Inside the Murder Castle

by Adam Selzer

  Then again, the authorities investigating it where the kinds of guys who saw a mysterious tank full of unidentified gas that emitted a noxious odor and decided to light a match to get a better look. A few years after the investigation, a detective hired to observe the police said “the police in Chicago are piano movers, bums, cripples, janitors, ward heelers—anything but policemen.” That these guys might have missed a tunnel that would have been concealed behind the western wall wasn’t totally out of the question.

  Now, a lot of people who do EVP work like to ask questions out loud. Some go for the dramatic “Are there any spirits with a message?” technique, and others ask more casual questions, like “Is there anyone here?” “How did you die?” and such like. I usually don’t ask anything—I sort of feel like an idiot standing there talking to dead people.

  But, again, this is partly just my own stubborn determination to remain a skeptic and assume that these “ghosts” aren’t sentient beings and aren’t likely to respond to stimuli. And what do I know, really? There are no real “rules” to this stuff. All of the “rules” and “tips” you hear are attempts to apply logical to the illogical, or fit things into one narrow theory about where ghosts come from and what they can do.

  And, anyway, just listening to the few seconds of audio after a question is a whole lot easier than listening to the whole recording later. By this time I’d been at the post office for several hours, and the recorder was running nearly the whole time. Just listening to a few seconds seemed a lot less daunting than wading through the whole thing.

  So I began to whisper a few questions, and the names of a few of the known victims.

  “Emeline? Julia? Pearl?” I whispered. I paused, then added a few other Chicago victims that I wasn’t as confident were killed in the castle. “Minnie? Anna? Anybody here? Are we in the right place? Can you give me a clue?”

  I didn’t hear a thing. After a moment I repeated a few of the names. “Emeline? Julia? Pearl? Anybody we don’t even know about?”

  It was clues that I was after. What really went on in this place? How many people really died here? Who were they? Did Holmes kill them all by gassing and asphyxiating them, as I suspected, or did he really use all sorts of different methods, like most retellings of his story claim? If a ghost wanted to give me a new lead, I wasn’t about to turn them down.

  It’s not exactly hard data, but sometimes the fact that a place seems to be haunted can be a clue—or at least a sign of encouragement for me. The fact that saying “Emily Van Tassel” out loud at the glass-bending site seemed to have an effect on the floodlight some nights might be the first clue in over a century as to what happened to her.

  Nothing happened in the tunnel as I whispered the names.

  Nothing that I could hear with the naked ear, at least.

  When I made it back out of the tunnel, I took a photograph of a door at the east end of the basement, and in the view screen I saw that there was a large shadow in the shot—from what I could tell, it would have been the shadow of someone standing next to me. I took another shot and the shadow had moved a bit. In the third shot it was gone. It wasn’t distinct enough that I couldn’t brush it off as something getting into the way of the lens or anything, and it was probably south of the actual footprint of the castle, but it was something. And, as I often say, if you can come back from the dead, you ought to be able to walk down the hall, too.

  The TV crew was finished and heading away. I said my goodbyes and thank-yous to everyone around as they put Jeff in a van to Lincoln Park, where he’d sit down for some interviews in the apartment they’d set up as a temporary studio. And I headed home to review my recordings, happy enough knowing that my shadow photos would pass muster as a ghost photo in some circles.

  The first thing I did upon loading the recording onto my computer was scroll up to the part where I was asking questions and saying names.

  And there it was: right around the second time I went through the names, over my own whispering, there was a sound like a little girl talking in a sing-song voice. Like a kid calling for a missing pet. Or calling “Come out come out wherever you are” in a game of hide and seek.

  I scrolled back and listened to it again several times, assuming every time that I’d come up with a logical explanation for it if I just heard it again. But every play just stumped me more.

  Usually, these “ghost” recordings have to be turned way up before you can hear anything—they usually require headphones, subtitles, and some imagination. This voice was louder, and clearer, than my own on the recording. Headphones were not required—I later found that I could play it for people on the ghost tours just by holding my cell phone up to the microphone, and everyone could hear it clearly. It quickly became a major attraction.

  However, the words the voice is saying/singing are not that clear—or not that intelligible, anyway (the voice is crystal clear). There are five “notes,” or five syllables. The first two sound like “Sorry,” which is sensible enough, but the remaining three sound more like “Beefalow.” “Sorry Beefalow” doesn’t mean anything in English—it sounds like the worst Chef Boyardee product ever.

  Did little Pearl Connor really come clear back from the dead to give me an idea for a canned pasta product that no one, anywhere, ever, would buy?

  Had the voice been any more distinct, I would have probably insisted that it must have been someone playing a trick on me. I’m not sure how they could have pulled it off, though; the tunnel is pretty isolated, and well insulated from outside noise. The voice seems to have been right next to the microphones. It was picked up by all four of the mics in my recorder, slightly louder on the top left one, but audible on all four when I mix it down to the four separate recordings. It was near some pipes that make me wonder if it was a plumbing noise, but it sounds too clear to be water in a pipe to me. You can hear it, along with other audio recorded that day, at http://www.chicagounbelievable.com/p/murder-castle-audio.html .

