Haunted Heartland

by Michael Norman

  Some of the men heard him and looked for themselves. They all agreed: it was the outline of a man’s left hand.

  Edward McKevitt grabbed a sponge and tried without success to wipe it off. The harder he rubbed, the clearer it became. Other men tried using ammonia and other strong soaps. One firefighter tried to scrape it off with a straight razor. Others thought it might be on the outside of the window.

  By early the following week, the story of the firehouse at Thirteenth and Oakley and its mysterious handprint had spread throughout the city, fueled by newspaper stories and neighborhood gossip. Curiosity seekers showed up by the hundreds to see for themselves.

  Experts from the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, the manufacturer of the window, were called in to solve the mystery. They used a special, highly reliable chemical compound to clean the window yet the handprint remained.

  The weeks and months passed. The window was cleaned and cleaned again but with no obvious effect on what was now generally agreed to be the last vestige of firefighter Frank Leavy. A few people suggested that the glass ought to be replaced, but that idea was quashed. No one wanted to tamper with the unknown. Some thought there was a supernatural element to its origin.

  So Frank Leavy’s handprint remained there over the years. The firehouse at Thirteenth and Oakley saw dozens of firefighters come and go. Older firefighters customarily told new men the story of Frank Leavy and showed them the handprint. Newspaper reports, usually on an anniversary of the Curran Hall fire, brought visitors asking to see “the hand.”

  However, Frank Leavy’s widow and his children never looked at the handprint as far as it is known. That is perhaps understandable. Frank Leavy Jr. followed in his dad’s footsteps and became a member of the Chicago Fire Department.

  The nature of the handprint has been debated over the years. No one has ever satisfactorily explained what caused this strange legacy of the firefighter who died in service to others.

  What happened to the window with Frank Leavy’s handprint?

  That is perhaps the strangest of all.

  On April 18, 1944, twenty years to the date after Frank Leavy died, a newspaper delivery boy threw a rolled-up paper toward the firehouse. But rather than landing harmlessly on the ground, it struck Frank Leavy’s window, breaking it into hundreds of pieces.

  Red Rose

  Chicago

  Newspaper reporters are usually not given to hyperbole or a belief in the supernatural. Objectivity is the cornerstone of their profession, a world of hard information supported by verifiable facts and physical evidence.

  Ann Marsters was just that kind of reporter. She worked for the old Chicago American, one of William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers. Before that, she was the first female sportswriter for Hearst’s Boston American. She was not gullible. That is why she was assigned to write a series of articles on Lily Dale, the famed upstate New York home of the controversial but popular American Spiritualist movement.

  The Spiritualists began back in the mid-nineteenth century when the Fox sisters—Margaretta, Catherine, and Katie—purported to be able to communicate with a spirit in their Hydesville, New York, home. They called him Mr. Splitfoot, a peddler who had been murdered and buried in their basement by a previous occupant of the house.

  The girls claimed they could communicate with him through a series of rappings. Eleven-year-old Katie worked out a code for talking with her “friend” Splitfoot.

  Over a period of time other manifestations occurred. Furniture moved unassisted across the floors, beds rocked, and doors slammed shut. In a grisly scenario, the sisters claimed the peddler’s murder itself was sometimes reenacted, replete with screams, the thud of a falling body, and what sounded like something heavy being dragged down the basement steps.

  The eldest sister, Catherine, decided to exploit the mysterious events and American Spiritualism was born.

  The girls’ followers were not shaken when it was revealed that many of the so-called rappings occurred when they cracked the joints in their big toes. The reenactment of the peddler’s death, and some of the other events, was still unexplained, the Fox Sisters’ defenders maintained.

  Scientists debunked the Fox sisters’ claims and, later, magicians said they could duplicate all the noises the girls claimed Mr. Splitfoot made.

