The ghost tour business, at least in Chicago, is not the kind of industry where competing companies get together to play softball every now and then. And it’s unfortunate.
When we started Weird Chicago, our philosophy, as far as other tour companies were concerned, was to live and let live. This worked out well. We’d frequently run into Hector while he ran a Chicago Spooks tour, and we’d pull the buses alongside one another.
“What’s up, man?” I’d ask. “Seeing anything good lately?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “We got a video of the little girl at Hull House, man!”
“Sweet!” I’d say. “Send it along!”
I’d introduce him to my tour group, and he’d introduce me to his. Then, as he drove away, I’d explain that most of the ghost tour guides in the city knew each other and that we were all friends. We shared information and everything. People got a kick out of it. I got a kick out of it. Nothing warms my heart more than friendship between rivals.
But all of that fell apart after Hector was fired from Chicago Spooks. Exactly why Hector was fired, I never found out. But after that, Ray was both driving the bus and running most of the tours himself.
Since our buses picked up at the same place, people would occasionally ask him if they were in the right place for our tour. Sometimes he told them “I fired those guys!” Other times he’d start railing about how he “wrote” our tour. Other times, he’d tell people he’d never heard of us. Sometimes he’d even chew the people out for wanting to go on one of our tours.
On a couple of occasions, Ken would go out to the bus—which we parked in his neighborhood—and find that someone had spray-painted over the windshield and logos or bashed in the headlights. We had no way of knowing who was doing it, but we only ever had one suspect.
When we ran into Ray during tours, it was nothing like running into Hector had been. Usually he’d ignore us. One night Ken said hello to him, and Ray responded by saying, “Don’t get cocky!”
The way Ken described it, this very nearly led to a boxing match. “Don’t get cocky or what?” he asked Ray.
When Ray didn’t respond, Ken challenged him further. “Come on!” he said. “I wanna know! Or what, Ray?”
I kept thinking that any night, I was going to run into Ray and his tour group in an alley someplace—Death Alley, presumably—and our respective tour groups would have a rumble. I imagined that it would be a lot like the “Beat It” video.
In the spring of 2008, I was walking toward the bank when I heard a voice shout “Adam!” It was Hector, driving by in a delivery truck he was driving at the time.
“Hector!” I shouted. I ran out into the street, and we shook hands and bitched about Ray for a while. I gave him an update on how things were going over at the tattoo parlor and the Congress, both of which he’d investigated with us, and both of which were now occasional tour stops for Weird Chicago.
“Hey, man,” he said, “I need to get back into the scene. You guys ever need a driver or anything these days?”
“I’ll let you know,” I said.
And, a few weeks later, Willie’s schedule changed, and we needed a new Friday night driver. Ken suggested Hector, and I was all for it. Hector agreed, and we had the whole old gang back together.
But he also said, “I’m not going to be the peanut gallery for you guys, though. I’ll just be the driver, and that’s it.”
I knew, of course, that he wouldn’t be sticking to this. Hector was never the sort who could resist even the smallest crowd.
The night of Hector’s first tour back with me, we all met up at Ken’s new house on the Northwest Side where the bus was parked, and we showed Hector how we’d fixed up the bus into a sort of rolling museum of Chicago history. He’d only driven it once before, and that had been back before we’d even had it painted.
Hector
“Man,” he said. “You know this is probably the first time we’ve all been in the same place in at least a year?”
It was true—the last time we’d met up was a night that I tagged along on one of Ken’s tours, and we ran into Hector at the Eastland site. We hadn’t all just hung out in months. But it felt right.
As we drove through the city to the pickup spot, Hector and I went through all of our old routines to see which jokes we could bring back and which ones we should just put to rest. We came up with some new ones. Hector had an idea for a new “character” he could play named Peanut, a very quiet, very stupid bus driver. He would barely open his mouth for the whole tour, except to say something stupid, then, midway through, whoever was running the tour would say, “Damn it, Peanut! How do you even tie your shoes in the morning? What job did you have before this?”
And “Peanut” would quietly say, “I was a tour guide for Chicago Spooks.”
It was a perfect persona for nights that he worked with Ken, who didn’t like sharing the stage as much as I did.
The tour that night, of course, was a blast. As I predicted, Hector was just as boisterous as ever. When we pulled up to the Hard Rock Cafe, they were blasting “Bohemian Rhapsody” over the speakers, and we headbanged so hard to the guitar solo that I was sore for days. Everyone was having a blast before the tour even began.
I hadn’t been going to Hull House much, even though I’d found out some new information about it recently, but working with Hector made me want to swing by there again. Hector had told me that he’d had some interesting success looking for ghosts there with a pendulum. As a firm believer that you never know what kind of nutty gear might prove useful in a ghost hunt, I was eager to see it.