  I immediately sent a copy to Jeff’s friend, Susan, the only woman in the basement at the time, to make sure it wasn’t her voice. She confirmed that she hadn’t been singing in the tunnel (she never sings), and the voice sure doesn’t sound like hers. Her voice comes in on the recording a few seconds later, and is clearly coming from outside the tunnel. The “mystery voice” sounds like it’s inside it.

  The archaeologists and engineers I played it for didn’t know what to make of it, either.

  Sometimes, when I’m theorizing that sudden, traumatic deaths can leave something behind in the environment that we perceive as “ghosts,” I wonder if maybe young girls are somehow particularly inclined, biologically, to haunt a place after death. We seem to run into little-girl ghosts a lot, after all. One of the theatres I investigate is said to be haunted by a little girl who manifests by flushing a backstage toilet and giggling. (I can vouch for the giggling part—I’ve never heard the toilet flush itself, but I’ve heard the giggle.) At another location, there was a one-year period when we got photograph after photograph of what looked like a girl about eight to ten years old (though we have no data of a girl that age dying there). This, for the record, was before the advent of all the smartphone apps that will insert a ghostly girl into your photos.

  And now there was this.

  The voice came up right after I whispered the name “Emeline.” Emeline Cigrand, one of the known victims of the castle, was probably too old to be the voice, though; the best candidate was Pearl Connor, whose name was whispered a second later, overlapping the sound of the mysterious voice. Pearl was about eight years old when she disappeared around Christmas in 1891. The castle was new then, and Pearl and her mother’s bodies are probably the ones most likely to have been destroyed at the castle—they found parts of a child’s coat in the basement during the investigation, and a bone or two that were thought to be the bones of a child.

  Could this hav
e been the voice of Pearl Connor?

  If so, what the heck was she trying to say?

  Another ghost hunter would probably be fine with saying that this was the soul of poor Pearl, crying out to be remembered, or the spirit of a girl who never “crossed over” and was trapped in the bricks, but I’m not inclined to come up with an explanation, or even to comment on the nature of what the recording is. I always feel that I reach a wall when I get to a point where I can’t explain something—I could say that this was Pearl’s spirit, or even that it was some sort of energy she’d left behind that responded to hearing her name, but if I said any of this, I’d just be talking out of my ass, really. The only reason to call this a “ghost,” not, say, a leprechaun or something, is the history of the place where I was sitting, at the bend of the tunnel, staring right into the footprint of the basement of the Murder Castle.

  As I always say, there’s no such thing as “good” ghost evidence, only “cool” ghost evidence. I never hold anything up as evidence of the “paranormal,” and I try to assume that there’s a rational explanation to everything (except for the fact that Bob Dylan was able to write “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” at the age of twenty-one). And everyone who hears it will just have to take my word for it that I didn’t fake it.

  But this is one recording I can’t explain.

  Unless it’s water from a toilet.

  At the time I thought this was, at best, a warm-up for larger investigations that were being planned by others, but it seems now as though this mini-investigation could be the most ghost hunting that is ever allowed there; a recent attempt to film an overnight investigation there was apparently nixed by the Feds. In just a few short minutes, I got a couple of pictures that I’d grade as about a C+ (as these things go), and an audio recording that’s a solid A. I've been at several famously haunted spots hundreds of times without getting anything as creepy as that audio recording (which, again, you can hear at chicagounbelievable.com).

  I still maintain that most of the stories one hears about H. H. Holmes and his castle today are wild exaggerations—many of the common ones come from 1890s tabloids and 1940s pulps that were really just playing “What if?” when they speculated that Holmes might have killed people who came to Chicago to attend the World’s Fair. I don’t believe that anywhere near 200 people were killed in the castle—but I do believe a few were, at least, and a young girl is among the three people who are the most likely victims. So perhaps that voice on the recording is one more clue to a mystery that no one could ever solve—not even when Holmes himself, the only man who knew the whole truth about the building, was sitting in his jail cell, spinning wild stories for reporters to pass the time while he waited for the noose to fall.

  [contents]

  If you enjoyed Inside the Murder Castle,

  you may also enjoy

  Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps: True Tales of an Accidental Ghost Hunter.

  The complete book is available now in both ebook and trade paperback formats at your favorite bookstore.

  ISBN: 9780738715575

  Getting pushed down the stairs by unseen hands? An old spirit hag sitting on your chest, holding you down? Strange glowing ectoplasm escaping from a grave? Don’t believe everything you hear . . . but then again, some things can’t just be brushed off.

  Come aboard the ghost bus and get a glimpse of Chicago’s ghostly goings-on. With a healthy dose of skepticism, professional ghostbuster Adam Selzer takes you on a tour of his famously spooky town and the realm of the weird. Tag along with your tour guide Selzer, bus driver and improv comic Hector, psychic detective Ken, and prolific author Troy Taylor as they uncover cool evidence of the supernatural. Entertaining and thought-provoking, this book will make believers and skeptics alike want to tromp through their local cemetery to see if it’s really haunted (or just dark and creepy).

