by Leslie Rule
The boys who slipped onto her campus to meet girls knew they had to sneak past the stern woman who sent many of them racing back to their dorms. In Helen’s time, proper young ladies did not spend unescorted time with men. And she certainly did not want her female students attending classes with males. She surely would have been appalled when the two schools merged.
Seminary Hall, built in 1855, was once part of Helen Peabody’s campus and was renamed for her in 1905. Students insist that her ghost haunts Peabody Hall. An inexplicable low guttural sound is sometimes heard, and the shower is known to turn itself on.
Two boys living in the hall were literally shaken up when their entire room experienced an earthquake not felt anywhere else. They stared, wide-eyed, as their furniture shook and items spilled from their desktops.
Students often hurry past the big portrait of Helen in the building’s foyer. Her eyes, they say, follow them. And legend has it that when someone has done something of which Helen would have disapproved, the portrait’s eyes blink as the guilty party goes by.
Students say the ghost of Helen Peabody, once principal of Western Female Seminary, seems to be watching them. This antique postcard shows the magnificent building where the stern opponent of co-education lives on as a ghost. (author’s collection)
Some say that Reid Hall is also haunted. Students report phantom footsteps in empty rooms and a pair of bloody handprints on a door. The prints, they insist, will not wash away and were made decades ago by a student shot and killed when he tried to break up a fight.
A May 9, 1959, article in the Vidette Messenger verified the murder when it reported the death of twenty-year-old Roger T. Sayles from Gary, Indiana. Roger was entertaining his mother, who was visiting for Mother’s Day, when he heard a commotion in the hallway.
He left his room to find two men arguing over a girl they were both dating. Eighteen-year-old Henry Lucas from Springfield, Ohio, opened fire, wounding his rival and killing Roger with two bullets.
Police searched the campus, but the killer was not found until seven hours after the shooting when a student in Ogden Hall went to make a call and found Henry slumped over in a phone booth. He’d shot himself in the head. He was rushed to the hospital in critical condition and later died.
Is it Henry or Roger who stalks Reid Hall?
Perhaps it is both of them, still trying to figure out what went wrong on that tragic Mother’s Day.
A Dark Premonition
The students in the Technological Institute huddled over their books, trying to ignore the odd noises that emanated from the walls. They did not have time to entertain the idea of ghosts or to discuss silly legends. They were, after all, serious pupils of one of the most selective colleges in the country, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago.
Sarah Bailey, however, managed to pry a student or two away from their books long enough to get the scoop for the school newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, in October 2004. Late-night studiers, she wrote, sometimes heard the sound of flasks and glasses clinking against each other. The noise was followed by a rattle and then an indefinable whisper.
The haunted Northwestern University is crawling with ghosts. (1921 yearbook)
More than one student reporter has speculated about the identities of the ghosts who inhabit the old college on the shore of Lake Michigan, entertaining various legends, such as the one that says the Tech Building ghost is a 1950s chemistry student who drank a tube of cyanide after his doctoral dissertation was rejected. Others believe that two female students committed suicide in the late 1800s after their fiancées deserted them. Witnesses swear they’ve heard the disembodied voices of the spirits weeping and commiserating with each other.
Another specter is said to be that of a heartbroken student who hung himself in the University Hall’s bell tower. And some say that Annie May Swift, an 1880s student who succumbed to an illness, still roams the campus and has a special attachment to the building named after her.
This writer, however, made one of her frequent forages into forgotten archives to finger an entirely different restless spirit. The sad story was buried so deeply that few on campus are aware of it. I found it by accident. I was researching another haunted location when a shocking news story surfaced. It chronicled the sort of death that often results in earthbound spirits. My investigation into the ghosts of Northwestern University was backward. First I found the death, and then I looked for ghosts where the tragedy had occurred.
