Haunted Heartland Read online

Despite William Orpet’s declaration that he wanted to “start in where I left off and make good,” most Lake County residents considered him a pariah. The University of Wisconsin booted him out; ministers called him immoral. The DeKalb chemistry teacher he hoped to marry dumped him.

  Within months of the trial, the Orpet family moved to Santa Barbara, California, where his father took a job as the superintendent of parks. Some reports say William became a gardener like his father. He served in World War I and may have been a cowboy in Wyoming. He took the pseudonym W. H. Dawson and moved to San Francisco for a time. He purportedly jilted a young Detroit woman he had promised to marry. He died at the age of fifty-three in 1948 and was buried in a Los Angeles military cemetery. Newspaper obituaries made note of the infamous murder case.

  Marion Lambert is buried next to her parents in Lake Forest Cemetery.

  And so we come back to the ghost on Sheridan Road, the girl who might be Marion Lambert.

  No one is quite sure when the first sightings of the specter took place or by whom, but they seem to go back at least a couple of decades. They center on a portion of Sheridan Road in Lake Forest, not far from the old train station and the location where Marion’s body was found. A haunting there might make sense. A reporter covering the trial for the Los Angeles Herald wrote that defense testimony and photographs showed “what a conspicuous spot . . . three oaks is, especially in winter when the leaves are off the trees . . . any one standing at the foot of the trees could be seen easily from Sheridan Road and from the electric train cars” (emphasis added).

  The defense team used that argument to suggest that no one would choose such a public space to commit a premeditated murder. But one could use the proximity of Marion Lambert’s last breath to the site of the alleged appearance of her ghost as something more than happenstance.

  Then there are those descriptions of the ghost: she is translucent and barefoot, wearing a mud-splattered blue dress; like Marion, she has short, curly, brown hair that frames a soft, gentle face; and she has that horrific burned mouth and blackened, crumbling teeth.

  Ghost hunters and historical societies sometimes organize forays to find evidence of Marion Lambert’s spirit but so far as is known, none have been successful.

  Perhaps a Chicago Tribune reporter summed it up best when he wrote of one such unsuccessful attempt to find a ghost: “Nothing remains but the mystery, haunting us like a shadowy girl in the middle of the road.”

  Resurrection Mary

  Chicago

  Nearly as elusive as the ghost of Marion Lambert along Lake Forest’s Sheridan Road is a captivating, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired girl in her late teens who loves to dance. She wears the same long, off-white ball gown in which she died in the 1930s.

  She is known simply as Resurrection Mary, after the cemetery in which she is restlessly entombed, Resurrection Cemetery along Archer Avenue in southwest suburban Justice, Illinois. No one seems to know her real name, or at least it has never been revealed. Cemetery records show that a Polish girl of about Mary’s age and description is buried there.

  The story told about her is that she was killed in an automobile accident in 1934 on her way home from a night of dancing at the old Oh Henry Park ballroom, a former outdoor dance pavilion built in the 1920s and named for the Chicago-produced candy bar. It was enlarged over the years and achieved national fame as one of the nation’s premiere ballrooms, especially after it was renamed the Willowbrook in 1959.

  Sadly, a multi-alarm fire destroyed the historic venue in October 2016.

  Yet for ninety-plus years, Mary’s appearances are legendary in that portion of Chicagoland. A song was written about her by singer/songwriter Ian Hunter, which includes this lyric:

  On a wild Chicago night, with a wind howling white

  I cheated time with Resurrection Mary

  And I felt tears form in my eyes for the first time, I felt something

  Deep inside and the first time I saw angels high in the air

  For the first time in my life, and I said, “Mary, go to the light

  It’s gonna be alright.

  It is generally agreed that Mary first made her presence known in about 1939 when motorists complained that a peculiar girl in a formal gown tried to get into their automobiles along Archer Avenue. In some cases she was able to hitch a ride to or from the ballroom. On those occasions no one suspected that Mary was anything but mortal. If she found a ride to the ballroom, she danced the evening away with the single men who frequented the nightspot. Folks noticed, however, that her answers were vague when anyone asked about her personal life. Her dance partners used the word “aloof” to describe her behavior. Her arm was icy cold when they touched it.

  After the last dance, Mary shyly asked for a ride home and directed her impromptu chauffeur to head north on Archer. As they neared Resurrection Cemetery, she asked him to stop so that she could get out. Her home was nearby, she said. On at least one occasion, she kissed her escort good night. A few claimed to see her vanish as she ran through the cemetery gates. That is when they knew they had given a lift to a ghost.