After telling the stories of the place and letting people out to look around, Hector pulled a crystal on a pendulum out of a pouch he was wearing around his neck and held it in front of him, staring at it intently.
“Pendulum,” he said, “is there a ghost here?”
The pendulum moved a bit.
“Do you really have to address it like that?” I said.
“Yes,” said Hector. “Pendulum, is there a ghost in the garden?”
The pendulum moved in a way that I guess was supposed to mean “No.”
Hector shrugged. “It’s weird,” he said. “I’m getting nothing at this place tonight. Remember how active it was two years ago?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It hasn’t been that active here lately.”
This wasn’t exactly true; the last time I’d taken a student group there, the curtains had been moving and one kid got a photo that looked a lot like a woman’s face standing just behind the window. Most shots like that turn out to be pictures of lamps, but still, it was pretty strange. However, Hull House hadn’t seemed active even 10 percent of the times I’d been there in the last year.
The crystal pendulum thing struck me as a little bit silly—I always feel a little bit silly when I see people talking to rocks and expecting a response. But I remembered one of the reasons Hector and I made such a great team on the tours: some people wanted to be told that there was a portal to the netherworld over by the fountain or that a swinging crystal would tell us where the ghosts were if we addressed it politely enough. I wasn’t about to do any of that, but Hector didn’t have a problem with it. It ended up being the same skeptic/believer dynamic that Ken and I had when we did tours together.
And so we proceeded on to the place I really wanted to go to that night—Old Town (formerly Odin) Tatu. It was too far away from downtown to be a nightly stop on the tours, but Hector hadn’t been in the building since that very first investigation, shortly before Tapeworm’s death.
So we drove out there and got everyone to sign the waiver. (Since the basement wasn’t set up for customers, we had to get people to sign a waiver saying they were going down those stairs at their own risk, in case they fell down, hit their head on the low ceiling, or saw a ghost and had a heart attack.) Then we headed inside.
I had gotten to a point where I could usually tell if it was going to be active in the basement as soon as I stepped inside, and that particular night, I really wasn’t feeling it. Plenty of people were taking orb pictures, but those are always to be expected in places as dusty as that basement.
Hector looked around for a minute, soaking it all in, remembering where the “Walter” voice was, where the cold spots had been. We walked around and sort of recreated that investigation. Hector broke out his pendulum, but had no luck with it.
Finally, he pulled out his camera and whispered, “Richie, brother. Tapeworm. Hombre.” He then said something in Spanish and waited for a second, pointing his camera over at a dark corner, near where we’d heard the “Walter” voice.
Suddenly, he began to nudge me. “Look!” he said. “Something’s moving over there.”
I looked into the corner. Soon, everyone on the tour was looking over at that dark corner. Sure enough, it looked like something was moving over there, but it was too dark to see for sure.
We slowly approached, but by the time we got there, whatever had been moving was gone.
It wasn’t until the next tour I ran with him a few weeks later that things got stranger. We were driving the bus down Division Street, through the area known around the city as the Viagra Triangle, due to the amount of middle-aged guys who roam through the bars on the strip trying to pick up twenty-year-old girls.
I joked about the strip as we stopped at a stoplight. Just as the light turned green, a big, bald dude with a goatee walked up and knocked on the door of the bus, smiling.
I smiled back and waved as we pulled away—people knocking on our doors or otherwise messing with us was nothing new, after all. It wasn’t until we were pulling away that Hector and I both realized, at the same time, that the knocker looked awfully familiar.
“Dude!” I said. “Was that … ?”
“Oh, my God!” said Hector. “You noticed it, too?”
I looked back at the picture of Tapeworm on the back of the bus. The knocker had looked exactly like him.
Traffic was pushing us forward, but I rushed to the back of the bus to look out of the rear windows. Naturally, there was no sign of any bald dude with a goatee.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened at the tattoo parlor that night. It appeared that the ghost of Tapeworm was out on the town.
Of course, hours later, I looked back on things and wasn’t so sure. It probably wasn’t Tapeworm’s ghost—there were any number of bald dudes with goatees hanging around at the bars in the Viagra Triangle on any given night. After all, in addition to all of the bars geared at frat boys and old men on that strip, there’s also a bar that features midget wrestling. You really do see all kinds on Division Street these days (instead of seeing nothing but low-down drunks and hookers, as you did a couple of generations back).
And the guy probably hadn’t vanished as we drove away. He’d probably just stepped into a bar or something. Really quickly.
But, still. Maybe it was just our minds playing tricks on us. In fact, I should probably say it was obviously our minds playing tricks on us. But you know what? Maybe it wasn’t.
It was a classic ghost encounter, the kind that most ghost stories spring from—a very brief encounter with someone or something that doesn’t stick around long enough to answer any questions, leaving our imaginations to do the rest. Maybe that’s all that ghosts are, really—the ability of our own minds to look at something as ordinary as a big weirdo knocking on the door of a tour bus and smiling or to feel “vibes” coming from something rattling in the furnace and turn it into something extraordinary.
