Tag Archives: odin tatu

6/20/06 – Old Town Tatu investigation notes

This morning I ran across a blog entry from 2006 about the first investigation of Old Town (then Odin) Tattoo – the shop that was featured on Ghost Lab and Most Terrifying Places this year. Written down write after the investigation, a few weeks before Richie “Tapeworm” Herrera’s death. Several bits of information on the history of the place didn’t hold up in the investigation (there was never a Walter who owned the place), but it’s still an interesting read:

6/20/06
Last night’s ghost investigation led us to a tattoo parlor that was a family-owned funeral home, owned by three generations of one family, from 1903-2003. Gorgeous building; there was a Tiffany fireplace in the entrance in which they had a small tombstone from the early 50’s – which they’d found in the attic – on display.

The staff told us a lot of stories of weird things that had happened, including several accounts of seeing a guy in a powder blue suit sitting in the doorway.

“I didn’t take my eye off him, cause I know if you look away from these cats for a second, they’ll be gone!’ said the owner. Others told us pretty much the same sort of story – I questioned how sober they’d been when they say these ghosts, but it was entertaining.

“Twice I felt like someone tried to push me down the stairs!” said the owner, who lives upstairs. “And you can’t fight back with these assholes, you know. But I said out loud, man, if I f—ing die in here, it’s f—ing ON, Motherf–er!”

With us on this trip were a couple of girls who were said to be psychic – I’m always VERY skeptical of this sort of business, but, hey, I’m of the opinion that there’s no such thing as GOOD evidence of ghosts, only COOL evidence, and having a supposed psychic or two around couldn’t really hurt anything.

My main job was running audio recordings, following one of the girls around. The basement was especially creepy – you can probably imagine that the basement of any given former funeral home is going to be pretty creepy. The ceiling was probably less than six feet above the ground. There were old drainage holes in the floor. Lots of weird holes in the walls.

I followed the girl to a back corner where things seemed especially odd – the temperature was changing, and I kept feeling like something was touching my shoulder. She said “there’s something here!” and right then, in the headphones I had attatched to the audio gear, I thought I heard something say “Walter!”

It was a few minutes later that they told us that the funeral home went out of business after the last owner died – he’d held onto it as long as he could, but his kids didn’t want to take over the family business, so it died with him. And his name was Walter.

As I’ve said, I’m a confirmed skeptic. There’re ALWAYS other explanations for this sort of thing.

But I had to admit – that was pretty cool. I love this job.

ghostsofchicagobanner

, , , ,
Posted on

Old Town Tatu on Ghost Lab (long post)

The Weird Chicago Team started investigating Odin Tatu (formerly the Klemundt Funeral Home, currently Old Town Tatu ) before Weird Chicago even existed – we were all still working for another company at the time. And the first investigation (June, 2006) of the tattoo shop was different than the more recent ones have been; back then, we were just looking for ghosts from the funeral parlor. Richie “Tapeworm” Herrera was the owner of the place then – it was on that first investigation that he pointed to the staircase and said “you guys see that staircase?…..twice, when I was walking down those stairs, I felt like someone was trying to push me. And that freaked me out, because everyone knows you can’t fight BACK with these cats, right? So the first time it happened, I said ‘listen! if I die in this place, it is ON!'” (those aren’t his exact words – I’m basing this on my notes from that night – the recorder wasn’t running at the time – and cleaning up his language a LOT, as I try to keep things clean(ish) around here).

Anyway, by now you probably know the story – Tapeworm died a few weeks after that first, somewhat informal investigation, and since then people have focused on looking for HIS ghost there. And if there was ever a ghost I believed in, it’s his. Many times, I’ve felt someone in that basement flicking my ears and pulling my hair – all the ways guys like Richie would pick on nerds like me.

