For many years, since the decline of the neighborhood, residents have reported to police a very young boy of no more than seven years old seen darting through these back roads and flooded forests at night, wearing a hooded jacket and seemingly oblivious to anything around him.
Back roads of Small Farms neighborhood, 2015. Photo by J.C. Rositas.
Brandon Crofton, a Gary police officer who works with a beautiful black police dog named Onyx, first heard of the boy when he was sent on calls to Small Farms after residents encountered the figure late one evening. After numerous calls over the weeks and months, Officer Crofton knocked on the door of one of the only remaining local residents: a mentally disabled man who lived in an old shack near the site where the boy was frequently seen.
Asked whether he ever saw a young boy around the area at night, the man gave a startling response. He said that, yes, he had seen the child many times—and had also spoken to him. He then told the officers, “It’s little Johnny who was killed here in the ’60s.”
The man went on to tell the officers that, during that time, there was a candy store just across the road from his shack. Johnny, a very little boy at the time, had gotten some money from his mom to go to the candy store. He was walking across the road when a neighbor’s car came around the bend, driving very fast. Johnny tried to sprint across the road to avoid the car, but he couldn’t run fast enough; he was wearing his older brother’s shoes and stumbled. Johnny, the man said, died on the way to the hospital.
Though they took the man’s story with a grain of salt for a lot of reasons, the officers later looked up the accident in the files at Gary police headquarters. Sure enough, they found not only the accident report but also, on further searching, a newspaper article detailing the tragic event.
Crofton came to find that his dog, Onyx, hated going down one particular road in Small Farms, especially in the early morning hours, just before dawn. The animal would growl and whine, having to be adamantly coaxed to keep up with Crofton and their duties.
Heartland Hauntings has spent many long nights investigating the isolated roads and swamps of Small Farms, with some fascinating evidence coming to light. These long nights have been peppered with frequent sightings of figures that seem to peek out into the roads as they walk them or even dart across the roads, vanishing instantly when they are pursued by an investigator, an experience I myself had at the site on the very cold January night when I joined them here in 2015. There are, too, other nonhuman manifestations.
J.C. talks about the “white mist we saw the first time we were here. It was not fog. It was a much more solid mass and concentrated in one spot, in a definite formation.” Members of the group were even able to photograph the phenomenon.
Recording for electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) or anomalous voices here is difficult, as Small Farms is located right off the expressway, but some have still been captured during investigations. On the night I visited with Len, J.C. and Officer Crofton, I was using my digital voice recorder to interview Crofton. Later at home, as I played back the recording, I heard the officer talking about a fellow officer’s fear of the site. Suddenly, a gruff voice hissed, “I’ll kill you!”
That fearful officer, Carlos Aleman, had numerous experiences at Small Farms before swearing off the place for good. As Len and Brandon explained, the fear isn’t for lack of courage in general. Len explains:
Aleman won’t come here. He’s scared to come here. But you’ve got to understand, the boy doesn’t flinch. He and I have been through the mill. We’ve been on some really rough calls. He’s good—really, really good. He’s a damned fine officer. He doesn’t scare, so if something scares Aleman, it’s something. He will not come in here.
Crofton goes on to tell the backstory of Aleman’s refusal to enter the place:
Back when he still used to stop here, he had pulled in here off the road to write up a report back here in his car. It was a foggy night—it’s always foggy with all the water around here—and he saw a figure coming toward the car in the rearview mirror. So he jumps out, pulls his gun out and shines his light back. No one there. Nothing there. Another time there was a guy who walked right past his window and said, “How you doin’?” And as he looked up, the guy was gone.
CHAPTER 9
A GIRL IN THE ROAD
THE GHOSTS OF CLINE AVENUE
Travelers making their way by car from Chicago to the casinos over the Illinois border or to the Indiana Dunes beach towns beyond are intimately familiar with State Road 912 in Northwest Indiana. The road, known here as Cline Avenue, stretches south from the Indiana Toll Road skirting Gary Chicago Airport and the towering steel mill complexes along Lake Michigan. Little do most travelers know, though, that this road is one of the most haunted in the world.
Much of the haunting reputation of Cline Avenue can be credited to not one but two “vanishing hitchhikers,” female spirits that have been reported along this road for generations, between the streets of Indiana Harbor and the Little Calumet River, long before the highway was built over the old road. But though these ghosts are prolific and legendary, one must look to the road itself for the backstory of these very active phantoms.
Throughout the 1930s, when the legends began, accidents were epidemic on Cline Avenue, as indeed they still are today. Newspapers were filled with accounts of crashes, pileups, injuries and deaths. By February 3, 1937, when a Hammond man was instantly killed by an oncoming truck driving in the wrong lane, the Hammond Times reported it as the Steel City’s tenth traffic fatality of the year. Reports almost always cited a drunk driver (or two or three) or an overtired millworker and—nearly without exception—treacherous roads and speeding.
