In 1991, a man in New York sued the previous owners of his house for not having disclosed that the house was haunted, and the court ruled in his favor. The judge didn’t comment on whether the ghosts might be real, but noted that the house had been written up as haunted in a national…
Category: Mysterious Chicago Blog
The Grave of Big Thunder: A Deep Dive
The exposed corpse of Big Thunder, which was an Illinois tourist trap in the 1830s. A deep dive into first hand accounts.
Minnie Wallace and the Ravenswood House of Mystery
When you’re 49 and talk a teenage girl into marrying you, and then she kills you and takes all your money… it’s kinda on you, bro. Minnie was only 16 when she left her home in New Orleans to marry 49 year old J.R. Walkup, the mayor of Emporia, Kansas. A month after the wedding…
Girl in Glass: The Inez Statue at Graceland Cemetery
Lots of new information on the history of Inez, Graceland Cemetery’s famous “Girl in Glass.”
When Illinois Packed Its Supreme Court
As of the 1830s, when Chicago was just rising up from its status as a mudhole on the prairie, the law in Illinois was that anyone could vote in the state as long as they’d lived here for sixth months (Well, provided that they were white, male, and over 21). This included people who weren’t…
New Statue Suggestion: Joseph Henry Hudlun
I don’t blame early Americans for their rush to name things after Columbus. In the days after the Revolution, they were eager for some national heroes who weren’t associated with the British, and Columbus fit the bill. But the Columbus obsession was a bug in our nation’s beta release. Most people who named things after…
Revolutionary War Soldier Found at Graceland Cemetery
Lists of military graves in Chicago tend to list two Revolutionary War vets – but neither are verifiable. In fact, they’re quite dubious. Lincoln Park hosts a memorial boulder to David Kennison, who claimed to be a 115 year old veteran of the Boston Tea Party. A note in his pension file says not to…
The Omnibus Riot of 1862
In July of 1862, as the Civil War raged in the south, a tangential battle was waged in Chicago on the corner of Clark and Randolph. The horse-drawn omnibusses in the city were privately owned, and generally not segregated, though there seems to have been an unwritten rule that black passengers would move to the outside…