In 1977, a woman named Teresita Basa was found dead in her Chicago apartment. Initially, it was thought to be a rape and murder case, but the autopsy revealed that there had been no rape—in fact, she was a virgin.
The police had no motive in mind, and no suspects, when a couple named Dr. and Mrs. Chua contacted the Evanston police and told them that Teresita had been “speaking” through Mrs. Chua, who worked at the same place as Teresita, though they didn’t know each other. By speaking through her, Teresita had named her killer and said that the motive was her jewelry, which the killer had divided among his wife and various girlfriends.
The desperate police contacted the man fingered as the killer and found the jewelry just where “Teresita” told them it would be. The man confessed to the murder, then retracted the confession and entered a not guilty plea. Since the “voice from beyond the grave” wasn’t the sort of evidence that would really hold up in court, the case seemed headed for certain mistrial when the killer, in a move that stunned the court, changed his plea to guilty against the advice of his attorneys.
Some people hold this case up as “proof” of the afterlife. Or “proof” of demonic possession. Or, at least, proof of ghosts.
Of course, it’s none of those things. No one can really know if the Chuas were telling the truth or if they happened to have information from some other source and came up with the “voice from the grave” story as a cover for something. And, even if they were telling the truth, we don’t have any idea as to the nature of what happened to make Mrs. Chua talk in Teresita’s voice.
And that’s the bottom line—we don’t really know anything about ghosts.
People looking for “proof” of ghosts are going to be looking for a long, long time. Some people claim to have found it, but these people are pretty generally quacks. And if they prove that a ghost exists, the proof will only work for the one ghost they prove. It won’t prove that any other ghost exists, necessarily.
Once, on a tour, I told people that we didn’t think cemeteries were usually haunted.
“Well, then,” said someone on the bus, “you don’t know what you’re talking about! My group has proven that they almost always are!”
They proceeded to show me a whole bunch of pictures of cemeteries. Orbs were all over in each of the pictures. These orbs, they said, were souls, trapped in purgatory, and their photos were proof of life after death.
I didn’t call them idiots right to their face—that wouldn’t have been polite. But a blurry picture full of balls of light isn’t proof of anything. Even if I thought the orbs were something paranormal, not just dew points, fruit flies, dust or camera malfunctions, it wouldn’t be proof of much. There was nothing in the picture to prove the existence of the soul, or of purgatory, or anything like that.
In dealing with the paranormal community, it’s inevitable that you’ll run across people or groups who will claim to have proven the existence of the paranormal, the supernatural, or the afterlife—they tend to have a glassy look in their eyes and tend to have trouble carrying on a conversation. Once I had a couple of people show me pictures of what they said were living dinosaurs. They held these up as proof of the biblical account of creation, and, therefore, the book of Revelations.
I don’t know where to begin saying what was wrong with that. For one thing, the photograph was obviously a fake—the “dinosaur” was obviously computer-generated. Badly, for that matter. And even if it was a dinosaur, it would only be proof that some prehistoric species wasn’t quite extinct yet, after all—something that’s happened before, in fact; every now and then people do come across a living animal that was supposed to have gone extinct eons ago, such as the coelcanth, a fish that was thought to have died out with the dinosaurs, but was rediscovered in 1938. They might, in theory, be able to hold a living dinosaur up as evidence that the earth is only six thousand years old, not more than four billion, as scientists say, but it sure as heck isn’t proof. Even if they proved that the earth was six thousand years old, it wouldn’t prove that the creation story in the book of Genesis was the correct one, as opposed to one of the countless other creation stories in the world, and it sure as heck wouldn’t prove anything in the subsequent books of the Bible.
It’s the same way with ghosts, of course. Even if I took a picture of a transparent version of Tapeworm, and no one could find any way that I could have faked it, and it was very clearly Tapeworm, not just a dust particle or optical illusion, it wouldn’t really prove anything. The fact is, there is no way to prove anything outside the field of pure mathematics. There’s always another scientific explanation waiting around the corner, and there is always the chance that any piece of evidence could have been hoaxed. Everyone except for me would sort of have to take my word for it, and I’d have to take it as a matter of faith that no one had set me up with some sort of hologram technology or something.
Even with that possible Tapeworm sighting on Division Street under my belt and the gunshot in the Congress Hotel, I can’t say with any certainty that I’ve ever seen or heard a ghost. And I don’t really expect to.
Even people who live full-time in places that go down in history as haunted usually don’t see things very often. The odds that we’ll actually see something on a one-night investigation, or a fifteen-minute tour stop, are pretty slim—particularly if we don’t happen to be there on an active night.
And even if I ever do have a girl disappear out of the bus as we drive through the old City Cemetery, what will it prove? That people come back from the dead? That mental energy can manifest as an apparition? That there’s carbon monoxide on the bus?
The flip side of this is that ghosts are never going to be disproven, either. There’s never going to be a scientific discovery that makes ghost hunting completely pointless.