Tapeworm had several stories for us that first night – what he told us, and the events of that night, are chronicled extensively in Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps and on our podcast (16mb mp3), which includes some of the audio. The short version: Tapeworm had seen a guy in a brown suit, another guy in a powder blue suit, a little girl, and a woman in white. I think he was making the woman in white up – my impression of him that night was that he genuinely thought the place was haunted, but had some misinformation about the place and wasn’t above exaggerating. Exaggerating when you tell ghost stories is hardly unusual. Almost everyone does it – and Tapeworm probably would’ve copped to it sooner or later. He was a cool cat.

We’ve had just a handful of experiences there on the occasions that we’ve brought tour groups there (which we can’t often do – just occasionally). There have been a handful of interesting pictures, but I haven’t seen anything REALLY exciting. There’ve also been a few nights when the basement suddenly began to smell of formaldahyde.

Anyway, going into the ghost lab show, there have been some mysteries:
1. For how long has there been a funeral parlor on the spot? Oral tradition has it dating to the 1880s. The Klemundt Funeral Parlor on the site was built in the 1920s, but the basement is clearly the foundation of an earlier building (there are places where you can see where the windows were). What this building was has never been determined. Also undocumented is the notion that the garage was once a stable and that some 30 bodies were buried on the grounds at one point (members of the Klemundt family I’ve spoken to seem to disagree on the history of the place, though they HAVE thought it was haunted for years).

2. Who was “Walter?” On that first investigation, the EVP mic picked up a ghost that identified itself as Walter. Tapeworm got all excited and said that Walter Klemundt was the last owner of the funeral parlor to die. We later learned that there was no Walter Klemundt (or that there WAS a Walter, but he wasn’t dead yet, depending on who you asked). I suspected that there may have been someone in the building messing with us on this one. It happens.

Trying to get to the truth of the matter on anything ghost-related is rough going. I often compare ghost hunting TV shows to professional wrestling – some of the moves might be “real,” but, whatever the intentions of the investigators, most of the shows are 90% showmanship. Trying to get “answers” to any of these mysteries from a show is usually a fool’s errand. They may learn information that contradicts the stories they’ve heard, or find a good explanation for the evidence they gather, but those scenes will probably end up on the cutting room floor.

Pointing out the problems of these shows and the evidence they gather tends to make me look like a spoilsport (at best), but, hey, if we want to find any real ghosts, we should learn to separate the misinformations and outright fictions that generate around any well-publicized “haunted” place from the real history and sightings, especially if we’re ever going to go so far as to actually declare a place to be haunted. I’ve never said that for sure about any place myself, even though I’d probably make a lot more money if I were willing to go on TV and say “it’s a shadow person! Dude, this place is freaking HAUNTED!” However, there are a handful of places I’d put in the ol “it practically MUST be” category – and Old Town Tatu is one of those.

When the Ghost Lab guys contacted me over the summer to get my permission to use the audio I recorded there, I certainly got the impression that these guys were doing their level best to get the facts straight and conduct scientific investigations. That hasn’t always been the impression I got from the show itself, but, hey, that could always just be the editing.

Anyway, on to tonight’s episode:
Glad they like my “Walter” EVP (I recorded the “walter” voice that they played on the show in the basement back in 2006 – Ken, who appears in the show, was also in the basement at the time). I’m not buying their “turn me on” one, though. Sounds like a mechanical noise to me. I can’t pass judgement on their other one without hearing it unedited. Certainly seems like something Richie would say, though.

The released-endorphin theory is a fun idea. I won’t be getting a tattoo during a tour, though.

Old Irving Park (it’s not actually anywhere the neighborhood known as Old Town) is hardly what I’d call the rough side of Chicago. I mean, it’s on the North side. Everyone knows (thanks to Jim Croce) that the SOUTH side is the baddest part of town. One could argue that the west side is worse now, but the Irving Park and Kimball area isn’t bad at all.

I heard about their findings about there being a Walter in the Klemundt family – a guy named Walter Loeding – last summer, during their investigation. It’s a great find – I had Walter Loeding’s obit among the handful of Walters whose funerals or wakes were held there, but the obit didn’t mention that he was a relative of the family. If there is a ghost named Walter, he’s as likely a candidate as anyone.