  In 1904, after the sisters had all passed away, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle trumpeted in a front-page story that a partial skeleton had been found beneath the foundation of the sisters’ home. It seems rain weakened a section of the basement’s stone walls and sections of the granite had fallen away, revealing a false wall behind. A human skeleton was discovered in the space between the false wall and the original foundation. The murdered peddler? The skeleton’s identity was never determined.

  The sisters’ home was moved to Lily Dale in 1915, a town situated in north-central Chautauqua County, near Lake Erie, that became the headquarters of the American Spiritualist movement. The Fox Sisters’ popularity did not wane; during the winter, the village’s population numbered fewer than three hundred, but as many as two thousand people crowded into town each summer to study spiritualism.

  Today, the permanent population numbers about the same, but over twenty thousand descend on the hamlet during the warm months to study spiritualism, New Age philosophy, and the paranormal. Unfortunately, the Fox sisters’ small house was destroyed by fire in 1955.

  Ann Marsters was given the opportunity in 1942 to “investigate” Lily Dale, then at its pinnacle as a spiritualist center. Her assignment for the Chicago American was to interview Ralph Pressing, the editor of the spiritualist newspaper The Psychic Observer, and to observe séances. Her editors wanted her to find out if it was really possible to communicate with the dead. The world awaited her answers.

  Marsters later recalled her stay in Lily Dale.

  “I had an open mind, not to write an exposé but to give an honest account of what I saw and heard. And I took along a staff photographer to make a pictorial record of my experiences,” she wrote.

  What Marsters saw was a mixture of obvious sham and truly puzzling events. She visited various “spirit” sessions, all conducted as “experiments” in spirit communication she was told, and transacted in darkened rooms that made searches for hidden gadgetry extremely difficult. From table rappings to trumpets floating through the air emitting disembodied voices to “materializations” of ghosts, the reporter saw it all. She dismissed some of it outright as hoaxes, but others raised questions in her mind. Could any of it be genuine? In some of the sessions, Marsters was addressed by voices from various “deceased” loved ones. She doubted they came from the dead, and certainly not from her relatives.

  But then one afternoon Marsters met Red Rose, a so-called Indian spirit.

  The two became acquainted during a séance led by one Ann Taylor, among the better-known mediums of the day. Red Rose became Marsters’s “spirit guide,” a kind of “buddy from the beyond” assigned (by whom was not clear) to assist Ann Marsters in contacting other spirits so that they, too, might communicate with the living.

  In a mixture of Pidgin English and contemporary slang, Red Rose talked to her audience and sometimes directly to Marsters.

  “You put a safety pin in the lining of your coat. Lazy!” Red Rose said to Marsters at one particular session.

  She was flabbergasted. She had found a tear in her coat before leaving her hotel room. She temporarily fixed it with a pin. No one had seen her repair the coat, nor had she told anyone about it.

  Ann Marsters returned to Chicago after a few days in Lily Dale. She outlined for editors a series of seven articles that she would write about her experiences. She decided against including her own encounter with Red Rose, figuring her editors would delete it as “too unbelievable.”

  Marsters did her writing at home. She completed the first article on a Friday and a copy boy came to collect the original manuscript and a carbon copy.

  “Be sure to deliver these to the Sunday edi
tor in person,” she ordered.

  Her series was due to begin that coming Sunday, two days hence. A heavy advertising campaign was underway to promote her findings.

  But on Saturday, the Sunday editor telephoned. Where was the copy for her first story?

  She could not believe her ears. Surely he had received it from the copy boy on Friday. Marsters even identified him by name.

  “No!” her editor boomed before slamming down the receiver.

  He found the copy boy and interrogated him.

  The boy claimed to clearly remember collecting the copy from the reporter but had absolutely no memory of what he had done with it. Nothing succeeded in jogging his memory.

  The editor phoned Marsters. She would have to rewrite the story. She shot back that there was no way she could remember the story line-for-line and, besides, the deadline for Sunday’s edition was only hours away.

  Marsters decided to go to the newsroom herself in the belief she might be able to find the copy boy’s missing pages.

