Just Kill Me

by Adam Selzer

  “So, that basically just leaves Hull House and the Couch tomb,” I say. “What do I do to fill the gaps?”

  The two of us brainstorm a bit, and he tells me about some places we could go—like the block of Prairie Avenue south of the Loop, where all the millionaires used to live. “The Fort Dearborn Massacre happened right there,” he says, “but even if you don’t want to mention that, it’s still full of mansions that look like something from Scooby-Doo. One of them’s supposed to be haunted by the architect who designed it and died before it was built.”

  “Got it.”

  “You could even go up to Wrigley Field if you wanted to. People say that’s haunted by a songwriter who tried to get his ashes scattered there. And he died of cancer, so there’s no guts or gore.”

  “Noted.”

  “And how about Bughouse Square? You could do that as an off-bus stop to kill some time. Say One-Armed Charlie is rumored to haunt it.”

  The park they used to call Bughouse Square is a regular drive-by on the tour, but not a haunted spot, just a cool thing to point out. It’s the second-oldest park in the city, and it used to be a popular place to go stand on a soapbox and make a speech; on any given night there’d be five or six people making speeches at once and hundreds of people there to heckle them. Newspaper articles make it sound like a mix between a carnival and walking through a field of audible Youtube comments. Awesome and awful, all at once. One-Armed Charlie was a regular speaker—his famous line that we repeat on tours was “If brains were bug juice, you couldn’t drown a gnat.”

  “I can try that,” I say. “Some people say you can still hear him. That sort of thing.”

  “Right. ‘According to legend,’ ‘Some people say,’ ‘Rumor has it,’ ‘The story goes . . .’ All those ways of covering your ass when you know a story probably isn’t true, but you don’t want to lie. It’s an emergency, after all. And it’s only gonna be a handful of people. You can equivocate a little more than usual.”

  After a while we have a basic list of non-gory sites I can go to, and a whole new route to try. It’ll be a little short on ghost stories, really, but plenty of good history, and as long as everyone has a good time, they won’t complain.

  When I go back into the living room, Clarice tells me the Feds have caught the shooter alive. But the people who were just wounded at first keep dying all through the day, and TV stations keep flashing pictures of kids who died across the screen. Rick texts to say that a couple of our customers have canceled. But the tour is still on.

  The faces on the Blue Line train are somber when I head downtown. A couple of people argue about gun control; the same six or seven lines you hear in all of those debates. On Clark Street, though, tourists skip around as usual, apparently oblivious. They pose for Terrence’s caricatures. They pose for photos pretending to shoot the Al Capone Tours guy, which seems even more disturbing than usual.

  Edward Tweed and Aaron Saltis both give me a “Well, shit, this is gonna be rough” look as I pass, though Tweed seems calm, like it’s nothing he hasn’t done a hundred times. Cyn gives me a small wave as I walk over and start checking customers in.

  “Rick says you’ve got a new route set up?” she asks.

  “Yeah. I’m a bit worried it’ll run short, though, so feel free to add anything you want.”

  “Will do.”

  Then I tell her how freaked out Zoey was. I think it’s sort of charming, how scared Zoey gets about me being in Chicago.

  We go to Hull House first, where all the ghosts seem to be of people who died of natural causes, then down Roosevelt Road, passing the place where Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train rolled into town. Rumor has it that the ghost train shows up now and then. We stick around the south Loop to hit Prairie Avenue and look at all the old mansions; they sure look haunted.

  I stop myself from thinking it’s a good place to take a volunteer. It’s just not a good night to think like that.

  While we cruise up Lake Shore Drive I tell a few stories I looked up about the Congress Hotel, which we can see on Michigan Avenue, over on the other side of Grant Park. Then I throw in a few stories of ghost ships on the lake. It’s not as good as my usual tours, but it works.

