EXCERPTS
Biograph Theater Chicago
John Dillinger Lives - Not the flesh-and-blood gangster, of course, but his ghost, who has been seen outside the place where Dillinger drew his last breaththe Biograph Theater on North Lincoln Avenue.
By the time Dillinger was gunned down by FBI agents on July 22, 1934, he had become Public Enemy No. 1, his notorious exploits ballyhooed in newspapers across the country on an almost daily basis. While much of the American public viewed Dillinger as something of a modern-day Robin Hood, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had issued a shoot to kill order on the gangster as well as a $10,000 reward. Each of the five states in which Dillinger and his gang had robbed banks also offered $10,000 rewards.
Born in Indianapolis in 1903, John Dillinger was not known as a troublesome youth. Rather, he was quiet, a good student, and a talented baseball player. But in 1923 he was refused permission to marry his sweetheart by the girl s stepfather and, in a rage, he stole a car, abandoning it only a few hours later. Afraid that he might be arrested for the theft, Dillinger enlisted in the U.S. Navy. The Navy wasn t to his liking, however, and he went AWOL several times, finally jumping ship for good in Boston. Listed as a deserter by the Navy,
Dillinger made his way back home to Indiana. It wasn t long before he fell in with men who would set him on a life of crime.
In 1924 Dillinger was involved in a robbery in which the victim was accidentally shot. He was convicted and sent to the Indiana State Reformatory. Just as he did in the Navy, Dillinger tried to escape several times, but was always caught. Dillinger became good friends with bank robbers Harry Pierpont and Homer Van Meter, both of whom were shortly after transferred to the state prison in Michigan City. Dillinger himself was later transferred to Michigan City, where he renewed his friendship with the two men. They also introduced him to other inmates who served as worthy professors in his criminal education. A plan was hatched in which Dillinger, who was slated for release before the other men, would rob banks in order to raise money to finance a prison break of the others. Dillinger s notorious bank robbing career was launched.
In July 1933, Dillinger and Harry Copeland walked into the Commercial Bank in Danville, Indiana, pointed guns at the tellers and customers and politely announced that they were robbing the bank. Dillinger, wearing a straw boater, which would become his trademark, was cool and collected. The men made off with $3,500. From that point on Dillinger engaged in a string of bank robberies throughout the Midwest, raising money to break his friends out of
prison. When he had enough money, he bought guns and had them smuggled into the Michigan City prison. While Dillinger s friends in prison were planning their break, he
was arrested in Dayton, Ohio, where he had been visiting a girlfriend.
He was incarcerated in the Lima, Ohio, jail when ten inmates of the Michigan City prison, using the guns Dillinger had sent them, drove right through the prison s front gates in cars stolen from inside the prison. Some of them discovered Dillinger s whereabouts, broke into
the jail, shot the sheriff dead, and freed their friend.
Dillinger and his friends shifted their operations to Chicago, living in a few apartments on the North Side. At one point they raided a police arsenal in Peru, Indiana, and made off with an assortment of weapons, including machine guns, shotguns, and bulletproof vests. Dillinger and his friends robbed banks in Greencastle, Indiana, and Milwaukee before taking a break in Florida and then Arizona. But the law caught up with Dillinger in Tucson. He was arrested and sent back to Illinois to stand trail for the robbery of a bank in East Chicago.
Ironically, it was a robbery that, in all likelihood, he did not commit, although he was accused of it. He was locked up in the escape-proof Crown Point, Indiana, prison from which he escaped a month later using a gun carved out of a bar of soap and colored black with shoe polish. Taking a few guards hostage, he stole a car from the prison and drove across the state line to Illinois, where he released the guards with his apologies and handed them four dollars for food and carfare. Although he was free again, Dillinger s transportation of kidnapped persons across state lines was a federal offense and now allowed the FBI to become involved in trying to bring him to justice.
Dillinger moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he teamed up with old friend and new parolee Homer Van Meter and an angry, deranged killer named Lester Gillis, better known as Baby Face Nelson. They knocked over a bank in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, but encountered resistance, making off with only about $50,000 of the $200,000 the bank had in the vault. Dillinger and John Hamilton, another old robber friend who had rejoined Dillinger, were shot in the holdup, although their wounds were not severe and they both recovered.
