excerpted from the Weird Chicago book Phillips appears to have designed at least four submarines in his lifetime – according to his descendants, his third model, built in 1851 and known as the Marine Cigar, was stable enough that he was able to take his family on fantastic underwater picnics (this was probably the one…
Tag: weird chicago:the book
The Fool Killer Submarine – Part 1!
excerpted from the Weird Chicago book. In the days following the Eastland Disaster, a diver named William “Frenchy” Deneau was responsible for recovering around 250 bodies from the murky water. Four months later, in November, he was back in the river, working to lay cables beneath the Rush Street bridge. While he worked, his shovel…
Whatever Happened to Lillian Collier: Teenage Flapper?
Update, 2014: We’ve had a break in the case! The facts are these: Lillian Collier (sometimes spelled Collee, or even Kelly) came to Chicago around 1920 from Greenwich Village, intent on converting Chicagoans to “real life.” Only a teenager by most accounts, her poetry made her the darling of the Dil Pickle Club. Some accounts…
Tales of the Gallows: Johann Hoch
When they caught Johann Hoch in New York, where he had fled from Chicago, he had already proposed to what would have been something like his 45th wife. His habit was to marry women and take their money within about a week or meeting them.He was not an attractive guy, but he was charming as…
Farewell, House of Crosses!
A true Weird Chicago landmark, the House of Crosses is no more. It was already abandoned by the time we started up the company, and was a staple on our earliest tours. The house went on the market a couple of years ago, and was presumed to be a tear-down property. Most of the crosses…
Florentine “Shadow Ghost” analysis!
We’ve now had time to analyze the heck out of the Florentine Room shadow ghost picture that was taken during a tour a few weeks ago – most of the early theories going around revolved around the presence of a “second photographer” taking a picture that cast either my shadow or that of the photographer…
The Murder of Amos J. Snell Part 3: The Aftermath
No examination of the Amos Snell story (ours is the first that we know of in about 65 years) is complete without a few words on what became of the well-to-do family. In 1901, Snell’s son, Albert, was penniless and living in the barn on the property. He was committed to an insane asylum and…
The Murder of Amos J Snell Part 2 – the vanishing suspect
Continuing our story on the mysteirous murder of Amos J Snell in his Washinton Blvd mansion in 1888… Some believed that Snell’s strange sense of foreboding came not from some pyschic feeling, but, perhaps, from some sort of warning from the recently-freed burglar, and that burglar was one of the first men rounded up. But…