  When we get off Lake Shore Drive, we wiggle through the Gold Coast and end up right at the Couch tomb, and from there we go down to Bughouse Square. It’s a lovely little park, really. Nice to walk around in, even though it doesn’t seem remotely spooky to me. The ghost of One-Armed Charlie declines to make an appearance. After trying to think of a sample speech I could give, I just decide to borrow Rick’s—he won’t mind, since it’s an emergency and all. I jump onto a bench and improvise a little rant about how stupid my uncle was to be planning to cut off his limbs for the insurance money. “If brains were bug juice, he couldn’t drown a gnat!”

  When we get back on the bus, the tour is still running way short, and we’re only a few blocks from being back at the McDonald’s. Cyn takes the mic to help me out.

  “Hey,” she says, “I don’t suppose Megan told you about the ghost of Lillian Collier, did she?”

  Everyone shakes their heads. Including me.

  “This one’s pretty obscure,” she says. “The ghost isn’t reported too often, but Lillian Collier was a flapper who used to hang out here in Bughouse Square back in the early 1920s. She ran a tea room on Michigan Avenue called the Wind Blew Inn, and one day when she was, like, nineteen, the cops raided the place because she was holding ‘petting parties.’ She had to go in front of a judge and say, ‘There is no snuggle-pupping at the Wind Blew Inn.’ ”

  “ ‘Snuggle-pupping’?” I ask. “That’s the best word I ever heard.”

  “Yeah, it’s like a more illicit version of cuddling,” says Cyn. “Anyway, the judge sentenced her to read a book of fairy tales to cure her bohemianism. According to legend, she died of tuberculosis or pneumonia or something, and now her ghost haunts Bughouse Square.”

  “You think she might be the vanishing flapper hitchhiker out at Waldheim?”

  “No reason why she couldn’t be, I guess. But I usually hear about her around here.”

  When we finish at Bughouse Square, we drive the bus through River North, meandering around and pointing out bars that are supposed to be haunted (just about all of them are) until we’ve been out just long enough to say we’ve done a full-length tour. Tips come to twelve bucks each. Not bad, really, all things considered.

  As Cyn drives me to the Blue Line, I ask if the Lillian Collier story is true.

  “Yeah,” she says. “She was a real person.”

  “Is she really supposed to haunt Bughouse Square?”

  “I certainly don’t have a firsthand account of the ghost to cite,” she says with a low-grade cackle. “She does disappear from the record in the mid 1920s, so she might have died when she was still a flapper. But she might have also just gotten married, changed her name, and had a few kids or something. You sort of look like her, you know. Now that I think of it.”

  I look Lillian Collier up on my phone during the train ride home. There are a couple of photos in the Tribune archives.

  I really do sort of look like her. Her hair was shorter, but her face was kind of similar to mine.

  That night I stay up for hours reading every vintage article I can find on Lillian Collier, the mysterious flapper of Bughouse Square.

  Chapter Fourteen

  From: Megan

  To: Ricardo Torre, Cynthia Fargon

  Date: Thursday, 1:05 a.m.

  Subject: Lillian Collier: The Vanishing Flapper

  Hey, guys. I am officially obsessed with Lillian Collier. I almost thought Cyn was making this story up, but I’ve been online all night digging up articles. Lillian’s antics made the Tribune several times, and there are a bunch of articles about her from out-of-town papers too. She was national news in 1922.

  Anyway, here’s a basic rundown of what I’ve found:

  In 1922, Lillian Collier (pronounced “Colly”) was a young f
lapper who told a reporter she had come to town to convert Chicagoans to “the gospel of high art” with her tea room, The Wind Blew Inn, which was on East Ohio Street, right off Michigan Avenue, where the Under Armour store is now. Apparently she had been a circus performer before she opened the place. She was all over the media in the early 1920s; one time she made the news by climbing up a flagpole, and papers loved to talk about (well, make fun of) all the weirdos and artists who hung around the Wind Blew Inn.

  Valentine’s Day, 1922, the cops raided the place. Neighbors had complained about the noise from “syncopated ‘blues’ music” coming from the place, and parents feared that their children were taking part in “petting parties” there. Not to mention that this was during Prohibition, and they were rumored to be selling booze under the table. Several patrons were arrested, along with Lillian herself and her “aide” (girlfriend, I’ll bet), Virginia Harrison.