All this time, the FBI was hot on Dillinger s trail. Dillinger, Van Meter, and a woman named Billie Frechette narrowly avoided capture at the St. Paul apartment they were renting. The three escaped in a hail of gunfire, one slug tearing into Dillinger s leg. The trio escaped
to an isolated fishing camp in the woods of Wisconsin called Little Bohemia. There Baby Face Nelson, Eddie Green, John Hamilton, Tommy Carroll, and several of the gang s girlfriends joined them.
Melvin Purvis, director of the Chicago office of the FBI, received a tip that the Dillinger gang was holed up at Little Bohemia. He assembled a team of dozens of agents and planned an attack on the fishing lodge. He positioned his men for a raid on the lodge the night of April 22, 1934. That night the agents saw three men exit a cabin and get into a car. The agents called for them to stop, but the men apparently did not hear the order. The agents opened fire, blasting the car apart and killing Civilian Conservation Corps worker Eugene Boiseneau and wounding two fishermen.
The real crooks heard the gunfire and disappeared into the dark woods. The agents poured gunfire into the cabins all night long, but in the morning all they found were some of the gang members girlfriends, who had managed to find refuge from the fire by hiding in the basement. Not one of the bank robbers was captured. Hoover and Purvis were embarrassed and incensed by the disaster. They vowed that such a fiasco would never happen again.
In July 1934, Chicago police detective Martin Zarkovich approached Purvis and told him that he could deliver Dillinger. Zarkovich had a friend named Anna Sage, a whorehouse madam who was facing deportation to her native Romania, who he said could set up Dillinger if the FBI would halt her deportation proceedings.
The deal was struck. The evening of July 22 was a warm one. John Dillinger wore a lightweight coat with a white shirt, gray pants, canvas shoes, and his usual straw boater as he entered the Biograph Theater with his most recent girlfriend, Polly Hamilton Keele. Anna Sage, who wore a brilliant orange dress, accompanied the couple. The banner hanging below the Biograph s illuminated marquee advertised that the theater was cooled by refrigeration so that its patrons could watch Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable, William Powell, and Myrna Loy, in comfort.
While the movie played, Purvis positioned his men in the streets outside the theater. He was nervous, chain-smoking cigarettes as he waited for the theatergoers to exit. At about 10:30, the house lights came up and the theater began to empty. As the crowd filed out, Purvis
saw Anna Sage s distinctive orange dressthe means by which they agreed to identify her, and thus, Dillingeramong the crowd. He signaled to his agents and the police to move in.
Dillinger stepped off the curb, just before the alley that ran alongside the theater. Alerted by something, he suddenly stopped and whirled around, apparently reaching for a gun hidden beneath his coat. The agents opened fire. Three bullets struck him. Dillinger staggered a few steps then fell to the pavement dead.
On the day I visited it, the Biograph Theater looked pretty much as it had that night in 1934. The same imposing marquee still projected out above the sidewalk as it had when Dillinger walked beneath it. The little box office where he had purchased his tickets was still there. But the interior of the Biograph would have been unrecognizable to Dillinger s ghost. At one time a single large room, it had since been dived into smaller theaters. The original seats, including the one that Dillinger had sat in and which had been painted a color different from all the others after his death, were long gone, replaced with newer ones. There were no moviegoers when I was there, but I did speak with the theater manager, as well as some employees, none of whom had ever experienced any ghostly happenings at the theater.
Still, there are stories of people seeing a shadowy figure of a man running on the sidewalk, or heading for the alley. He runs, then staggers, then falls and disappears, almost as if reenacting the shooting over and over again. There are some who say the man killed at the Biograph Theater that night was not really John Dillinger, but that the FBI, embarrassed by the Little Bohemia debacle, could not admit yet another mistake and so covered up the truth. We may never know the truth, but what we do know is that a man was shot and killed that night and that his ghost relives that agony still.
"