Or maybe—just maybe—it really was some strange, otherworldly version of Tapeworm himself, out for a night of fun somewhere besides the musty basement of his old home, wanting to smile and say hello.
It was a few months later that I had perhaps the spookiest experience I’ve had yet. Right in the middle of a tour, too, which was a bonus.
The Congress Hotel had not been particularly active the whole time we’d been taking people there. The dark, empty ballrooms and corridors were spooky enough to make it a good enough place to stop even without a ghost showing up, but we hadn’t had a lot of luck with pictures or actual sightings so far.
But in late summer of 2008, it started to seem creepier. That “haunted” vibe, which I’d never noticed there, started to be pretty distinctly present on tour stops there.
One particular night, as I stood in the lobby outside of the Gold Ballroom, I noticed blue, pink, and yellow lights dancing across the ceiling. The lobby was deserted, and the lights were mostly out. I didn’t think I’d ever seen lights like that on the ceiling in there before, but figured that maybe I just hadn’t noticed them. For the record, I didn’t see them any other night thereafter, either.
Also, several people who wrote me after the tour said that they kept seeing shadowy forms out of the corner of their eyes while we stood there. I saw a couple myself, but brushed them off as tricks of the mind. There are mirrors all over the lobby, and they can pick up shadows of tourists and play tricks on you if you aren’t really, really careful.
In the Gold Room itself, we had a weird battery-drainage issue—a couple of brand-new double As that had just been put into a camera suddenly went dead.
The spooky feeling followed us all the way up the stairs and down the hall to the Florentine Room. After telling the stories about it, I let the tourists in and began to lead them around, not bothering to turn on the light.
I was so spooked that night by the very feeling in the air that I decided, since it was dark and no one could see me looking foolish, to try out Hector’s pendulum trick. I pulled out my key chain and let one of the attachments dangle.
“Key chain,” I said politely, feeling only slightly dumb, “is there a ghost in here?”
The key chain swung a bit, seeming to point over at a wall where I had never heard of a ghost showing up. Satisfied that my makeshift pendulum had just been silly, I started walking back to the entrance, intending to turn the lights on. I was halfway back when the quiet of the room was broken by a very loud sound—like a gunshot—coming from the service hallway behind the wall where the key chain had been pointing.
A couple of people hit the deck. A couple of others asked if I’d set the whole thing up. A braver person ran into the hallway.
It was deserted. The whole floor, in fact, was deserted except for us. There had been no footsteps following the sound of the gunshot. There was nothing large on the floor that could have fallen to produce the sound.
We ended up spending the next several minutes trying to debunk the gunshot sound, but came up empty. If someone on the staff was playing a prank on us, they’d done a damned good job of it. Certainly, this was no “stuff a costume full of deer guts, stick it in the freezer and say it’s Bigfoot” type of hoax. It was the kind that scared us so thoroughly that I almost had to make the next stop on the tour a trip to Target to buy new pants.
Two nights later, I was back in the Florentine Room, where a banquet had just been set up. Someone noticed a small 9-volt battery on the floor and dropped it to see if it made a noise similar to what we’d heard. It did, but it didn’t explain the noise away. The night we’d heard the noise, we’d checked the vicinity very carefully, and we would’ve noticed a battery on the floor. Besides that, if a battery had just randomly fallen out of nowhere, that would be a paranormal event in and of itself.
Ken tried to tell me that the noise was probably just an oven closing or the furnace, two floors below, making noise. Just as Ken is known to think no one is psychic but him, he also tends not to believe in ghosts that other people report if he hasn’t “sensed” them himself.
But a month or so later, Ken called me up in the middle of one of the tours he was running.
“We just heard the gunshot!” he said, proudly. “We checked the whole floor, and there’s nothing here that could have caused it!” He gave up his idea that it was an oven or the furnace pretty quickly—the noise seemed far too close to be coming from the furnace, and there was no oven in operation anywhere near the floor.
This doesn’t mean it was a gunshot, necessarily (by this point, the staff had taken to faking noises from time to time, though they usually owned up to it afterward), but this is the most we can truly hope for on a ghost hunt—we’d encountered something that simply defied explanation.
Being a ghost tour guide isn’t always fun. As much as we mix up the tours, I do end up telling the same stories over and over. Sometimes I’m halfway through the story of the Iroquois Theater and realize that I’ve been thinking about cheeseburgers the whole time. Sometimes I just give up on ever actually seeing a ghost in a specific location. Sometimes the crowds are rowdy and unpleasant. The money isn’t great—as a small operation, we could sell out every night and still not make much of a living out of it. Sometimes months go by without a single check coming in.
But then, every now and then, a moment like that comes along that makes everything old seem new again, and it’s all worthwhile.