  At the hearing following the raid, a judge let all the patrons go, but set Lillian’s trial for the next month and told her to remove the “obscene” nude statues that were used as decorations. She compromised by putting overalls on them.

  At their trial, she and Virginia told the judge that they didn’t serve anything stronger than chocolate éclairs, and that “There is no snuggle-pupping at the Wind Blew Inn.” That was when the judge sentenced Lillian to read a book of fairy tales to cure her of her bohemian ideals and teach her “the value of the things of life in general.”

  Lillian dutifully marched into the library and posed for the press holding the book of fairy tales she’d checked out, promising to mend her ways if the stories in the book convinced her to.

  A month later the Wind Blew Inn burned down.

  The fairy tales obviously didn’t work, though. Two years later, in 1924, Lillian was quoted in a widely-circulated article entitled “Is Today’s Girl Becoming a Savage?” In it, she claimed that flappers were not “savages” at all, like stuffy society marms were saying they were, but represented a new era of freedom and opportunity for women. “Our open and honest ways are too frank for mid-Victorian critics,” she said. “Women for too long have played the role of the underdog. The flapper of today is the product of a new age turning toward the light.” (Article attached.)

  After that article, though, Lillian vanishes from the record completely. I couldn’t find anything saying she died in the 1920s, but the Social Security Death Index didn’t start until the 1930s. It may just be that she got married and changed her name, and somehow the marriage isn’t in the records either, but I just feel like there must be more to her story.

  I have found several women from 1930 and beyond named Lillian Collier who may have been her. A poet in Canada. A suffragette in Texas. A New York socialite who married an Olympic fencer (he died in a blimp crash right after the wedding). But none of these can be definitively shown to be to the same Lillian Collier who took Chicago by storm in 1922. Even many of the known stories of her have only been traced to provincial papers so far—the Chicago Tribune covered her arrest, but not her bizarre sentencing.

  I’m going to solve this mystery.

  —Megan

  MEGAN:

  I dreamed I was her last night.

  ZOEY BABY:

  That flapper girl?

  MEGAN:

  Yeah.

  MEGAN:

  In the dream she/I changed my name and became a silent film star in 1926. But in the dream it was the 1950s, and I was living in a hotel, singing sultry songs like “Why Don’t You Do Right” and “Young and Beautiful” in the hotel bar while Cyn played piano.

  MEGAN:

  It was kind of cool. Like I was in hiding. No one at the hotel knew I used to be famous. Even though one of my movie posters was on the wall.

  ZOEY BABY:

  You think she was sending you a message about what happened?

  MEGAN:

  I have to admit, I woke up hoping so.

  MEGAN:

  God, now I really, really want to be a washed-up silent film actress living in a seedy hotel in 1955.

  ZOEY BABY:

  Hey, if movies have taught me one thing, it’s that dreams can come true. LOL.

  MEGAN:

  Yes. If I work hard and set my mind to it, I CAN go be a washed up 1920s starlet living in the 1950s. I believe.

  MEGAN:

  *WISSSSHHHHHHHHING*

  ZOEY BABY:

  *WISSSHHHH*

  Chapter Fifteen

  For the first part of the summer, I was always having dreams about the Couch tomb. Like, I’d dream I found a tunnel that led into it. Or that I’d hop the fence, the door would swing open, and there would be Ira Couch, in his bathrobe and his underpants, eating some toast and saying,“What?”

  Sometimes in my dreams it was full of more dead bodies than it could really hold. Recent ones. Once there were bodies, plus a bunch of cubicles where guys were doing office work, not even noticing all the bodies. It was usually bigger on the inside. Night after night, I was inside that tomb in my dreams.

  But after I get into Lillian Collier, most of my dreams are of her.