  She was also seen on several occasions inside the cemetery. A man passing the graveyard late at night happened to glance toward the locked gates. Peering back at him was a young woman tightly gripping the wrought iron fence.

  Mary seemed to be especially active after the cemetery’s 1969 remodeling.

  A taxi driver was cruising for a fare on a midwinter night when he caught sight of a coatless girl standing near the entrance to the Old Willow Shopping Mall. He thought the woman might have had car trouble, so he stopped. Into the front seat climbed a strikingly beautiful young woman dressed in white with black, patent leather dancing slippers fashioned with a thin strap over each delicate instep.

  “The snow came early this year,” she said, barely loud enough to be heard.

  The taxi driver tried to get more information from her but with little success. She had to get home, she said, gesturing vaguely in a northerly direction. He thought she had imbibed a few too many drinks but took off anyway.

  “Here!” she cried out after they had gone a few miles up Archer Avenue. The cabbie pulled to the curb and looked out his window toward a small, dilapidated shack set back from the road.

  He turned to ask if this was indeed the right place, but the back seat was empty. The rear door had not opened. Across the street was a cemetery.

  Devil Baby

  Chicago

  The three elderly Italian women chattered amiably as they scurried along the Chicago city sidewalk on an early spring morning. They kept close together, not daring to lose sight of one another, their pocketbooks clutched tightly against their ample bosoms. Should any one of the hundreds of strangers they passed have been asked to identify their mission, the answer might have been that the ladies were on their way to church, or the market, or perhaps to visit a favorite daughter-in-law. But that was as far from the truth as the women were from their native Sicily.

  The trio turned a corner and paused. Their destination lay a few yards away. They looked at one another and nodded in quiet agreement. Yes, they would go forward. After all, it was not every day that they could see a living Devil Baby, the spawn of Satan himself complete with short horns, pointed ears, and cloven hooves.

  A few more steps on this day in 1913 took them to Hull House, a city landmark since Jane Addams and Ellen Starr founded it as a settlement house for the city’s large immigrant population in the late 1880s. Although Hull House moved to new quarters in the 1960s, the original building has been preserved as a memorial to Addams and Starr.

  It is not clear what prompted the origin of the Devil Baby legend nearly a century ago, for that is what it was, a tale without substance, as that trio of elderly women soon sadly discovered.

  The Hull House receptionist pleasantly greeted them, sat them down, and asked them their business. And then as gently as possible she told them that there was no Devil Baby. Never had been, not then and not in the
quarter century the shelter had existed. The story was untrue. Gossip. Nothing more.

  The women insisted they knew what they were talking about and spoke at length about the child and his incredible attributes, about how he looked and about how he could speak from the moment he was born. Why with his first breath he had cursed his father, grabbed a cigar right out of his mouth, and smoked it on the spot.

  Fantastic as it sounds, Hull House was inundated with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of similar requests to see the Devil Baby over the course of the next several months.

  Letters, telephone calls, and personal visits by the curious fully taxed the resources of Hull House and its staff. A large group of Milwaukeeans wrote asking that their “delegation” be allowed to visit so they might “assess” the child. They would pay whatever the cost.

  Italian, Irish, and Jewish versions of the peculiar child have been documented, each with its own strong moral implications. The “lesson” seemed to be to not question the teachings of one’s own religion or family, to not stray from the fold. To do so invited hideous retribution.

  The Irish and Italian versions of the Devil Baby reflected the centrality of Catholic teaching. In one telling, an Irish girl failed to confess to a priest that she had an affair with a married man before wedding her husband. For that transgression the girl was forced to give birth to the devil’s baby as punishment. Her husband took the infant to Hull House, where workers decided it should be baptized. They unwrapped the swaddling clothes only to find them empty. That is when a nasty laugh erupted from the rear of the church. It was the baby, dancing across the pews and out the door.

  In another story, a young Italian girl committed the grievous sin of marrying an atheist, despite the protests of her family. A few months later, pregnant with their first child, the young bride hung a painting of the Virgin on the bedroom wall. When her husband returned home from work that night, he ripped down the picture and burned it. He shouted that he would rather have the devil himself in the house than a holy picture. And he did.

  Orthodox Jewish belief was at the center of another version of the story. In the tradition of pidyon haben, parents must pay the rabbi a fee for their first-born son no later than one month after he is born. A young Chicago Jewish mother had been asked if her son was her first child. Yes, she lied. She had given birth to a baby boy out of wedlock some years earlier. For that sin, she paid dearly—her next child was Satan’s progeny.

