deportation to her native Romania, who he said could set up Dillinger if the FBI would halt her deportation proceedings. The deal was struck.
The evening of July 22 was a warm one. John Dillinger wore a lightweight coat with a white shirt, gray pants, canvas shoes, and his usual straw boater as he entered the Biograph Theater with his most recent girlfriend, Polly Hamilton Keele. Anna Sage, who wore a brilliant orange dress, accompanied the couple. The banner hanging below the Biograph’s illuminated marquee advertised that the theater was “cooled by refrigeration” so that its patrons could watch Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable, William Powell, and Myrna Loy, in comfort.
While the movie played, Purvis positioned his men in the streets outside the theater. He was nervous, chain-smoking cigarettes as he waited for the theatergoers to exit. At about 10:30, the house lights came up and the theater began to empty. As the crowd filed out, Purvis saw Anna Sage’s distinctive orange dress—the means by which they agreed to identify her, and thus, Dillinger—among the crowd. He signaled to his agents and the police to move in.
Dillinger stepped off the curb, just before the alley that ran alongside the theater. Alerted by something, he suddenly stopped and whirled around, apparently reaching for a gun hidden beneath his coat. The agents opened fire. Three bullets struck him. Dillinger staggered a few steps then fell to the pavement dead.
On the day I visited it, the Biograph Theater looked pretty much as it had that night in 1934. The same imposing marquee still projected out above the sidewalk as it had when Dillinger walked beneath it. The little box office where he had purchased his tickets was still there. But the interior of the Biograph would have been unrecognizable to Dillinger’s ghost. At one time a single large room, it had since been dived into smaller theaters. The original seats, including the one that Dillinger had sat in and which had been painted a color different from all the others after his death, were long gone, replaced with newer ones. There were no moviegoers when I was there, but I did speak with the theater manager, as well as some employees, none of whom had ever experienced any ghostly happenings at the theater.
Still, there are stories of people seeing a shadowy figure of a man running on the sidewalk, or heading for the alley. He runs, then staggers, then falls and disappears, almost as if reenacting the shooting over and over again. There are some who say the man killed at the Biograph Theater that night was not really John Dillinger, but that the FBI, embarrassed by the Little Bohemia debacle, could not admit yet another mistake and so covered up the truth. We may never know the truth, but what we do know is that a man was shot and killed that night and that his ghost relives that agony still.
Ghosts of the Eastland
CHICAGO
The steamer Eastland lying on its side in the Chicago River shortly after capsizing.
ONE OF THE MOST TRAGIC MARITIME DISASTERS in U.S. history did not occur on the storm-tossed seas of the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans, nor was it the result of monstrous icebergs, killer storms, or enemy torpedoes. No, there was nothing dramatic in the death of the steamer Eastland except that it slowly rolled onto its side on the Chicago River, in the heart of that city, in plain view of thousands of people, killing at least 844 passengers and wiping out twenty-two entire families. The disaster occurred in water no more than twenty feet deep and only a few feet away from dry land.
Today, these unfortunate victims haunt the stretch of the Chicago River between the Clark and La Salle Street bridges. Witnesses have seen faces peering up at them from the watery depths of the river and have heard unexplainable screams and cries emanating from it. And it could be that the ghosts of the Eastland roam even farther into the city.
Saturday, July 24, 1915, dawned as a partly cloudy day in Chicago but the clouds could not dampen the carnival atmosphere among the seven thousand employees of the Western Electric Company who crowded the docks along the south bank of the river near the Clark Street Bridge. The adults chatted and laughed, while their children chased each other as they all awaited their turn to board one of several steamers chartered by Western Electric to take them to the company’s annual picnic in Michigan City.
The Eastland was one of the newer ships gathered at the docks that day and would be one of the first to depart, so it was natural that many of the picnickers would try to get on board. Rumors had circulated among the steamship lines that the Eastland was top-heavy and less than stable, but those rumors were disregarded as passengers began to stream aboard at 6:40 a.m. Only one minute later, the ship began to list starboard, toward the docks. The listing did not overly concern the ship’s chief engineer, Joseph Erickson, since it was an expected result of the passengers boarding from that side of the ship. Still, he ordered the ballast tanks on the port side to be filled in order to level the ship. As more passengers crowded on board, the ship began to list to the port side, where many people had congregated to watch the other ships boarding and to listen to a band aboard the nearby Theodore Roosevelt play “I’m on My Way to Dear Old Dublin Bay.” The Eastland crew continued to manipulate the ballast tanks to stabilize the vessel, but still there was no sense of impending danger.
The ship continued to sway back and forth, some of the passengers joking about it as loose objects slid along the deck. Water began entering the Eastland on the lower port side. The gangplank had been removed on the overcrowded ship, which now held more than twenty-five hundred passengers. More passengers moved to the port side, increasing the list to forty-five degrees. The crew began to worry and started to move some of the passengers to the starboard side. Water continued to enter the ship from below. Chairs, picnic baskets, and other items fell over and slid across the deck. Passengers below deck began climbing out of gangways and windows on the starboard side as the ship continued to lean toward port. The passengers panicked. They tried to find purchase somewhere on the tilting deck, while those below scrambled to make it topside before the ship keeled over. The ship continued to list dangerously to port. Before the eyes of hundreds of horrified spectators on nearby streets and docks, the Eastland slowly rolled over onto its port side.
The body of a woman being recovered from the Eastland.
Many passengers were pitched into the Chicago River, where, encumbered by suits and long dresses they were pulled below the water. Many more were trapped below, where they drowned. The thick smoke that filled the ship when some of its machinery exploded killed some. Lucky survivors managed to climb onto the hull of the ship while others were pulled from the river by rescuers in boats and even by onlookers who jumped into the river to save the floundering passengers. Others struggled to stay afloat and clung to whatever floating debris they could find.
Police and firemen and other rescuers climbed onto the hull of the Eastland, where they cut holes in the metal plate to bring up the survivors and the dead. Screams echoed all around them from the river and those trapped below deck. They worked frantically to free those inside but the screams gradually diminished even as they worked. By 8 a.m. all the survivors had been rescued, but 844 bodies were pulled from the ship and the river.
The scene was like something from Dante’s Inferno. One witness, a Chicagoan named Gretchen Krohn, described what it looked like dockside: “Up the slippery wet side canvas was spread that those carrying out the bodies might bring out their gruesome freight at a dog trot and thus empty the overturned basketful of human beings more quickly. All of the bodies carried past were so rigid that poles to carry them seemed superfluous. And the pitiful shortness of most of them! Children, and yet more children. And when it wasn’t a child, it was a young girl of eighteen or so.”
Another survivor said that the sight of so many babies floating on the water caused him to lose his belief in God.
