all those years, or perhaps he just wants to hang around to see what happen to his old neighborhood. In any case, he remains, master of the house.
Graceland Cemetery
CHICAGO
GRACELAND CEMETERY ON NORTH CLARK STREET was one of those beautiful parklike cemeteries that were in vogue in the late nineteenth century. Beautiful, sometimes ornate funerary art marked the graves of some of Chicago’s leading citizens where they slept among well-trimmed lawns and old shade trees. Meatpacker Phillip Armour, retail legend Marshall Field, hotel owner Potter Palmer, private detective Allan Pinkerton, and railroad car tycoon George Pullman were all buried there, as was William A. Hulbert, the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs’ second president, from 1877–1882, who rested beneath a huge granite baseball adorned with the league’s team names.
It was a late summer’s afternoon when my wife, Mary, and I visited Graceland. The trees cast long, cool shadows across the emerald lawns. We appeared to be alone. Other than the occasional birdcall, it was quiet and peaceful in the cemetery. I could understand why it was once fashionable for people to picnic there, or to simply enjoy the beauty and tranquility of the place. Having grown up in New England, I was used to ancient cemeteries filled with worn, moss-covered stones, most of them broken or leaning in all directions like bad teeth. You just knew those cemeteries were filled with ghosts. By comparison, no one could have thought that such a lovely place as Graceland was haunted. But it was.
One of the hauntings concerned the tomb of a man named Ludwig Wolff. It may very well have been only a legend, based on the man’s last name, but it was said that his tomb was guarded by a ghostly dog with glowing green eyes that howled mournfully at the moon. As it was a bright, sunny day, I did not see the ghost dog, but as I passed by the tomb, I did wonder why a ghost dog would appear there. Was the dog Wolff’s pet? Was it, in fact, a wolf? And if Wolff himself haunted the cemetery, would that make him a wolfman instead of a ghost? Those were the questions that entered this ghosthunter’s mind.
The whole concept of cemeteries being good places to find ghosts has been under discussion recently. Many psychic researchers believe that ghosts haunt places that have some meaningful relevance to their former lives. Sometimes these places recalled happy times in their lives; the houses in which they were children or perhaps, the houses in which they raised their own families. On a grimmer note, these places could be prisons or hospitals, or other places in which they spent unhappy, traumatic, or eventful times. But why a cemetery, a place where no living person longs to be and a place that, at most, is only a brief stopping point between death and the hereafter? If you were a ghost, would you rather wander around some old cemetery, or would you rather go back to your home or to some other happy place? Still, ghosts are found in cemeteries, possibly because they are somehow trapped there, bound to the spot in a psychic force that we do not understand. Noted psychic researchers Ed and Lorraine Warren would say that cemeteries are spawning grounds for evil spirits and may be portals to a nasty and demonic realm. My own experiences have shown me that far more hauntings occur out of cemeteries than in them.
Statue of Inez Clarke
Graceland, however, did have its ghosts.
The most noted Graceland ghost was that of little Inez Clarke, who died in 1880 at the age of six, apparently killed by lightning while on a family picnic. Her grief-stricken parents commissioned a life-sized statue of their daughter to be placed upon a stone base above her grave. The statue was shielded from the elements by a protective glass box.
I was completely charmed by the details of the little girl’s statue. Inez sat in a rough-hewn chair wearing a pretty frilled dress. The ribbons of her hat were loosely fastened around her neck, although the hat itself was slung over one shoulder. She wore a locket on a chain and held a parasol in her right hand. But what held me most was her face. Her eyes seemed simultaneously fastened on mine and fixed on some greater distance, an eternal point to which I was not privy. Looking into her eyes, I felt as though some communion were possible there. But the most evocative feature of her face was her enigmatic smile, a barely discernible Mona Lisa-like upturn to the lips, that seemed to say Inez had a secret.
The stories associated with the ghost of Inez included strange weeping sounds that were heard near the statue, as well as the vision of a child who would vanish into thin air near her grave. The most interesting stories, however, concerned the statue itself. It is said that sometimes the statue would disappear from within its glass box. This had been noted especially during thunderstorms, which seemed to make sense since the child was killed by lightning. Perhaps poor Inez belatedly ran for cover as she relived the awful day she died. In Haunted Illinois psychic researcher Troy Taylor says that more than one security guard at Graceland had seen the empty box, only to later find the statue had returned to its usual place inside. A guard quit shortly after finding the glass box empty one night.
There was no one around the day I visited, so I was not able to get any firsthand accounts about Inez’s wandering spirit. If she was out there, however, I hoped she was enjoying a paranormal picnic at Graceland, without the lightning.
Another story from Graceland was not so much a ghost story as it was simply a weird legend. The final resting place of Dexter Graves—I’m serious, that’s his name—was marked by a larger-than-life statue called “Eternal Silence.” It was an extremely creepy statue of a brooding man wrapped up in a voluminous robe. One arm, buried beneath the folds of the robe, was raised parallel to the ground, covering the mouth and lower half of the face. Only the eyes and nose were visible beneath the cowl of the robe. Over the years since Graves died in 1831, the effects of weather had turned the statue pale green, all except for the face, which remained black, having been protected from the weather by the robe’s deep folds.
The legend says that anyone looking into the figure’s face will catch a glimpse of his own death. That legend did not come true for me, nor did the one that says the statue simply cannot be photographed. There was also some vague doom associated with rubbing the figure’s nose, but it was too tall for me to reach it, so I was spared. At least for now. You just have to wonder how such dumb and easily discredited legends get started. Haunted or not, an awesome power and majesty emanated from “Eternal Silence.” In the absence of any obvious ghosts, it made the trip to Graceland worthwhile.
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
CHICAGO
SOCIAL REFORMERS JANE ADDAMS AND ELLEN GATES Starr founded Hull-House on Chicago’s Near West Side, a once-fashionable area that had become by 1889, a run-down industrial neighborhood, rife with poverty, crime, sickness, and illiteracy. It was a neighborhood full of smoky factories, squalid sweatshops, saloons, and crumbling tenement houses inhabited mostly by poor immigrant Germans, Greeks, Italians, and Polish and Russian Jews. There was no better neighborhood for these pioneering women to test the purpose of the Hull-House charter, as Addams herself defined it in her book, Twenty Years at Hull-House: “To provide a center for higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago.”
The original building in the Hull-House Settlement, which eventually grew to a dozen sprawling buildings by the time the facility closed in 1963, was the Charles Hull house built in 1856, in what was then one of the affluent