The Annie May Swift Hall at Northwestern University, depicted in this antique image, is home to the ghost of young Annie who succumbed to illness while attending college here. (author’s collection)
My sixth sense told me that while many spirits may inhabit the campus, a 1921 student was surely among them. Those familiar with my books know that I am only slightly shy about admitting that my intuition sometimes guides me as I track ghosts. And in this instance, that sixth sense felt as sharp as the one the victim himself felt when he made a gloomy prediction.
Northwestern University as it appeared when one student mysteriously vanished. (1922 yearbook)
Freshman Leighton Mount had a special affection for an older woman, twenty-four-year-old Doris Fuchs, who did not return his feelings. “You made me love you,” he wrote in a last note to her in September 1921.
“We were what you might call pals,” Doris said in 1923.
Was Leighton simply trying to get her attention when he spoke to her about ways he could end his life? He dismissed the idea of drowning, because his body would resurface, she remembered. She was so used to his ramblings that at first she did not take him that seriously when he told her that he would “disappear during rush.” Doris heard the statement as a half-hearted suicide threat. Was it a threat, or was it a premonition?
Leighton must have had reservations about the wild week of hazing, because his mother advised him that he had better participate, or he would “look like a sissy.”
The barbaric “fight week” pitted freshmen and sophomore males against each other in tortuous “pranks.” Did Leighton and his roommate, Roscoe Fitch, really have a choice? The rowdy, testosterone-driven event rushed over the campus like a tidal wave, picking up everything in its path and leaving the hapless wounded in its wake.
Some of the students were terrorized in the lake. Student Arthur Persinger, for instance, “was tied to a plank which was placed parallel with the water, and so low over it that the waves would splash over his face,” according to one witness.
Young men kidnapped and tied each other up, sometimes abandoning angry and embarrassed students naked and far from campus. Almost everyone seemed to get through the September 1921 rush OK—everyone except for Leighton Mount.
Just as he had told Doris he would, Leighton disappeared.
At first, none of the other students would admit to having any idea of what had happened to him. But then Northwestern student and star athlete Charles Palmer, who worked at a bakery, told a coworker that he knew where Leighton was. When she pressed Palmer for details, he clammed up.
As Leighton’s parents hired a private investigator, rumors circulated. Students told the university authorities that Leighton had been kidnapped by a newspaper reporter who was keeping him hidden. The reporter, they said, would eventually release him and get a great scoop for his newspaper.
Fifteen months went by with no word from Leighton, and then, at Christmastime, his parents received a telegram, signed “Leighton.”
Was he alive? Or was someone trying to throw them off the trail?
In April 1923 another fight week turned tragic when Louis Aubere was killed in a car wreck. The cars were loaded with students involved in the rush, and some witnesses said that the crash was deliberate.
As students were grieving, a grisly discovery was made. A twelve-year-old boy went down to the lakeshore to play by the Lake Street Pier, south of the college campus. Puzzled by the odd bones he found beneath the pier, he took one home to show
his mother. She called the police.
Leighton Mount had been found.
The bone the kid retrieved was one of Leighton’s shin bones. Leighton’s mother identified bits of clothing and a belt buckle, stamped with the initials L.M. Leighton’s dentist made a positive identification.
While students said the death was a suicide, there was no discounting the rotted bits of rope found with the skeleton. It was the same type of rope that the boys used when they bound each other during rush.
Prosecutor Robert Crowe argued that Leighton had been kidnapped at midnight on Wednesday, September 21, 1921. The hazers had tied him beneath the pier and, when they returned the next day, found him dead. They had then made a pact to keep the death a secret. Now, twenty months later, dozens of people were subpoenaed as authorities demanded the truth in court.
The truth, however, was difficult to pinpoint. Some of the students changed their stories—including Leighton’s roommate, Roscoe Fitch. Newspapers reported that after four trying hours and eight versions of his account, Roscoe burst into tears and cried, “I’ll lose my credits! I’ll be kicked out of school if I tell! I dare not talk for I have been warned by men at the top to keep quiet, and I must do so!”
