Meanwhile, Back at the Tattoo Shop
No one knows how many ghosts there are supposed to be in Chicago, and there’s no way that anyone can come up with a complete list. We can come up with a good list of well-known ghosts, but the number of buildings around the city that are thought to be haunted by the people who live and work inside them is pretty much endless. Honestly, it’s hard to find an old building that isn’t supposed to be haunted.
On North Clark Street, near the river, there was a bit of a dead zone in the space between Bughouse Square and the site of the Eastland disaster where there wasn’t much to talk about on my original Chicago Spooks route. So, to kill time, Hector and I made up a ghost story about the adult bookstore we drove past. As it always was with the stories I made up, it wasn’t a ghost story so much as a joke—when I was making up a story outright, I wanted people to be able to tell. Hector and I sort of refined the joke together over a few weeks, adding a bit to it every night until it became a really complicated story.
“If you look to your right,” I’d say, “You’ll see the haunted adult bookstore. We do lots of investigations at the haunted adult bookstore.”
“Hell yeah!” Hector said, while people chuckled.
“The story goes,” I said, “that the place was originally opened by a woman who was a fairly famous stripper several decades ago. But then she lost her leg in a shuffleboard accident, and her leg was sold to P. T. Barnum, who put it on display in a vat of formaldehyde as part of his sideshow. Within a year, her leg was making more money than she was. So she quit stripping and started up this store, then spent years writing letter after letter to P. T. Barnum, asking if he’d sell her her leg back.”
“Is this true?” someone would usually ask.
“Of course it is,” I say, making it fairly obvious that I was lying.
“Tell them about the footsteps,” Hector would say.
“I’m about to,” I’d say. “You see, after she died, they started hearing mysterious footsteps all over the building. Or, well, foot step anyway.”
I’d tap on the microphone to mimic a single footstep, and people would start to groan. But the joke wasn’t over. Hector provided the punchline.
“On the day she died,” Hector said, “they finally got a letter back from Barnum. It said, ‘Honey, if you want that thing back, it’s gonna cost you an arm and a leg!’”
“Good night, folks!” I’d say.
“Try the veal!” Hector would add, and we’d do a little dance.
By the time we got that far, I’d be at the site of the Eastland, ready to get back to telling real stories of death and tragedy.
I always felt like it was fairly obvious that that story was just a joke, but a few people e-mailed and told me that they’d gone to the place after the tour to look for the ghost.
Nearly two years after I first told the story, Ken started running a red-light district tour for Weird Chicago—a tour that took people to a couple of old brothel sites (and a couple of current ones). That very adult bookstore was a regular stop. One night, when I was riding along on that tour, I introduced myself to the owner.
“I just wanted to apologize,” I said, “in case anyone ever came in asking about the ghost of a one-legged stripper.”
I explained the story to him, and he seemed amused.
“That happens now and then,” he said, “and we always thought it was weird, because, the thing is, we really do have a ghost here!”
And this wasn’t the only time this happened. Troy once ran a pub crawl where he was offered a hundred bucks to add an extra stop at the end of the route. Because everyone was too drunk to care about the story, he quickly made up a ghost story about the nearest pub. It turned out that the staff of that place had actually thought it was haunted for years.
We looked into the history of all of these places, and some of them turned out to have really good stories behind them. But even the spookiest places didn’t always have a very good story. Like Odin Tatu, for instance. Sure, it was a funeral parlor, but who the heck dies in a funeral parlor?
Well, besides Tapeworm, that is.
When Tapeworm died, Hector and I speculated that maybe, on some level, he had known that he didn’t have much time left when we did our first investigation. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always sort of suspected that sometimes, before people die, they know in the back of their minds that their time is short, even if the death is completely unexpected. This is one of those beliefs (or suspicions, rather) that’s stuck with me even as I’ve grown more skeptical.
Right after Tapeworm’s death, Hector and I began to talk about him on the tours, filling in the space between Harpo Studios and Hull House. And we speculated that, since he had challenged the ghosts to a fight in the event of his death, that he was now engaged in a battle royale (Immortal Kombat, if you will) with the ghost of Walter, the ghost who had said his name into the microphone. And, even if Walter had picked up some really crafty tricks in the afterlife during the years in which he’d been dead, my money was still on Tapeworm.
But we didn’t make a return trip to Odin Tatu for some time. Even after they reopened for business, we didn’t want to impose—there’s really no Miss Manners guide to etiquette out there to tell you how long to wait after someone dies before you can ask his friends if you can come see if his ghost is up and around (though I suspect that the answer is “never”).
Finally, one wintry day they called Ken and asked if we’d like to come check the place out again. We dropped everything and headed up, planning to record an episode of our Weird Chicago podcast during the impromptu investigation.
Except for the fact that the tattoo people no longer rented, or had access to, the upstairs apartment area where Tapeworm had lived, the place was pretty much the same as it had been before. The gravestone was still in the fireplace. Lots of the Star Wars memorabilia was still around. Tapeworm’s station in the tattoo parlor, where he had done his work, was still there, untouched and unused. They left it up as sort of a shrine.