  Some 1920s slang words I dig up, and resolve to start working into tour stories at once:

  Oil burner: a girl who chews gum (or takes drugs)

  cake-eater: a playboy

  crumpet-muncher: same as a “cake eater”

  dool-owl: a dull, depressing person

  cuddle cootie: a guy whose idea of a date is taking a girl for a bus ride

  lollygagger: a young man who “pets” in the hallways

  the berries: an excellent person or thing (similar to “the bee’s knees” or “the cat’s pajamas”) (as in: “Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries is the berries.”)

  OAO: One and Only (1920s version of OTP or BAE)

  I spend an afternoon strolling through Waldheim Cemetery, looking for graves that might be hers if she’s the vanishing flapper who supposedly hitches rides there, even though I don’t exactly believe those hitchhiking ghosts are real.

  Before my next tour, I even walk over to the sportswear store on Michigan Avenue that was built over the grounds where the Wind Blew Inn used to stand and stroll around, just letting myself be impressed with the fact that Lillian probably stood right in the space where I’m standing now.

  I don’t talk out loud to dead people, normally. I know they can’t hear me. But I find myself whispering, “Here I am, Lillian. Can you give me a clue?”

  Nothing happens, though, and thinking that the site of the Wind Blew Inn is just a place selling sporting goods and stuff now starts to get depressing. There are no ghosts here. No quiet echo of the “syncopated ‘blues’ music” that neighbors used to complain about. No soft sound of laughter and secret make-out parties. No faint smell of spiked tea and chocolate eclairs.

  Just a lot of people buying moisture-wicking underwear.

  With no traces of Lillian at her old stomping grounds, I go to the McDonald’s, order a coffee, and just sit there, watching the city go by.  Terrence the caricature guy gives me a nod through the window.

  After a minute I hear a voice beside me.

  “Rolling with the rotters?”

  Aaron Saltis, the other DarkSide tour guide, takes a seat next to me.

  “Cruising with the corpses,” I say.

  He smells like gin. Or vodka, maybe. I don’t really know. Embalming fluid, for sure.

  “How’s business?” he asks.

  “We’re getting by.”

  “October is coming.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sixty-five percent of the business is in October, you know. Bunch of October-only tour companies are gonna sprout up. The Segway Tours start running ghost tours. Trolley company, too. Even the fucking food tours. Death Alley’s gonna be a battle zone every night. Four, five big groups crowding in at once.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to have a rumble,” I say. “We’re the Sharks, you’re the Jets. You have to be the racist ones.”

  He la
ughs a gross, throaty, “just crawled out of the grave” laugh.

  “I assumed you must be funny if you got a gig with Rick,” he says. “You know Rick tried to get me to go into business with him when he left DarkSide?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know all the history between you two.”

  “He did. I didn’t think ‘Mysterious Chicago’ would last, though. Edward’s safer. And I don’t trust that Cynthia girl.”

  I take some offense at this.

  “At least she isn’t going around telling people their flash bouncing off a window in a photo is a ghost.”

  Aaron chuckles and grunts in a single sound, then looks off into the distance. “People just come on these things for thrills and chills,” he says. “Most of them assume the stories are all fake anyway.”

  “They don’t have to be,” I say. “The real stories are good enough. We don’t need to make up shit about devil babies and Indian burial grounds.”

  “Or people hanging themselves from the ceiling,” he adds. “Ninety percent of the ghost stories that start with a suicide, it’s someone hanging themselves from the ceiling. You ever notice that? Heh.”

  I wonder for a second if maybe getting hanged from the ceiling is similar to getting punched in the brain, physically, which would explain why there are so many ghost stories like that. Like, if you die while doing auto-erotic asphyxiation, it leaves something behind. It seems logical, in a pseudoscience sort of way. But it’s probably just a folklore thing—hanging oneself from the ceiling sounds good in a ghost story. That’s all.

  I decide to take advantage of the fact that Aaron is admitting the stories are mostly BS.

  “Yeah,” I say. “And how many Indian burial grounds can there be?”

  He chortles again. “And how many kids got killed in a bus on railroad tracks so their ghosts can push cars over them? Half the small towns in the world have that story.”

  “Pregnant nuns getting walled up inside a former nunnery.”