However, I don’t think that he is the person Tapeworm was talking about. He certainly never owned the place, and I doubt Tapeworm would have heard of him. Even most of the members of the Klemundt family I’d spoken to didn’t know about him.

Anyway, one story about Walter Loeding – who died in the late 1960s – that has gone around in the last couple of months is that when he died, he didn’t own a suit, so the family bought him a brown one, making him likely to be the guy in the brown suit Richie told us he’d seen. There’s also a story I’ve heard that during his funeral, a guy wearing a powder blue suit crashed his car into the place and died – Tapeworm also talked about seeing a guy in just such a suit. The story about Walter being buried in a brown suit sounds reasonable enough, but I’m not sure I’m buying the idea that a guy fatally crashed into a funeral and that the story somehow didn’t make the papers.

In summary, The Ghost Lab team still seems like they believe everything they hear to me – and they repeated some misinformation (which I thought they KNEW was misinformation from the family) about the history of the building, particularly the basement. BUT, they didn’t make any totally outrageous claims, didn’t waste time showing any orb pictures (I’d say the odds they got those in the basement are about 100%), and they did dig up some good stuff.

Klemundt Funeral Home, currently the home of Old Town Tattoo (alias Odin Tatu) on the North side of Chicago.

“Orbs” in the basement at Odin / Old Town Tattoo, emerging, it seems, from Ken’s butt. The shape of this one gives it away as a dust particle (which is pretty generally what orbs turn out to be – very few reputable ghosthunters believe that orbs are ghosts). This one may prove my own pet theory – orbs aren’t ghosts, they’re ghost FARTS. 🙂

Tapeworm, who challenged the ghosts in his the Odin Tatu building to a fight in the event of his death – which, tragically, came three weeks later.

“Orbs” that appear to have faces in them are almost invariably just “matrixing,” a trick of the mind the makes us look for faces and other such patterns in random visual noise (and no serious ghost investigator still claims that orbs are ghosts to begin with). But the “face” in this one at Odin Tatu sure does look like Tapeworm! It’s one of two distinct “faces” that tend to show up in this location – the other looks like the guy on the Quaker Oats box. I never hold orbs up as ghost evidence, but this one is kinda neat. It was taken about a year and a half after Tapeworm’s death.

The gravestone in the fireplace at Odin / Old Town Tatu. They found this in the attic when they moved in.


This, not the mask shown on Most Terrifying Places, was the mask Tapeworm said tended to fall off the wall. This was taken during the first investigation, just after he showed it to me.

 

, , ,
Posted on

Old Town Tatu

Old Town Tatu was recently featured on Most Terrifying Places in America on the travel channel (click the link to see part 1 – the segment kicks in about 7 minutes in. Part 2 is right here. The segment features Weird Chicago’s own Ken Melvoin-Berg (as well as driver Brant McRae, who plays the “visual apparition”).

The haunted tattoo parlor is also featured prominently in Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps (teh excerpt online is all about the place). I was the EVP guy on the first investigation of the place a few years ago – the night when Tapeworm claimed that he’d challenged the ghosts in the place to a fight in the event of his death. “They freak me out, because everyone knows you can’t fight back with these cats!” he said (in not those exact words – I’m cleaning up his language a LOT). “So I just said, ‘listen! if I die in this place, it is ON!'” And, as the program notes, he died in the place three weeks later.

I’m not sure how good the history used by Most Terrifying Places was – the history of the building is sort of in dispute. The Klemundt Funeral Parlor building dates back to the 1920s, not the 1800s, but the basement level is clearly the foundation of an earlier building, about which little is known, though it IS said to have been an 1880s funeral parlor (records on the place tend to contradict each other; a common problem around here). Even if it WAS a funeral home in those days, I’m not sure that it was the first established funeral home in Chicago, as the show says – by the 1880s, Chicago’s population was around a million, so I sort of doubt that no private funeral home had been established. However, the term “Funeral home” doesn’t appear in the Tribune until the 1890s, and “Funeral Parlor” doesn’t appear until 1902 – the custom at the time was for wakes to be held in private residences.