People pretty much believe what they want to believe. This is part of why phony mediums found it so easy to fool people during the height of the Spiritualist movement—people so desperately wanted to talk to their dead loved ones that they couldn’t bring themselves to believe that that ectoplasm was just cheesecloth that had been stuffed up someone’s butt. They believed it was their dead child because they desperately wanted to believe it.
I’ve seen this in action—if there’s one question I dread more than “Do you believe in ghosts?” it’s questions from people who want to contact a dead loved one or who believe that their dead child is haunting their house and want my help to prove it. If I were less honest, there would be a fortune to be made here. As I’ve said, I don’t look New Agey. I don’t claim that I can contact the dead or detect their presence. I look so young that I tend to get carded when I try to get into R-rated movies. Therefore, I probably come across as reasonably trustworthy and levelheaded. But I’ve had people beg me to come to their house and confirm that their son is haunting it. I don’t have to do a single thing to make them think I could do such a thing; they convince themselves. And many, I’m sure, would be prepared to offer me pretty impressive sums of money to confirm their beliefs.
I’ve yet to hear of a single séance in which the medium doesn’t tell the client what he or she wants to hear. Consider that TV show where the woman claims to be contacting the spirits of people’s dead pets—she never says anything like “Boy, did that cat hate you! I know she purred a lot, but she was totally faking it.” The reasons for this are simple—if she tells the people what they want to hear, they’ll want to believe her. If she tells them anything else, they’ll start calling her a fraud. It happens a lot. If I tell people that the orbs they’ve photographed in the alley are just dust, some of them tend to get really ticked off and decide that I must not know what I’m talking about.
I’m always at a loss as to what to tell the people who are trying to contact someone. If I tell them I don’t believe that there’s anything haunting their house or that the pictures they have are just dust particles, they’d be devastated. At the same time, I have to stand on my principles and not lead them on just to make a quick, dishonest buck. About the best I can do is tell them that “I can’t possibly confirm something like that, but if you think he’s there, I’m in no position to say he’s not.”
How much of belief in ghosts comes from this sort of thing? How many of us decide that we believe in ghosts because someone we know claims to have seen one, and it’s against our nature to think that our friends are kooks?
I’m no closer to answers than I ever was. Until that woman in white comes floating out of a wall to tell me to avenge her death and then submits to an interview, I won’t be.
But that’s part of why ghost stories endure. There are no answers. There never really will be. It’s part of why they become such important parts of a town or family’s identity. They may not be exactly true, but that’s beside the point. Plenty of the historical facts that are part of our national identity as Americans—Christopher Columbus discovering America, Washington and the cherry tree, etc.—are no more reliable than the story of Resurrection Mary. But we know for sure that George Washington never cut down his father’s cherry tree. We can keep on wondering about Mary.
As long as the city of Chicago stands, I imagine that I’ll keep getting e-mails from restauranteurs saying that they think their restaurant is haunted. Some of them will be managers out to launch publicity stunts (we get a lot of those). Some of them will just be making up stories to explain noises that are really caused by bad wiring or rats in the basement. But other times, we won’t be able to dig up an explanation for the hauntings, but we will find evidence of a murder or suicide in the building. And that’ll start me on another long trail of research and detective work, and maybe give us a new place to stop on the tours. The supply of stories in this city is endless.
Troy, Adam, and Ken
Weird Chicago Tours is doing well. We’ve expanded to run straight historical tours that barely mention ghosts, if at all, and several other spin-off tours that give me more reasons to do research into Chicago history. We’ve got a lot of plans for new tours, new stops, and new ways to get people around the city. And they’ll keep expanding, because the stories just keep coming.
The ghost tours we run change all the time—we have an ever-growing list of places we can go, and sometimes months go by in which I never run the same route twice. The Weird Chicago book came out in summer of 2008, and immediately gave us a major boost. Hector and Willie are still driving for us. The tours still aren’t a big moneymaker or anything, but business has picked up steadily; the Weird Chicago book has been especially good for business.
Ken and I are still doing investigations; lately we’ve been focusing on a couple of major sites around the city that we’ve been given unprecedented access to. Our reputation for having our heads more-or-less on our shoulders opens a lot of doors for us. I can’t talk about many of them yet. Loose lips sink ships.
As of this writing, Olga and Ray are still in business, with a couple of new guides and drivers. The new guides seem friendly when we run into them. I ran into Olga herself at the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre site (which we usually just drive by now, since there’s not much to see), and we chatted pleasantly for a bit. Some stories are still going around (usually coming from Ray) that Ken and I were “fired” from Chicago Spooks or that Troy had lured us away with promises of more money, but, well, I suppose I’ve already covered that.
Ghost stories will stick around as long as people are still telling stories, as long as they’re wondering what happens when we die, as long as we wonder how to explain the strange things that exist in the environment. There’s no end in sight to any of that.
And, inevitably, as more stories are created, either by actual events or by sheer imagination, there will be more evidence—pictures, recordings, sightings that back up the ghost stories. They won’t convert the unbelievers, but they’ll reinforce the myths.
They won’t be good evidence of ghosts.
But they will certainly be cool.