  She arrived in a state of panic and stood at the editor’s desk. What to do? Then she remembered Red Rose. Surely if the little spirit had found a safety pin in her coat she might be able to find the missing manuscript.

  Oh, please, Red Rose, help me out! she pleaded silently to herself.

  And then without conscious thought or deliberation, Marsters walked across the busy city room to a table next to the pay phone on the wall. She opened one of the phone books on the table. Inside was the missing manuscript.

  Ann Marsters could never explain the reason she decided to go to the city room, nor why she looked in that one particular phone book. Nor were they ever able to figure out why the copy boy put the pages in a phone book. It remained a mystery.

  The Attic

  Equality

  David Rodgers was grateful to have escaped the imposing antebellum mansion known benignly as Hickory Hill, near Equality, that particular Halloween morning. It had been a long night for the man from Harrisburg, Illinois. He claimed to have successfully challenged the ghosts of African American slaves that purportedly haunted a dismal third-floor attic.

  While it is officially known today as the Hickory Hill Historic Site, after its builder, John Crenshaw, a man with a heinous reputation as a kidnapper and slave trader in the years prior to the Civil War, the imposing mansion and its ghosts Rodgers said he faced there make it understandable why so many know it simply as “The Old Slave House.”

  Although he heard plenty of strange noises that night, Rodgers did not encounter any of the spectral forms that had beset previous ghost hunters who supposedly fled the alleged third floor and its “slave cells.”

  Rodgers had heard other stories as well: of secret tunnels and whipping posts, of rushing, vaporous forms and horrific screams that would drive him out the door. A couple of Marines couldn’t make it through the night and the wife of a former owner said human shapes materialized on the staircase.

  Rodgers was a reporter for a local television station and saw a good story. During an earlier program, he had challenged the house’s owner at the time, George M. Sisk II, to let him spend the night in the attic. When he was told no one had ever spent an uninterrupted night in the same rooms where the enslaved men, women, and children had been held, Rodgers found it to be a dare he could not resist.

  John Hart Crenshaw—the man who built Hickory Hill in the late 1830s—came from a long-established American family. His parents moved to Gallatin County, Illinois, after their home in New Madrid, Missouri, was destroyed in the 1811 earthquake.

  The Crenshaws settled on Eagle Creek, near one of the many salt deposits prevalent in that region near the Saline River. John’s father, William, died when the boy was a teenager, leaving him as sole support for his mother and six younger siblings.

  John Crenshaw went to work in the salt refinery. It was hard, backbreaking work. He grew sullen and resentful. He had, however, no other options at the time.

  Shortly after John Crenshaw married Sinia Taylor in 1817, his life and his fortunes began to change. Illinois was a free state that ostensibly prohibited slavery. But the owners of the salt mines found it increasingly difficult to hire laborers to work the mines. In its 1818 constitution, Illinois provided a narrow exemption against slavery so the owners and operators of the mines could use slaves until 1825. The federal government, recognizing the economic importance of the salt mined there, agreed to let employers “lease” slaves from owners in Southern states and take them into Illinois to work the mines.

  Crenshaw saw an economic opportunity. He leased several salt springs from the government and received permission to transport in slaves from Kentucky and Tennessee.

  By 1834, John Crenshaw had amassed a sizable fortune. He owned three furnaces that reduced salty water to crystals, a mill on the North Fork of the Saline River, and nearly thirty thousand acres of land. Now he could afford to give his wife the home of her dreams. Before the year was out, John and his brother Abraham began construction of Hickory Hill. As the house took shape on a wind-swept hill near Equality, John Crenshaw’s quest for riches and power grew. As soon as the house was completed around 1840, he undertook an even more reprehensible plan that would bring in even more money—he kidnapped free African American men and women that he then forced to labor in the salt works or in his farm fields; sometimes he sold them back into slavery in Southern states. The National Park Service has designated Crenshaw House a historic waystation on the “Reverse Underground Railroad,” which secretly moved the kidnapped individuals to Southern states.