  Read on for an excerpt from Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps by Adam Selzer.

  For additional resources and related titles, visit us online at Llewellyn.com

  or find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/LlewellynBooks

  Begin Excerpt

  Through the Ages

  You’re always hearing things like “The ancient people of this region believed that ghosts were spirits condemned to live among the children of the animals they killed” or “The tribes here believed that the dead could return to be among the living on one night per year.” Every time I hear people say something like this, I ask myself the same questions: Where did they get that idea? Who told them that? Did they really, truly believe it, or was it just a story that they told? It’s not fair—how come they get to agree on what ghosts are and where they come from, and we don’t?

  As hunting for ghosts became more and more a part of my day, I came up with a lot of theories about ghosts and how to explain them—just a lot of them.

  The most notable theory I hit on at the time was one that I hope will go down in history as Selzer’s First Theorem: Any remotely spooky place that people sneak into in order to get wasted will eventually turn up on a TV show, website, or book about ghosts. Spookiness + drunkenness is a regular formula for ghost sightings. Ghost hunting is really not the sort of thing you ought to do while drunk, but, when we would make a pub stop on some of the tours, I would tell people that the two sorts of people who see ghosts most often are children under about the age of five and older people who’ve been drinking heavily—if they had a drink at the pub, they’d probably greatly increase their chances of seeing a ghost.

  While we were at the pub, I had a chance to chat with the customers. Here, people would tell me their own ghost stories. As much as I enjoyed hearing them, I quickly realized that all ghost stories are pretty much the same. I heard a few of the same things over and over and over again.

  These included:

  1. “My son said he saw his grandfather, whom he had never met, in his room. An hour later, we got a call that his grandfather had died.”

  I hear variations of this story almost as often as I hear from people who say that their grandparents hung around with Al Capone. Of the two, the ghost stories are frankly the ones I’m more likely to believe.

  Stories of kids seeing a dead grandparent, either on the night of the person’s death or for months after it, are really quite common. Many people told me that they’d seen their toddler playing with someone and clearly having a conversation with the person when there was no one there. The kid would later describe their playmate as matching a description of some long-deceased ancestor. Often, the kid would even have information that he or she could only have heard from that ancestor. These stories tested my skepticism the most; they’re common enough that I couldn’t simply brush them off as imagination every time, and most of the scientific theories I hit on over the years didn’t come close to explaining them.

  2. “We think our house is built on an Indian burial ground.”

  Normally, this strikes me as the sort of thing that they should have noticed when they dug out the basement. However, it’s certainly not impossible—or even all that uncommon—to find houses in the Chicago area that are built over graves, Indian and otherwise, that may be buried so deep beneath landfills that the basement just didn’t go down far enough to get to the bodies.

  3. “My grandfather’s clock stopped the day he died.”

  This sort of story is rather well known; in the nineteenth century, it was even the basis of “My Grandfather’s Clock,” a tremendously popular parlor song by Chicagoan Henry Clay Work, who was responsible for some of the most maudlin parlor songs of the Victorian era. (Which is really saying something. The song about the clock that “stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died” after “ninety years without slumbering … his life seconds numbering” was actually one of Work’s cheerier numbers—look up his other big hit, “Come Home, Father,” if you really want a good
time.) Variations of this—mechanical or electrical disturbances at the moment of someone’s death—are common stories.

  4. “We set up a digital voice recorder and recorded a voice saying, ‘Get out!’”

  There must be some kind of memo going around in the spirit world saying, “When those guys with the microphones show up, tell ’em to get out!” Phrases like “Leave” and “We don’t want you here!” are also common.

  The practice of using audio recorders to look for ghostly voices that can’t be heard with the naked ear is known as EVP (electronic voice phenomenon), and eventually it became my job on ghost hunts. As the EVP guy in the group, I’ve never run across a voice telling me to get out, but the first ghost who tells me something like that is getting a real tongue-lashing from me. “I’ll get out when I damn well please!” I’ll say. “You’re the one who’s dead around here! Don’t make me get out my proton pack! We can cross the streams with the 2.0 models, you know!”

  Speaking hypothetically, if there are ghosts in the world, I respect their right to exist, but I don’t have much patience for those who think they can push the living around.

  The closest thing I’ve seen to this, honestly, was one night at the Congress Hotel, where letters in a sealed message board had been arranged to spell out “U Will Die.” The security guards swore they hadn’t done it. It still seems like a pretty obvious prank to me, but if it was a ghost, this ghost must have learned all its tricks from B-grade horror movies. How is “U Will Die” a prediction, anyway? Of course we’re going to die! I’d have been more impressed if it provided a specific name and date.

  5. “My grandmother always smelled of cigarettes and lilac perfume. She’s been dead for years, but we still smell that particular scent around the house sometimes.”