Ewok village. And comparing the dresses worn at the time of the story to that of Queen Amidala.

The rest of the tour descended into an endless stream of geekiness. This is PROBABLY the only time I'll claim that, in addition to having an army of bums to fight off the cops, Captain Streeter (founder of a shantytown on the lakeshore) employed a band of Tusken Raiders.

One common stop on my Weird Chicago tours is a famous salt stain on an underpass that is said to resemble the Virgin Mary. I don't see what they're looking at myself - though, if I squint, I sometimes think it looks like Princess Leia - but THIS is spooky business.

On the south side of North Avenue between Western and Damen, I found this:

A puddle shaped liked a profile of Butt Head!



Repent, ye buttmunches! huh huh. huh huh.




Meanwhile, in back in the normal world, my cat has been having some digestion issues. Probably just hairball stuff, but I'm taking my baby to the doctor's this afternoon to be sure.

Spent the morning today trying to deal with a flat tire on the Weird Chicago bus in time for a tour tonight - thank goodness that Willy (our permanant Employee of the Month) owned a jack.

We still need to do plenty of things to the bus, not the least of which is getting an air conditioner before it gets much hotter.

Spent a good chunk of the week trying to come up with a new route. The house of crosses is no more, leaving us minus a stop, which can throw things off remarkably.

This is the side of the ghost busting industry that they just don't show you on the discovery channel