The closest we have to good photos of a strange and vanished society.
Author: adam
Podcast: A Suicide Bridge Ghost Story
See more podcasts This year, I had the distinct honor of running the “Haunted History” tours at the Lincoln Park Zoo, which gave me a good opportunity to research some interesting aspects of the Zoo that I didn’t know about, search as zoo director Marlin Perkins’ search for the Yeti. And, of course, the ghost…
“The Black Hole” of the South Loop, 1882
Podcast also available on iTunes! Recently, Valancourt began republishing a bunch of novels by Michael McDowell, who is best known for writing the screenplays to Beetle Juice and Nightmare Before Christmas. Mostly forgotten, his horror novels are fantastic books that deserve to be among the first rediscovered as readers start sifting through the rubble of…
Whatever Happened to Baby Rembrandt?
A baby left on the doorstep at Tree Studios became a local celebrity before vanishing from the news in 1902
The Wild Adventures of “Sensational Viola”
I was researching a whole other story in the oldĀ Chicago Post 1903 microfilms when I came across an article about Viola Larsen, a 17 year old girl who was on trial for plotting to kidnap one of her neighbors. She told the judge that she was just looking for material to work into the books…
Finding The Very Punny Civil War Dispatches of Irving W. Carson
The life and works of Irving Carson, the first journalist killed in the Civil War (and a bit of Han Solo-type).
The “Other” Great Chicago Fair – The Northwestern Sanitary Fair of 1865
With posters from the 1933 Century of Progress in every gift shop and a seemingly endless series of books and exhibits on the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, it’s easy to forget that we’ve had OTHER great fairs around here, too. In the new episode of my Cemetery Mixtape podcast, I cover some events surrounding one…
Thomas Bryan: Graceland Cemetery, the World’s Fair, and HH Holmes
Connections between HH Holmes and the World’s Fair and Columbian Exposition of 1893 are mostly fictional – though he did claim he was adding a third floor to his building to serve as a hotel during the fair, the “hotel” was never open for business, and the notion that he was preying on fair patrons…