“Has anything weird been happening here?” we asked the people—friends of Tapeworm’s—who now ran the place.
“A couple of people have heard the little girl,” said one of them. “Chango, you heard it, right? Come here!”
A guy got up from his station and walked toward the back.
“Chango?” asked Ken. “There’s a guy here named Chango?”
Shortly after they’d reopened, they had hired a new tattoo artist who was nicknamed Chango—the name of the orisha of whom Tapeworm had been so fond and also Tapeworm’s own boyhood nickname.
“Yeah,” said Chango. “I was in the back room, and I heard this faint sound coming from out in the entryway, like a little girl crying. And I came out to see what it was, and there was nobody out here.”
They also told us about flickering lights and of glass display shelves that were falling apart inside of their cases. Lots of people had been “feeling” the presence of the little girl. One person had even seen her—a little blonde girl, peeking around the corners. No one was totally sure that the girl that people heard and the girl that people saw were one and the same, of course. We never can be sure of these things. They could be ghosts of two different girls or possibly even two separate ghosts of the same person, for all we know. That sort of thing has been known to happen.
We proceeded into the basement, which was spookier than ever. The lighting had been removed from the place, so I was walking around, taking photograph after photograph, not so much to hunt for ghosts—I wasn’t even looking through the viewfinder—but to use the flash as a flashlight.
Unlike the first time—when we got nothing unusual in the photographs—we were at least picking up some orbs this time. But they were, without question, just dust particles. It was awfully dusty down there.
There was, however, one strange thing that happened: Every time I took a photograph, I’d see two silhouettes on the back wall of the basement. One, of course, was Ken. The other was of Nick, one of the tattoo guys. Neither silhouette was showing up in the pictures, though.
One time, only once, there was a third silhouette. I only saw it for a split second, but I was absolutely sure that it was Tapeworm.
It could have just been my mind playing tricks on me. But it was a sighting of a ghost made not from photos or audio recordings, but with my own two eyes. That’s incredibly rare.
That split-second sighting was all that happened that was out of the ordinary that night. The next day, though, we got an e-mail from Keegan, one of the young psychics who had been on the first investigation.
“In my dream last night,” she wrote, “we were in Odin Tatu, all of us, and you were doing an investigation and while you were doing it, Tapeworm and I were watching. Then I went to say hi to you, and he told me not to, since I would be interrupting.” The dream had been so vivid that she felt she had to write to see if we were okay. She had no idea that we had been there that night. In fact, at the time of our investigation, she was most likely asleep.
As the months went by, we got occasional reports back from the tattoo parlor that a lot of weird stuff was going on. Over the summer, about a year after Tapeworm died, they installed some motion-sensor cameras that were picking up weird, orblike blobs. My first instinct was to say that they were dust particles, but they weren’t behaving like dust. They were larger than dust particles, for one thing. And dust alone shouldn’t have set off the motion sensor. And the way that they moved wasn’t really consistent with what we’d see from dust—dust particles don’t normally float up to the camera, pause in front of it, and then float away. Many of them seemed to be moving with a sense of purpose.
On Halloween night, during a party in the tattoo parlor, one of the employees noticed that he’d missed a call on his cell phone. No message was left, and it turned out that the number belonged to a random woman who was apparently asleep at the time the call was made. But the employee recognized the number—it used to belong to Tapeworm.
Normally, I would say that you’re not really much more likely to see ghosts on Halloween; they get reported all year. But knowing Tapeworm, I would have expected him to be a bit more active that night. It’s just the kind of guy he was.
In the fall of 2007, about a year after Tapeworm’s death, we started bringing tour groups to the parlor—we even managed to get permission to take tour groups down into the basement. One of the benefits of having a smaller bus than we’d used for Chicago Spooks was that we could get our groups into places that couldn’t really handle large crowds.
Like any place, it was more active some nights than others. Some nights we’d go down there, and it wouldn’t even seem all that spooky. Other nights, though, it was terrifying. Cold spots were recorded frequently. On a couple of occasions, we smelled a strong aroma of formaldehyde for a couple of minutes that disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared. Another night, there was a smell that people described as “the smell of decay.” On many of the more active nights, I would feel like someone was tapping my shoulder, flicking my hair, and tweaking single hairs off of my head—all of the annoying things that guys like Tapeworm do to nerds like me.
Soon, I was telling people that I was a skeptic, but if there was ever a ghost that I believed in, it was the ghost of Tapeworm. I don’t bother myself with questions over whether ghosts are proof of the afterlife or if “being” a ghost is a form of the afterlife, but Tapeworm is in that building all right. If I screw my skepticism to the sticking place, I can go so far as to say that he’s still there in our hearts, that his spirit hangs over the place the way the spirit of the Beatles infests the Cavern Club.
But, one way or the other, he’s still there all right.