But whether the history there is correct or not, I can vouche for the stories about Tapeworm. I have my doubts about many of the stories I’ve been told about hauntings in the place from decades past, but if there’s ever been a ghost I believed in, it’s the ghost of Tapeworm.

For a LOT more information about the place, check out Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps or download The Weird Chicago Podcast (16mb mp3) episode about the place, featuring recordings from the first investigation of the place, shortly before Tapeworm’s death. I understand that some of the EVP I recorded there has been analyzed for an upcoming episode of “Ghost Lab,” too. They seem to have done MUCH more historical research. Most of what they found is stuff I could have told them myself if they’d asked, but they did come up with some stuff that was news to me, including a possible identity for “Walter,” the ghost who seems to identify himself in the EVP. I’ll be back with a full report when the episode airs!

Note: In Tapeworm’s day, the place was called Odin Tatu – it was renamed Old Town Tatu after his death. For the record, it’s located on Irving Park on the Northwest side, not in the neighborhood known as Old Town. It’s too far away to be a regular stop on tours, though we have been known to go there occasionally.

Some pictures from the “pics of stuff from the book” page put up for Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps:

Klemundt Funeral Home, currently the home of Old Town Tattoo (alias Odin Tatu) on the North side of Chicago.

“Orbs” in the basement at Odin / Old Town Tattoo, emerging, it seems, from Ken’s butt. The shape of this one gives it away as a dust particle (which is pretty generally what orbs turn out to be – very few reputable ghosthunters believe that orbs are ghosts). This one may prove my own pet theory – orbs aren’t ghosts, they’re ghost FARTS. 🙂

Tapeworm, who challenged the ghosts in his the Odin Tatu building to a fight in the event of his death – which, tragically, came three weeks later.

“Orbs” that appear to have faces in them are almost invariably just “matrixing,” a trick of the mind the makes us look for faces and other such patterns in random visual noise. But the “face” in this one at Odin Tatu sure does look like Tapeworm! It’s one of two distinct “faces” that tend to show up in this location – the other looks like the guy on the Quaker Oats box. I never hold orbs up as ghost evidence, but this one is kinda neat. It was taken about a year and a half after Tapeworm’s death.

The gravestone in the fireplace at Odin / Old Town Tatu. They found this in the attic when they moved in.


This, not the mask shown in the show, was the mask Tapeworm said tended to fall off the wall. This was taken during the first investigation, just after he showed it to me.

,
Posted on

Ghost Lab and “Era Cues”

“Ghost Lab,” a new program on Discovery, premiered tonight – these guys have interesting theories and a lot of cool gadgets. I especially like their “era cues,” which we do ourselves sometimes (playing music popular at Bull Moose party rallies on the piano in the Florentine Ballroom to see if it generates any activity is a good example of the technique). On an upcoming episode, they’ll be investigating Old Town Tatu, which we’ve been investigating for about three years now (it’s on the second episode of our podcast and featured prominently in Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps) – I understand they analyze the EVP picked up on my microphone there.

I don’t necessarily agree with all of their techniques or ideas or anything (they seem awfully quick to believe that a place is actually haunted, and don’t always seem that comfortable with the scientific stuff, but this could always be just the way Discovery edits it), but they strike me as being a bit less hokey than most ghost shows out there – and seeming anything BUT hokey in an episode where you look for the ghost of Elvis is no easy task! In any case, they look like they’re having fun, which makes it fun to watch – certainly more fun to watch than those awful shows where they pretend to be possessed and scream every time they hear a tapping noise (if you’re that scared of a tapping noise, ghost hunting is probably not the profession for you). These guys also didn’t waste their time with orbs, which is always a plus.

Anyway, we’ve used “era cues” on occasion. I wouldn’t say I’m a proponent of the theory, but it’s one of those things you can try that certainly can’t hurt! I certainly prefer playing period music to saying “do any spirits here have a message for me” or challenging ghosts to a fistfight.

, , , ,
Posted on