While traffic incidents continued to climb—along with population—throughout the twentieth century, attempts to accommodate the growing vehicle load led to even more tragedy. On April 15, 1982, part of the Cline Avenue ramp, then under construction, collapsed during concrete pouring operations near the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal, killing twelve highway workers and injuring eighteen more. The fatalities were gruesome, with numerous workers crushed beyond recognition and one who had been pushed headfirst into a wet concrete piling, which hardened by the time his body was reached. It should not be surprising that, almost immediately, stories spread of shadowy figures seen at the site of the tragedy.
A Gary official raises a black flag to bring attention to the epidemic traffic deaths in Gary, 1930s. Press photo from author’s collection.
“The Cline Avenue Collapse” still claims title as Indiana’s deadliest construction or industrial accident, and it led to a long delay in continuance of the ramp project, due to investigations by the Indiana Department of Transportation and the National Bureau of Standards for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The latter concluded that a crack in a concrete pad—meant to support a leg of the shoring towers—was the culprit. The pad was too thin. Strangely, a look at the mechanical drawings for the bridge indicated that one-inch steel bolts were needed at key points in the design, but “frictional clips” were used instead. No one could determine who had authorized this tragic substitution or the engineering of the faulty pads.
Though myriad lawsuits ensued on the part of the dead workers’ families, the consensus maintained that no one entity or person could be effectively blamed for the incident. The most that was achieved was an out-of-court settlement by one family, who used their winnings to set up a college fund for the workers’ children.
Almost four years later, after laborious checking and double checking of every aspect of the construction, the Cline Avenue extension finally opened, though workers who survived the collapse strictly detoured from it for months or even years, according to colleagues and friends. Perhaps to quell some guilt—or ghosts of one kind or another—the stretch was eventually renamed the Highway Workers Memorial Highway.
In yet another bizarre run of terror along Cline Avenue, throughout the summer of 2006, drivers along the eastern section of
Cline Avenue went to police with reports that they had been shot at by a sniper, their windshields and windows pummeled with unidentified objects. The FBI became involved and came to believe that either a BB gun or slingshot was the weapon being employed by the assailant. Despite the determination by the bureau, others maintained that the “attacks” were simply the result of flying gravel. Though several leads were turned in, no arrests were ever made in the alleged sniper attacks of Cline Avenue.
In December 2009, INDOT closed the three-and-a-half-mile bridge portion of Cline Avenue between Calumet and Michigan Avenues due to overall corrosion of most elements of the structure. Plans to build a toll bridge were scrapped in favor of a freeway crossing, but the total demolition of the original bridge did not come soon enough. In March 2015, a sixty-four-year-old Munster man, Iftikhar Hussain, drove himself and his wife onto the closed bridge ramp, which should have been blocked off by concrete barriers. The car plunged thirty-seven feet and exploded below. Hussain’s wife died of massive injuries from the ensuing fire.
The Cline Avenue ghost is sometimes seen wandering the streets of Indiana Harbor, passing steel workers’ cottages in the shadows of the mill. Photo by Clarence Goodman.
Whether or not the Hussain incident was an attempted murder-suicide may never be truly known. Police reported that the driver seemed to be following his GPS instructions too closely but seemingly would have had to drive around concrete barriers to have reached the fatal spot. Later investigation discovered that the concrete barriers had been moved. Reportedly, there have been a smattering of suicides and suicide attempts at the closed bridge and other sites along Cline Avenue, including as recently as March 2014. At around two o’clock on a weekday afternoon, a Chicago man jumped from one of the Cline Avenue ramps onto Calumet Avenue, in the Robertsdale neighborhood, sustaining massive head injuries and dying on the way to the hospital.
Reflecting on the many deaths have occurred on this treacherous road—and the terror it thus strikes into the hearts of motorists—it should not be surprising that one of the deadliest aspects of Gary should also be known as the city’s most haunted. Indeed, the most famous ghosts in Gary are the phantom hitchhikers or vanishing hitchhikers of Cline Avenue.
Far from being indigenous to only Chicago, phantom hitchhikers—known to folklorists as “PHH”—are an international phenomenon. They are also nothing new: sightings date as far back as the Old Testament. One such sighting tells the story of Philip, who baptizes an Ethiopian who picks him up in a chariot and then disappears. In the New Testament, Jesus himself appears to two men on the road to a neighboring town. During their supper, the travelers recognize the crucified Jesus as he breaks the bread.
Then there are ancient tales from India, Africa, China, South America and Britain. Often they involve a man traveling on horseback through the countryside who picks up a beautiful woman walking near the road. After mounting the back of the horse and being carried to the next town, the woman simply vanishes before arrival.
Since the tsunami that devastated Thailand in 2004, stories have circulated of taxi drivers who continue to pick up the wandering dead. Most versions of the tale describe a driver who picks up a couple looking for a ride to the airport in Phuket. When the taxi arrives at the destination, the driver turns around to find that his fare has silently vanished. This commonly retold tale is accompanied by ongoing reports of taxi drivers picking up one or several passengers near the beach, all of whom simply vanish after boarding the cab. But are these apparitions phantoms, hallucinations, cultural manifestations or something else?
