Addams and Starr came across the house in 1889, the bucolic suburbs had been swallowed up by the rapidly growing city of Chicago. Sandwiched between a saloon and undertaker’s establishment, the ground floor of this faded beauty of a home was rented as office and storage space for the factory behind it, but the women were able to rent the second floor and one room on the first floor to begin their venture.
It is in this house that the ghost stories originate.
Charles Hull was a Chicago real estate promoter whose wife died in the house he had built at 800 South Halsted Street shortly after the family moved in, leaving him a widower with two small children. His wife’s cousin, Helen Culver, moved in to take care of the children, although she left them during the Civil War to serve as a nurse. Sometime after her return, the children became ill and, despite her nursing abilities, died. In 1868, Hull closed up the house and moved out.
Even though it was abandoned, the house somehow survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Culver inherited the house when Hull died, and she rented it out to several tenants, including the Little Sisters of the Poor, who ran a home for the elderly; a used furniture store; and the factory that occupied it when Jane Addams first saw it.
All that time, the house was haunted.
Addams mentioned the fact that the house was haunted in Twenty Years at Hull-House. She wrote: “It had a half-skeptical reputation for a haunted attic, so far respected by the tenants living on the second floor that they always kept a large pitcher full of water on the attic stairs. Their explanation of this custom was so incoherent that I was sure it was a survival of the belief that a ghost could not cross running water, but perhaps that interpretation was only my eagerness for finding folklore.”
A bucket of water is not running water and the resident spirit, believed to be that of Mrs. Hull, apparently had no qualms about wandering around the house. Later stories tell of strange footsteps in the night, especially in a second-floor bedroom occupied by Addams, which was the same bedroom of the dead mistress of the house. After enduring several nights of loud footsteps in her otherwise empty bedroom, Addams finally gave the room back to the ghost of Mrs. Hull and moved to another room.
Guests of Hull-House also encountered the ghost. Helen Campbell, who was herself a successful author and social reformer with her book, Prisoners of Poverty, spent a night in the haunted bedroom. Sleeping fitfully, she awoke and in the dim light saw an unidentifiable figure standing by her bed. She leapt out of bed and turned up the gas jet to illuminate the room, but the apparition had vanished. A dream? Perhaps, but could it not have been Mrs. Hull watching over her guest?
Louise Bowen was a lifelong friend of Addams and she too had the same kind of encounter with the ghost of Hull-House. The same things happened to Jane and Mary Smith, and to Canon Barnett of Toynbee Hall, from the English settlement house upon which Hull-House was modeled. Each of them said they were visited by a lady dressed in white who was able to pass through closed doors.
The docents at the Hull-House Museum, which is now owned by the University of Illinois at Chicago, are forbidden to talk about the ghost. Despite that injunction, Sara*, the young graduate student who guided my wife, Mary, and me through Hull-House, confided that many people who worked there had experienced strange things—sounds for which they could find no source, motion detectors that went off without anyone being there, strange shadows, and a sense of uneasiness, as if one should quickly look over his shoulder before whatever it is that is there, disappears. The kind of feeling that truly makes your hair stand on end.
Another strange story that attached itself to Hull-House was the tale of the Devil Baby. Sometime in 1913, a rumor spread through the neighborhood that a devil baby, complete with horns and a tail, had been born at Hull-House, and that it was being kept alive in the locked attic of the house by Addams and her staff. No one knows how the rumor began, but it persisted for several years and Addams herself, baffled by the rumor, spent much energy in debunking it. Over a period of time, it died out, although the story provided the inspiration for Ira Levin’s 1967 best-selling novel, Rosemary’s Baby.
It was a warm and sunny August day when Mary and I visited Hull-House, not at all the kind of day one would consider even remotely creepy. We were the only visitors at that time, despite the fact that beyond the windows, outside, we could see streams of students hauling mattresses, TVs, clothes, and computers from their cars to the dorms as they moved in to begin the new school year.
Sara told us that we were welcome to tour the ground-floor rooms of Hull-House but that the second floor, the floor on which Mrs. Hull’s bedroom was located, was off-limits to visitors. An elegant wood-carved staircase in the foyer, carpeted with a red rug, led to the second floor. I was tempted to go up anyway, but decided to obey the rules. Since I didn’t see any buckets of water on the stairs, I thought maybe the ghost would come down to visit with us.
Sara said that she would show us a brief video about the history of Hull-House, and we followed her out the back door to the adjoining residents’ Dining Hall, which was reconstructed in 1967, as was the main house. The Dining Hall and Hull-House itself are the only two buildings left of the many buildings that made up the Settlement. Just as she approached the door to the Dining Hall, Sara stopped abruptly.
“Oh, dear,” she said, looking down at the sidewalk. There lay a dead bird, its barred wings spread wide as if in flight.
A good omen, I thought.
Sara paused for a moment, then stepped around the little corpse and unlocked the door to the Dining Hall. “I’ll call someone from maintenance to pick it up,” she said.
She led us upstairs to a large, rather nondescript room, in which was set up a screen and rows of chairs. She ran the video for us, an interesting story about how Hull-House came to be, but I was disappointed that there was no mention of its ghost. When the video was over, Sara brought us downstairs to view the residents’ Dining Hall.
The residents of Hull-House were not the poor immigrants from the neighborhood. Rather, they were young, idealistic men and women, mostly college educated, who came to live and work at Hull-House and direct its programs. They did this as volunteers, without pay. Many of these residents were women who in all likelihood would not have found a suitable outlet for the application of their college education had they not worked at Hull-House. In the Dining Hall, these bright and energetic young people had the opportunity to socialize with each other and to exchange ideas and opinions in ways that they might not have had in the general public.
The Dining Hall, with its wood paneling, paintings, carpeted floors, and long tables, seemed like a comfortable enough place to dine and chat, but now it was quiet and still, devoid of any ghostly presence.
I glanced at Mary and she shook her head. She didn’t feel anything either.
We left the Dining Hall and went back out to Hull-House. The dead bird was gone.
Back inside Hull-House, we were free to explore the downstairs rooms at our leisure. Jane Addams had wanted to restore the fine old house as best she could, to make it a warm and welcoming place for the poor people of the neighborhood. She succeeded admirably.
Richly carved moldings outlined the tall doors and long windows and framed the ceilings. In the center of the back parlor, Addams’s desk, a simple Colonial style in cherry wood with three rail-back chairs, stood on a Persian rug. A bright brass chandelier with six tulip-shaped glass globes hung above the desk. The walls were covered with gold-flocked wallpaper. On one wall was a marble fireplace surround. A portrait of Jane Addams in a gilded frame hung above it. A glass-front bookcase stood against another wall. Sunlight streamed into the quiet and peaceful room through the sheer curtains covering the windows.
If Mrs. Hull was