All-American boy Chuck Palmer may have had guilty knowledge of a cruel death. (1922 yearbook)
The school president himself, Walter Dill Scott, had his character called into question when it was implied that he had known more about Leighton’s disappearance than he’d admitted. His detractors questioned why fifteen students had allegedly been mysteriously expelled immediately after the young man vanished.
In the end, a grand jury concluded that Leighton had indeed died by the hands of others.
News of a promising lead appeared in the July 17, 1923, issue of the Indianapolis Daily Star when a witness claimed that he had watched a group of men lower Leighton beneath the pier. The case, the paper said, may soon reopen. An archive search produced no more accounts of the case, and Leighton Mount’s name dropped from the news.
The ivy on the old buildings grew thicker, the trees towered higher, alumni lived out their lives, and Leighton Mount was forgotten. The guilty walked free.
Some of the guilty must have felt remorse as they lived out their lives, the secret a prickly bur in their sides as they tried to forget. If still alive, the culprits would be near one hundred years old. Perhaps one with guilty knowledge told someone. And maybe that someone was a son or daughter who will now come forward with the information—especially when they learn that Leighton may still be in pain.
Most of those who loved Leighton are dead. Does he know that? Or is he stuck in the nightmare of a September morning in 1921? Is he still trying to escape his terrifying, watery grave where he was so callously abandoned until his last breath was replaced by cold lake water, and the skin floated from his bones?
Imagine, the terrorized spirit, trying to make his way back to campus. Imagine it, and you will very likely come up with an image that is much like the apparition seen near campus.
They call him “Seaweed Charlie.”
Chicago ghost researcher Richard Crowe is well aware of the specter seen near the Evanston campus. Despite his grasp of Chicago history and the fact that he is related to the prosecutor who handled the fatal hazing case, the murder of Leighton Mount was buried so deeply that even Crowe hadn’t heard of it. Yet he had known about “Seaweed Charlie” for years.
The tortured spirit is seen both crawling and walking from the water by Sheridan Road, near the Lake Street Pier where Leighton met his fate. Witnessed by many over the decades, the description does not vary, said Richard Crowe. One encounter occurred on a summer night in 1993, he told me. “Two girls, Lisa Becker and Jenny Trisko, were driving south along Sheridan Road around midnight,” he said. “Suddenly they noticed the car in front of them swerving, as if to avoid something in the road.”
Students enjoy playing in the lake, ignoring the dark secrets beneath the surface. (1922 yearbook)
There in the middle of the street was a man wearing a heavy trench coat. He had come from the direction of the lake.
“It was too nice [outside] to be wearing a coat,” Lisa told Richard. Jenny said that the man was tall and thin and glowing. The ethereal being emanated an eerie light as he lumbered across the road. The girls had never heard of the Sheridan Road ghost, and when they excitedly described their encounter to friends, they learned that the mother of Jenny’s boyfriend had seen the specter at the same spot ten years earlier.
When Richard Crowe speculated on the identity of the ghost, he had several ideas, including the theory that the ghost belonged to an instructor from the Glenview Naval Air Station who crashed his plane in the lake in May 1951.
My research confirmed the plane crash, along with details about two rescuers who drowned while trying to retrieve the pilot’s body. They were on the lake just off campus when their boat capsized.
According to Richard, some who have seen the Sheridan Road ghost say that he is dripping with seaweed.
The Evanston, Illinois, campus, shown here in a vintage postcard, is lovely but filled with ghosts who carry dark secrets. (author’s collection)
Are any of these men “Seaweed Charlie?”
Maybe. But what about the fact that the ghost is encountered around midnight, the same time that Leighton suffered his fate? Weigh the terror that was surely suffered by each lake victim, and Leighton wins the dismal contest.
Bound for hours beneath the pier in icy darkness, he was alone with his own tormented thoughts. What did he think of in his last moments? Did he think of Doris and how he would never again see her lovely smile? Did he imagine the grief his parents would feel if he let the lake take him?