The legend of the vanishing hitchhiker is a tale told widely but with a particularly local feel. Though you’ll find versions of it in all corners of the world, the story is generally connected to local histories or personalities as part of the folklore of a community or region. This important fact, and the value of these stories, gained much greater recognition with the publication of Jan Harold Brunvand’s debut volume of urban legends, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. It was only after this volume was released that a non-scholarly audience began to understand the value and meaning of urban legends on a wide scale, but doubt grew along with this new awareness.
Folklorists such as Brunvand classify PHH encounters as urban legends. Folklorists specializing in urban legends do not believe that these encounters are real. According to Brunvand and others, PHH stories are merely cautionary tales meant to inspire fear in order to teach some kind of lesson—in this case, “don’t pick up hitchhikers” or “don’t drive alone at night.” Mental health experts working in Thailand after the tsunami confidently stated that survivors witnessing alleged phantoms were, in short, delusional. Thai psychologist and media commentator Wallop Piyamanotham declared that survivors were participating in a “mass hallucination that is a cue to the trauma being suffered by people who are missing so many dead people, and seeing so many dead people, and only talking about dead people.”
This idea of mass hallucination is closer to a longtime theory held by psychologists that “witnesses” truly experience PHHs in a real—albeit hallucinatory—way. That is, people do have the experience of seeing PHHs, but there is no objective reality to what they are seeing. In this case, the hitchhikers are not ghosts but illusions induced by both our expectations and the hypnogogic effect of night travel along darkened roads. Gently eased into the mildest of hypnotic states by the relaxing effect of a quiet car and a darkened landscape, drivers may find themselves both expressing and easing their disorientation by literally giving form to their fears of isolation by “creating” a traveling companion. Add to this the presence of a cemetery, and one begins to wonder if people are seeing ghosts simply because they expect to. This theory breaks down, however, when you consider the numerous accounts that have involved actual physical contact with the PHH.
Like many vanishing hitchhikers, the ghost—or ghosts—of Cline Avenue have interacted with witnesses time and time again. Astonishingly, researchers have come to believe that there are at least two—and possibly three—separate “road ghosts” of Cline Avenue. Even more surprisingly, these womanly wraiths are part of a veritable epidemic of phantom hitchhikers in the Chicago–Northwest Indiana region.
In 1933, around the same time the stories of a Cline Avenue ghost began, not one but three phantom hitchhikers appeared in neighboring Chicago. Some researchers even speculate that one may share an identity with a Gary ghost.
Across Archer Avenue from Chicago’s Resurrection Cemetery is an old tavern called Chet’s Melody Lounge. The owners have encouraged the telling of the local tale of Chicago’s most famous vanishing hitchhiker, “Resurrection Mary,” for many generations. In fact, for years the bartenders left a nightly Bloody Mary cocktail at the end of the bar for the elusive phantom, “just in case she was thirsty.” And a local favorite, “The Ballad of Resurrection Mary,” was a longtime offering on the bar’s jukebox. Chet’s enjoys a unique place in the Resurrection Mary story because numerous witnesses have come into the bar claiming to have struck her on the road outside. The encounter follows the same plot line almost without deviation. A man is driving along Archer Avenue around 1:00 a.m. From out of nowhere, as he passes the stretch of Resurrection Cemetery, a woman appears in the headlights of his vehicle. He slams on the brakes to avoid striking her, but he’s too late. In each eyewitness account, the driver testifies that he felt the vehicle make contact with the woman’s body as he ran her over. Nonetheless, when he gets out to attend to the victim, she is nowhere to be found. Chet’s first became associated with the legend because of the sheer number of drivers who rushed into the bar begging for help after these bizarre experiences.
For Chicago’s “Mary,” there are plenty of historical incidents to connect to these tales. Most researchers have long believed that, in life, Mary was actually Mary Bregovy, a Polish-Czech factory worker who lived in the Back of the Yards neighborhood near the Union Stockyards. On a fateful night in the spring of 1934, s
he went through the window of her escort’s car on the way home from a night of dancing when the vehicle struck a support beam of the elevated rail tracks on Lake Street in Chicago’s Loop.
Also in 1933, men traveling home from the old Melody Mill Ballroom in Forest Park, Illinois, began encountering a “flapper” girl in the road, dressed in a black fringed shift and walking along the fence line of Forest Home Cemetery. After the men attempted to give the girl a ride home, she would habitually leap from the car as it was moving, running right through the cemetery fence near the mausoleum.
In another series of encounters from 1933, travelers journeying to Chicago for the Century of Progress Exposition were going to police with strange reports of their travels. According to their tales, they’d picked up a woman along the road who was also going to the fair. Almost immediately, they were sorry they had offered her a ride, for as soon as she was in the car, the woman had begun to make prognostications about the end of the world and about the manner of death awaiting her fellow passengers. Before they could eject her from the car, however, she would do them the favor of simply vanishing into thin air.
Some researchers have wondered if the woman encountered by Chicago fair-goers in 1933 is the same phantom who has been seen for generations by Northwest Indiana travelers. Certainly, many tens of thousands of visitors came into the fairgrounds from Indiana, Michigan and points farther north and east by way of the Indiana Dunes highway. Their vague reports of meeting a woman “along the way” may very well have been Gary-area encounters.
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