John B. Kachuba is the author of Ghosthunting Ohio, How to Write Funny, and (with his wife, Mary A. Newman, PhD) Why Is This Job Killing Me? His short fiction and nonfiction have been widely published. He is a recent winner of the Dogwood Fiction Prize and has been published in such journals as Tin House, Hawaii Pacific Review, Connecticut Review, Mississippi Quarterly, and others. He holds advanced degrees in creative writing from Antioch University and Ohio University. He currently lives in Athens, Ohio.

Beverly Unitarian Church

Chicago

There is an interesting debate among people of faith about whether ghosts exist or not and if a belief in ghosts can be reconciled with a belief in some religious creed. Every religion has stories of supernatural beings, creatures that exist in another realm that is invisible and unknown to mere mortals. We have various names for such beings, depending upon our own cultural beliefs―angels, spirits, demons, guides―but what they all have in common is that they are non-flesh-and-blood beings that have various forms of interaction with humans. The beings themselves were never human and are considered as purely spiritual creatures. Ghosts, on the other hand, are distinct from these entities in that they were, at one time, human beings with the same wants and desires, pains and sorrows, joys and successes that are all indicative of the human experience. It is this difference between once-human and never-human, eternally spiritual and formerly mortal that fuels the debate.

For the members of the Beverly Unitarian Church on Chicago’s South Side, the debate is of little consequence. One of the seven principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association, of which the Beverly church is a member, supports “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” a concept that allows for both a belief in ghosts as well as a disbelief. The choice is left up to the individual and is not dictated by some religious hierarchy.

It came as no surprise to me then to find that the Beverly Unitarian Church was haunted.

My wife, Mary, and I were familiar with the Unitarian Universalist church, having attended services in our hometown of Athens, Ohio, so we decided to go to the Sunday service at Beverly while we were in Chicago researching this book. The fact that the church was haunted was an added incentive, of course. It was a warm and sunny day in August when we pulled into the parking lot adjacent to an imposing building that looked like a castle, and was in fact nicknamed “the Irish Castle” by its neighbors.

The castle sat on a little hill at the corner of 103rd Street and Longwood Drive in a quiet residential neighborhood. The three-story limestone block structure was built in 1886 by wealthy real estate magnate Robert C. Givens and modeled after a castle he saw while traveling in Ireland. Givens and his family lived in the house only a few years before selling it. The building then served as a private residence for various people and, at one point, housed the Chicago Female College. In 1942, it became the home of the Unitarian Fellowship.

Mary and I were early. No one else had arrived and the door was locked, so we walked around to the front of the building. Rounded corner towers rose above the trees. The crenellated battlements and the massive Romanesque arch above the solid-wood door called to mind images of King Arthur, or maybe the moody Dane, Hamlet, chatting with the ghost of his father on a cold and moonless night. Ivy crept along the stone steps leading up to the castle and twined around the towers. Unlike a real medieval castle, this one featured many large windows.

After a few minutes, people began to arrive for the services, so we followed them inside. Those large windows admitted plenty of light and the interior was bright and airy, not at all what one would expect inside a castle. We spoke with some of the people as they entered and were invited to tour the building before the service began. The ground level, now used as the main worship space, was one large room at the front of the house and had originally been the parlor. A large piano stood before the windows.

A beautifully carved oak staircase led up to the second floor. This floor, too, was essentially one large room, with a kitchen on one side. I didn’t know for sure, but my guess was that many of the original interior walls on both floors had been removed in order to open up the interior and create larger spaces. On this floor, as on the ground floor, the rounded corner towers created cozy little nooks, some of them furnished with chairs. Another stairway led to the third-floor apartment of the caretaker, who was not at home the day we visited.

It is not uncommon for Unitarian services to be conducted without a minister, led instead by one of the members of the fellowship. We joined the others downstairs and listened as one of the members of the fellowship talked about his struggle with depression. Halfway through his talk, I heard a thump on the ceiling above me. It didn’t quite register with me until it sounded again, and I remembered that we had been the last ones upstairs. There was nobody up there now.

“Did you hear that?” I whispered, leaning toward Mary. She nodded.

“What do you think it was?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

I listened carefully, but the sound did not return.

The service concluded and we found ourselves chatting with the woman who had been sitting next to us. Pat Haynes, a longtime member of the fellowship, was happy to talk to us about the castle ghost.

“No one is really sure who she is,” Pat said. “People have seen a young woman dressed in white, something like a nightgown. Some say she is the ghost of a girl named Clara, one of the students here when this place was the women’s college. They say she died in the 1930s from influenza.”

I wondered if a young female ghost from a women’s college would be so rude as to clump around upstairs and make the thumping sounds I had heard.

“Have you ever seen her?” Mary asked.

“No,” Pat said, “but some of the old-timers have. There’s another theory,” Pat continued, “that she may be the ghost of Eleanor Veil, a woman who lived here during the Depression.”

