Ken just called me from the tour he’s running tonight and told me that, during the tour, a mysterious, flickering light was seen in the vicinity of the Sobieski Street building that Holmes is thought to have owned. Ken doesn’t call me with reports from the tour DURING the tour very often – only when something really interesting is going on – so I hope to have more on this soon; we’ll probably run a better investigation of the spot tomorrow night, since we’ll both be on the bus for our Dion O’Bannion Memorial Pub Crawl. Our last trip out to that spot, which we recorded for our podcast, was on one of those COLD Chicago nights where I was just sure we were going to freeze to death. Our grasp on names and dates was a bit shaky on that particular podcast, since we were concerned with fighting off frost bite than remembering Myrtle Belknap’s and Georgianna Yoke’s names!
Anyway, the building there was a rickety glass-bending factory lined with kilns that police suspected Holmes was using for cremations. It was connected to two story house; the light was right about where the house would have been. But the exact location is impossible to figure out; just finding where Sobieski Street was was quite a trick, since the name was changed around 1896 and it was only a few blocks long to begin with. The only article on the building that ever came close to giving an address said it was “where 65 Sobieski ought to be,” northwest of the railroad crossing and attached to a two story house. All of this was walking-distance from the candy store (see previous post); it’s entirely possible that he committed some murders on the site.
If you’d like to hear our podcast about the place, click the button:
It’s the “murder castle” episode.
Here’s hoping some people from the tour will leave comments describing what they saw there tonight!
My fiance and I were on the tour and I had noticed the flickering light to the right of the bus while ken gave his speech. I watched it for a few minutes as it flickered on and off to Kens voice pattern. Another rider pointed it out and Ken asked Willie to drive around to the other side to get the address of the building. As soon as the bus started moving the light stayed on continuously with no flickering. truly amazing! (seemed like the light was in touch with kens voice tone and body movements)