One of the more popular stories on the ghost tours I run in Chicago is “The Legend of Dillinger’s Ding-a-ling.” It’s not a ghost story exactly, but it’s too good a story not to tell.
When we run the tour on routes that go past the alley in which John Dillinger, the Depression-era bank robber, was shot, I usually tell people the popular urban legend that Dillinger’s twenty-three-inch penis is on display somewhere in the Smithsonian Institute. Then I show off the picture that started the legend—a newspaper shot of Dillinger’s corpse on public display at the morgue, covered from the neck down by a sheet. Rigor mortis had caused his right arm to be bent at a ninety-degree angle, resulting in a large, tentlike protrusion in the sheet just about level with Dillinger’s crotch. It does look for all the world like Dillinger’s corpse is phenomenally well endowed and awfully happy to be there on the slab. Most of the onlookers surrounding the stiff (pun intended) in the picture look pretty impressed, except for one woman who looks distinctly unamused.
It is, in fact, just his arm causing the protrusion, not his wiener. No chunk of Dillinger is actually on display in the Smithsonian. One nurse—presumably the unamused woman in the picture—who tended to the corpse claimed that she peeked under the sheet out of curiosity and found that there was nothing remarkable about ol’ Johnny in the crotch department. But the rumors inspired by the picture persist to this day, and the picture is usually a big hit.
However, every now and then, there’ll be a crowd for whom that story isn’t particularly appropriate—a crowd with a lot of young kids, for instance, or a crowd of insecure guys who might get jealous. Or sometimes the traffic keeps us from moving at normal speed, so the story is done before we even get to Diversey Avenue. Whichever is the case, it creates a few minutes of quiet time as the bus travels between Dillinger’s Alley and the old factory where Adolph Luetgert, the original sausage king of Chicago, murdered his wife. I have to kill time somehow.
“Well,” I ask, “are there any questions? Even if it’s a totally off-the-wall question. This is Weird Chicago Tours, after all.”
One person raises her hand, and I point at her with a flashlight. I already have a pretty good idea what’s coming.
“So, do you really believe in ghosts, or what?” she asks.
I take a deep breath.
That’s a loaded question.
What, exactly, is a ghost, anyway? If I say I believe in them, are the people on the bus going to think I believe every story I hear about ghostly kids pushing cars over railroad tracks, every story about guys in white sheets who rattle chains and go “Whoooo”? Will they think I believe that a translucent version of me is floating around in my body, ready to fly free when I die?
I spend a lot of energy trying to keep from seeming like a total nut, and saying I believe in ghosts—any kind of ghosts—will make me look like a nut to many people right away.
When we say “ghost,” we usually think of the Hollywood model: a translucent version of a dead person that floats around wearing ghostly clothes that, while translucent themselves, still manage to cover up the ghost’s hoo-hoos perfectly. According to the stories attached to ghosts, this is usually supposed to be the soul of the dead person; either the soul is unable to “move on” or it’s back from some celestial plane to sort out unfinished business. Do I have to believe in that stuff to believe in ghosts?
And what about the similar apparitions that we call “residual” hauntings—these look like Hollywood ghosts, but they aren’t thought to be conscious entities. They’re sort of like video recordings that play over and over again, no more aware of themselves than, say, the wind or the waves in Lake Michigan. Some theorize that these residual hauntings are caused by some sort of energy exerted at the moment of sudden, traumatic deaths, creating a sort of “mental picture.” If that’s true, do these count as ghosts, too, or do ghosts have to be intelligent, thinking beings to qualify?
In fact, those are just two of the countless kinds of ghosts that people talk about. You need a whole encyclopedia to cover all of them.
There are poltergeists—ghosts that can’t be seen, but manifest by turning lights off and on, throwing things around the room, tugging at your clothes, and generally making nuisances of themselves.
There are figures so lifelike that you can dance with them all night and never realize that they’re not regular, living people until they disappear out of your car as you drive them past the suburban cemetery on South Archer Avenue.
There are vague voices heard in empty houses and hallways. Sometimes they seem intelligent enough to communicate; sometimes they just seem to repeat the same word or phrase over and over again.
There are mysterious phantom houses that appear near a cemetery, disappear, then show up again on the other side of the graveyard.
Spooky faces that just appear for a split second in the mirror. Spookier faces that jump out of the mirror and try to bite you.
Strange forces that cause people to get hang-up phone calls from a number once owned by a long-dead friend or cause a grandfather clock to stop with its hands frozen at 3:10, the time when the clock’s owner passed away.
Residual emotional energies that leave “bad vibes” in a place where a murder or disaster took place. Some say that these same energies cause the feelings of fright that come to people in darkened rooms with creaking doors and creeping shadows.
Which of these count as ghosts? Are any of them “real” to begin with, or are all of them just figments of overactive imaginations? If it’s the latter, is there any value in telling stories about them at all or in researching them scientifically? Am I just wasting everyone’s time or, worse, encouraging people to jump to supernatural explanations for everyday occurrences by taking them on ghost hunts?
Without question, most of the ghost reports I hear can be explained away with the knowledge you’ll find in any eighth-grade science book. Any ghost hunter worth his salt will tell you that at least 80 percent of all ghost reports can be dismissed very quickly.
But others are a bit harder to account for. Science may eventually find a way that a traumatic, sudden death can produce some form of energy that will, under certain unusual conditions, manifest as an “apparition.” Anything’s possible.
Some scientists say that for ghosts to exist, we’d have to rearrange physics, but for some ghosts, we may just have to learn more about physics.
Or perhaps we don’t need to rearrange physics at all; we just need to rearrange semantics. Whether ghosts are real or not depends a lot on what counts as a ghost and what doesn’t. One thing I can say for sure is that there are weird things in the environment that can have the psychological effect of making you think there’s a dead person hanging around. Should the wind making a moaning noise by blowing over a hole in the roof count as a ghost? It certainly functions as a ghost for all practical purposes, after all.
I’m a skeptic. Or, anyway, I try to be. I think that just about everything (except for Bob Dylan) can be explained by science. Even the stuff that we can’t explain yet will probably be explained eventually. And it’s a good thing I’m a skeptic; I’ve had my palm read twice, and both readers told me I’d die in a bus accident. On the tours, I stand up at the front of a bus for long stretches of time—with the door open in summer.
But there are only a few blocks of space between the end of the “appropriate for all audiences” version of the John Dillinger story and the sausage factory. I don’t have time to explain all of this. I just have time to break out a quick stock response.
“Well,” I say, “I don’t believe everything I hear, but I have seen some pretty weird stuff.”
I have, in fact, seen some strange things. I’ve seen shadows cast next to my own on the wall when there was no one next to me. I’ve heard weird voices and ghostly music. I’ve heard gunshots ringing out in empty hallways. I’ve felt invisible hands tapping me on the shoulder and flicking my ear.
In fact, I’ve experienced almost all of those things at one particular location.
And it just happens to be the next stop on the tour.