Although I was carefully listening to what Pat was saying, I was distracted by the glass jar she held in her hands. “Can I ask you what you’ve got in that jar?” I finally said.

“Oh, this?” She laughed and held up the jar so I could see inside it. There were a few green leaves and some fuzzy little, I don’t know ...things.

“What am I looking at?”

“These are monarch butterfly caterpillars,” Pat said, “and the leaves are milkweed. That’s the only thing the caterpillars will eat.”

I wondered why she had brought the caterpillars to church, but before I could ask her, she said, “You should talk to Fran Johnson. I’m sure she’s got a ghost story for you.”

No sooner had Pat spoken her name than Fran came over to us. Mary and I recognized her as someone we had spoken to earlier, although we didn’t get her name the first time.

“Are you talking about me?” Fran said, with a smile.

“They’re interested in ghost stories about this place, and I told them you might have one for them,” Pat said.

Fran looked at me quizzically.

“I’m writing a book,” I said.

Experience had already taught me that most people, contrary to what I would have expected, would pour out their hearts to me once I told them I was writing a book. Maybe they felt sorry for me, or maybe I was just cheaper than a therapist. In any case, Fran was willing to talk.

“It was during an evening meeting of the Ladies of the Castle,” Fran said. “We were meeting upstairs on the second floor. Since there was no one else in the building except our group, the lights were off down here on the first floor.”

As the ladies were talking, they heard faint tinkling sounds from downstairs. The sounds grew louder and became recognizable as someone playing the piano.

“There wasn’t supposed to be anyone down there, so I went downstairs to check it out,” Fran said. “I could hear the piano clearly. I threw on the lights and the sounds stopped, but there was no one there.”

Fran was shaken, but she went back upstairs and the ladies resumed their meeting. They froze in mid-conversation only a few minutes later when the piano began playing again. Fran crept back downstairs a second time, thinking that there must be an intruder in the building. When she got to the bottom of the stairs, she quickly turned on the lights and the music stopped. She was alone in the room.

“Not only was I alone, but there was simply no way the piano could have played. The cover had never even been removed. It was still on the piano.”

We had been standing beside the piano as she told her story. There had been no music during the service and the piano was completely hidden beneath a heavy quilted cover. It would be impossible to strike a single note from it with the cover in place.

“What do you think happened?” Mary asked.

Fran could not offer any explanations for what she and the Ladies of the Castle had heard, but said that other unexplainable sounds, such as the tinkling of silverware and glasses, and disembodied voices, were sometimes heard in the building.

Fran offered one more story about yet another female ghost. During a New Year’s Eve party at the castle, a woman dressed in red was seen descending the stairs from the second floor to the first. The partygoers saw the woman move across the room toward the door, which opened of its own accord as she drew near. She passed through the door and out across new-fallen snow. She disappeared in the night and left no footprints.

The Reverend Leonetta Bugleisi is no longer the minister at the Beverly Unitarian Church, having moved to new pastoral duties in Michigan, but she had several ghost stories of her own while she was there.

Leonetta was talking with some friends and her husband at a church reception in 1994. “I saw two thin woman’s arms wrap around my husband’s waist,” she told me, “and I thought someone was hugging him to say goodnight for the evening. When I looked around him I did not see a face. I said, ‘Michael, are you okay?’ And he said, ‘Yes, why?’ I asked him if he felt anything around his waist and he said no. Then the arms disappeared.”

Leonetta said that a former custodian had heard the piano playing when no one else was in the building. Another custodian suddenly died in the nursery school hallway while waxing the floors. The summer after his death Leonetta was alone in the upstairs library, sorting through some books. She came across a book about death and dying by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and put it aside before going downstairs. When she came back up to get the book, it had disappeared and she never found it again. “My theory,” Leonetta said, “is that Kevin, the custodian, was still inhabiting the castle he loved so much and took the book as a sign of his existence.”

Another time, Leonetta was upstairs with a church member. While Leonetta was in a storage room the other woman was in the apartment area. The woman went down to the first floor unbeknownst to Leonetta, who called out to her.

“When I looked out towards the apartment door I saw a distinct black shadow―and this was in broad daylight―flow down the stairs past me and go to the second floor,” Leonetta said.

The fellowship of the Beverly Unitarian Church may never learn the identity of the ghosts who haunt its church, but it doesn’t really matter. Those ghosts will always be accepted there and offered haven.