  Some believe the house was planned with this aim in mind. From the outside it is of Greek Revival design with upper and lower front verandas, supported by massive columns, extending the width of the house. Not readily identifiable was a peculiar innovation that, according to local lore, Crenshaw built into his home: a carriageway that actually extended into the house. The shackled slaves or slaves-to-be were said to have been brought into the house in carriages with covered windows and then hustled up a rear staircase, where they were imprisoned in one of the third-floor “cells” scarcely large enough to hold a cot. The arrangement precluded curious neighbors and guests from learning this evil side to Hickory Hill.

  However, archaeological and architectural investigations in the 2010s found evidence that the carriageway merely went to a broad back porch where passengers were unloaded in plain sight. That discovery cast doubt on the existence of any backdoor entryway for carriages full of slaves being slipped into the house.

  There is another legend that a secret passageway once connected the house to the nearby Saline River. Slaves were brought up the Ohio River by steamboat to the Saline then transferred to smaller craft and moved up the river by night to a point near Hickory Hill. It was there that they were unloaded and taken through the tunnel and into the house. Archaeologists and architectual historians have not confirmed whether a tunnel still exists.

  Although much of what could termed the lore of Crenshaw House cannot be proven one way or another, there is little doubt, and much on the record, to conclude that Crenshaw was a malevolent slaveholder with little compassion for the men, women, and children he enslaved.

  In point of fact, Crenshaw apparently could not amass slaves fast enough to labor in his salt works, farm fields, or sell downriver to Southern slaveholders. According to one story, he began breeding slaves because a pregnant woman, or one with a small child, brought several hundred dollars more on the slave market. In one case, a slave named “Uncle Bob” was suspected of fathering three hundred babies.

  There is evidence as well that Crenshaw sold forged contracts that purported to show free blacks were indentured servants (indentured servitude was legal in Illinois at the time) and sold the contrats to Southern slave owners.

  The most well-known legend of the Crenshaw House is that two rows of “cells” on the third floor opened onto a hallway twelve feet wide by fifty feet long. Each cell had a narrow doorway and a single barred win
dow overlooking the hall. The only ventilation came through windows in the front and rear gables of the house.

  But that story appears to have given way to modern architectural detective work as well. Pieces of iron rings, chains, shackles, and a “whipping post” found on the third floor were left over from slave times, past visitors were told. However, according to findings by academic experts, many of the pieces are not accurate to the period or are erroneously labeled—the so-called whipping post is really a tool for making wood shingles. Recent paint and wood analyses did indicate the room was built at the same time as the first two stories.

  Further research determined that the rooms were not cells but more closely modeled after those on a steamship or riverboat. Crenshaw may have built them as lodging for travelers.

  Crenshaw did not escape notice that many of his activities were illegal even in those years when slavery sometimes was condoned even in free states. He was charged with kidnapping four times but acquitted by juries each and every time. He came close to being held accountable only once. In 1842 he was accused of selling into slavery a free woman named Maria Adams and as many as eight of her children. A Gallatin County jury trial found him not guilty, possibly because of his financial and political importance. It is speculated that at one time one seventh of the State of Illinois’s entire revenue came from the taxes Crenshaw paid. Abraham Lincoln was a state representative when he spent a night in a second-floor bedroom at Hickory Hill after attending political debates in Equality and Shawneetown.

  Alhough the reason is not clear, in time, Crenshaw moved his family to Equality and leased out the farm to a German family. He sold Hickory Hill outright in 1864 and died seven years later. John and Francine Crenshaw are buried in Hickory Hill cemetery.

  The Sisk family bought Hickory Hill in 1913 and began giving public tours. They may have been the first to call it the Old Slave House. In the mid-twentieth century, George Sisk II and his wife, Janice, operated the house as a museum and tourist attraction. It was also their home. They restored the exterior and used the first and second floors as their living quarters.