it spoke, turning its head to look at me and then detect some movement from one of the other figures. Weren’t Mrs. Wilder’s hands folded in her lap before? Wasn’t the daughter looking to her left only a few second ago? The figures were more than lifelike, they were just plain creepy.
The tour ended in the lounge car and we all debarked from there. Travis had a break for a few minutes so we resumed our conversation while Mary wandered off to explore more of the museum.
“That was a great tour,” I said.
“Thanks.” Travis took off his conductor’s hat, wiped the sweat from his brow with his coat sleeve, and put the hat back on. Apparently, fake conducting on a train that couldn’t go anywhere was harder work than I thought. “What did you think of the animatronics?” Travis asked.
“The which?”
“Animatronics, the robots.”
“Really good,” I said. “A little freaky maybe.”
Travis nodded. “We have to turn them on, you know. They’re not able to move unless we do.” One of the people who had been on the tour was walking near us and Travis waited for her to pass by before continuing. “So how come the figures in the lounge car move on their own, without being switched on? Mrs. Wilder, especially. She’s been seen moving her head when the power’s off.”
“Do you think the car is haunted?” I asked.
He shrugged and drew me to a display board near the train. One of the panels described an accident at Napier, Missouri, on October 2, 1939, in which the engineer and another person aboard the Burlington Zephyr were killed.
“Maybe there’s reason for it to be haunted,” Travis said.
We had walked around to the front of the sleek locomotive, its single headlight piercing the gloom of the great hall. Though at rest, it looked as though it could spring to life at any moment and hurtle through the museum, with or without the dead engineer at its controls. More people passed by and Travis lowered his voice when he said, “The train isn’t the only thing in the museum that’s haunted. Have you heard about the U-505?”
I knew something of the history of the U-505, the only German submarine ever captured by the Americans in World War II. The U-505 was commissioned in Hamburg, Germany, in 1941, was involved in several battles, and by 1942 was already responsible for sinking eight allied ships. On June 4, 1944, the U.S.S. Guadalcanal task group in the mid-Atlantic Ocean attacked the U-505. The Germans attempted to scuttle the sub, were unsuccessful, and so surrendered to the American forces. The capture of the sub was the first time an American naval force had captured an enemy ship on the high seas since 1815, when the U.S.S. Peacock seized H.M.S. Nautilus during the War of 1812. The submarine was towed into port in Bermuda, where U.S. and British military experts could study it. Its capture was kept a secret until after the war.
In 1946, the U.S. Navy planned to scuttle the German submarine by using her for target practice. The existence of the sub came to the attention of the Museum of Science and Industry’s president, Leonard Lohr, who revealed ten-year-old plans for the museum that included a submarine among its future exhibits. The people of Chicago raised $250,000 to purchase the sub and tow it to the museum, where it was designated as a war memorial and became a part of the museum’s exhibits.
But none of that was what Travis was talking about. He was talking about ghosts aboard the U-505.
“What kind of ghosts?” I asked.
“The commander,” Travis said, “a man named Peter Zschech. In 1943, the sub was attacked with depth charges by a British ship. The attack went on for a while and Zschech just lost it. While the depth charges were exploding all around the sub, he killed himself in the control room.” Travis told me that the U-505’s First Officer took over and skillfully evaded the attacking ship, bringing the sub safely back to port in France. “Some people here think that Zschech is still aboard his sub,” Travis said.
He said that before the museum opens, a staff person boards the sub and walks through its length to turn the lights on inside. One day, as a member of the staff walked through the darkened sub to turn on the lights, he suddenly felt an unseen presence with him.
“The guy said that the presence ‘tried to enter him,’” said Travis. “Those were his exact words, ‘enter him.’”
Another docent was straightening up the commander’s bunk, Travis said, when he felt someone right behind him. He whirled around but there was no one there.
Female docents especially seem to be having a tough time with the commander’s ghost. One young woman had just made a rather insulting joke about the commander, according to Travis, when a steel door suddenly slammed closed on her hand, injuring her. Another woman felt a hand come out of nowhere and grasp her shoulder. Of course, there was no one else in the room.
The U-505 exhibit was undergoing major renovations when Mary and I visited the museum. It will be interesting to see if the ghost of Commander Zschech becomes even more active as a result of being stirred up by the commotion, or whether he decides to ship out for some otherworldly port. But even if Zschech leaves, the ghosts of Clarence Darrow and those aboard the Burlington Zephyr remain to keep you company when you visit Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.
Red Lion Pub
CHICAGO
JOHN CORDWELL WAS A MAN’S MAN IN SO MANY ways. As a Royal Air Force pilot during World War II, he was shot down, captured by the Germans, and became one of the forgers involved in the failed escape from the German prisoner of war camp Stalag Luft III, located near Sagan, Poland; the heroic effort was later immortalized in the 1963 Steve McQueen movie, The Great Escape. After the war, Cordwell moved to Chicago, where he became a renowned architect and city planner. Chicago’s popular rapid-transit system probably never would have been built without his guidance and direction. Even while accomplishing all these great things, Cordwell longed for one simple pleasure, to hoist a pint of stout in his own pub, just like the pubs he used to frequent in his native England.
John Cordwell realized his dream in 1984 when he and his son Colin bought a bar at 2446 North Lincoln Avenue on Chicago’s North Side, across the street from the infamous Biograph Theater where John Dillinger met his fate, and renamed it the Red Lion Pub. Until his death in 1999, the Red Lion was something of a home away from home for the senior Cordwell.
“But I know my father is still here,” said Colin Cordwell, as I sat at the bar with him and his brother-in-law, Nick Rice.
Nick had longish white hair and a receding hairline. He wore a T-shirt that read, A dog is the only relative you get to choose. “We feel him all the time,” Nick said.
It was mid-afternoon on a weekday and the pub was not crowded. As I sat at the long bar with the two men, my wife, Mary, sat at a booth by the large window overlooking the street. The sunlight came in through the window, but farther back at the bar, the pub was not as well lit.
“I’ve got a photo that was recently taken by one of our customers that I’m sure shows my father,” Colin said. The photo depicted some people at the bar and a misty figure with a face that Colin recognized as that of his father. “I knew it was my father,” Colin said, “because he had his hand on the girl’s breast.”
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