Discovered dead and blue, he was further insulted by the cover-up. If there was ever a candidate for a spirit to remain earthbound, Leighton is it.
If you should travel along Sheridan Road, say a prayer for Leighton Mount as you pass the Lake Street Pier. If you should see the wet and glowing ghost, do not be afraid. It is probably just Leighton, a naïve young man in love with a girl named Doris.
Restless Victims
Are the ghosts of murdered people really more prone to stay earthbound?
Yes, according to Richard Crowe, Chicago’s original ghost hunter. Leading ghost tours for three decades, the author of Chicago’s Street Guide to the Supernatural frequently makes the connection between murder and ghosts.
He points to the case of Bobby Franks, the thirteen-year-old victim in a 1924 “thrill kill.”
The murder made headlines not just because of the viciousness of the killing, but because both the victim and the killers were the sons of Chicago millionaires.
Nathan Leopold, eighteen, and his partner in crime, Richard Loeb, seventeen, had been planning to kill someone for months before accosting Bobby as he walked home from Harvard School on the southwest side of Chicago, explained Richard Crowe.
Bobby was Richard Loeb’s second cousin, so the boy probably was not alarmed to see the familiar face peering from the car as it pulled up beside him. Relative or not, the sociopaths did not care. They thirsted for blood and took the opportunity to make their twisted fantasy a reality.
They brutally killed Bobby and dumped him in a culvert, where he was found so quickly that the ransom note was just being delivered to his parents’ home.
A tip from a chauffeur led police to the rich boys. When a pair of tortoise-shell eyeglasses were found near the culvert, their prescription was matched to the pair worn by Leopold. Though he claimed that he’d lost them while in the area bird-watching, evidence against the teens mounted. Each blamed the other for the murder. In the end they were both convicted but escaped execution due to the expert defense by famous attorney Clarence Darrow.
While Darrow was fighting for the lives of the teenage killers, State’s Attorney Robert E. Crowe was in Bobby’s corner.
Robert and Richard Crowe are branches from the same family tree. Their roots are
in Tipperary, Ireland, and it seems they have a karmic connection, each ending up in Chicago as a voice for murder victims. While Robert worked to put killers behind bars, Richard tells the stories of the restless spirits of the slain.
Was the spirit of Bobby Franks aware of this link when Richard Crowe visited his crypt in Rosehill Cemetery? Did he recognize the younger Crowe as the relative of the man who fought so vehemently to avenge his death?
It was 1988 when Richard Crowe, along with a cemetery caretaker, visited Bobby’s grave. Richard told me he walked up to the door of the crypt and tried the handle, even though he did not expect it to be unlocked.
The caretaker gasped as the normally locked door creaked open. “Maybe the ghost of Bobby wants you to go in!” he exclaimed.
Richard entered and said a prayer for the soul of Bobby.
Afterward, as he stared solemnly at the cold, gray crypt, the caretaker shared some fascinating history. Years earlier, cemetery workers had frequently seen a boy wandering near the crypt. As they approached, the youngster would vanish. Everyone said it was the ghost of Bobby Franks. Interestingly, the ghost did not settle down until his killers met their own deaths.
Despite the fact they were incarcerated, the two enjoyed special privileges. “They had the run of the prison,” said Richard. “They had special meals and private dining in the officers’ lounge.”
Richard Loeb died from razor cuts after a fight in the shower in 1936. Nathan Leopold, paroled in 1958, succumbed to heart failure in 1971. It was only then that the ghost sightings of Bobby Franks stopped.
Another Chicago area ghost, however, is not at rest.
“The murder of Emily Keseg is one of the area’s most baffling mysteries,” said Richard Crowe. An eighteen-year-old freshman in the fall of 1969, Emily attended classes at Morton College in Cicero, Illinois. At that time, Richard explained, the new college had not been built, so sessions were held at Morton East High School.