  The immigrant women of early twentieth-century Chicago fervently believed the stories and passed them along. Surrounded as they were by a foreign culture, they clung tenaciously to the ways of the Old World. Miracles, curses, the supernatural—all were considered possible in the cultures they brought with them to America.

  The existence of a Devil Baby seemed perfectly normal. If a woman questioned the teachings of her elders, or her church or synagogue, or in any way ignored the behavior expected of her, the reckoning could be swift, the punishment harsh.

  Jane Addams herself understood what motivated these women.

  “During the weeks of excitement,” she wrote later of the incident, “it was the old women who really seemed to have come into their own, and perhaps the most significant result of the incident was the reaction of the story upon them. It stirred their minds and memory as with a magic touch, it loosened their tongues and revealed the inner life and thoughts of those who are so often inarticulate. They are accustomed to sit at home and to hear the younger members of the family speak of affairs quite outside their own experiences in a language they do not understand.”

  Who started the story of the Devil Baby?

  No one knows.

  Was there ever any basis in fact?

  Perhaps a child had been born with a birth defect and was taken to Hull House for care. If so, there is no known record from that period to indicate the identity of the child or whatever became of him or her.

  Despite this lack of evidence, for a month and a half in the spring of 1913, a living, fire-breathing Devil Baby did exist at Hull House—if only in the fertile imaginations of the old, the superstitious, or the lonely.

  The Telltale Hand

  Chicago

  Firefighter Frank Leavy seemed melancholy and preoccupied as he raised the soapy rag to scrub the winter’s grime from another window in the Chicago Firehouse at Thirteenth and Oakley. It was Good Friday, April 18, 1924, so his mood was understandable.

  Leavy was scheduled to work that day and on Easter Sunday, according to the recently posted work schedule. He was a thirteen-year veteran of the force, dedicated to his profession, but bothered by being away from his family on those days. They understood of course, but that did not lessen his gloom as he struggled to concentrate on the mundane task of cleaning windows.

  The cold, harsh winter had taken its toll on the men of Engine Company 107 and Truck Company 12. They were thankful that spring seemed within sight and left open the large, red barn doors of the firehouse during the much-needed housecleaning.

  Yet Leavy’s friend Edward McKevitt was worried about him. He walked over to where Leavy was cleaning windows, one soapy palm, fingers spread, resting against a pane of glass while he wiped at the adjacent window with a wet cloth.

  “Is there a problem?” McKevitt asked.

  Leavy’s shoulders sagged. He looked at his friend square in the face.

  “This is my last day at the department,” Leavy said quietly.

  McKevitt was taken aback. His friend had seemed happy and content, talking about his future plans. But now something had changed. Whether it was working two important religious holidays or the multi-alarm fire spreading at that moment through the sprawling Union Stockyards, McKevitt did not know.

  For several hours the ticker-tape device in all the Chicago firehouses rattling out updates about the stockyard blaze indicated it was extremely serious, but Leavy’s firehouse was far from the scene and not likely to be called in. The real fear was that if another fire erupted somewhere in the city and Leavy’s company had to respond, there would not be sufficient equipment to handle the new blaze.

  Suddenly the unthinkable happened: the machine rat-a-tat-tatted a message from alarm box 372 nearly two miles across the city. A fire had erupted at Curran Hall, an imposing four-story brick-and-stone edifice southwest of the Loop. Within minutes Leavy’s engine and truck companies were ordered to respond.

  Leavy and McKevitt clambered aboard the pumper and truck with their fellow firefighters for the harrowing ride through the streets. There were few traffic lights in 1924; intersections were impossibly congested. New electric streetcars, rattling horse-drawn wagons, automobiles, and pedestrians all jockeyed for right-of-way. The screaming fire engines left a trail of bewildered citizenry and frightened horses.

  Each city in America has its tales of heroic firefighters, those selfless public servants whose lives are often sacrificed to protect the public they serve.

  Chicago is no different.

  The files of that city’s fire department are filled with the names of those who have died in the line of duty, and of the fires that have claimed them.

  Of course most Americans know the story of Chicago’s Mrs. O’Leary and her errant, lantern-kicking cow whose actions are said to have triggered the conflagration that nearly destroyed the city. But one of the strangest cases in Chicago fire history does not concern a particularly spectacular or even long-remembered fire.

  It is the story of the Curran Hall fire to which Leavy and his mates responded.

  Curran Hall was engulfed in flames as the fire trucks arrived. The building housed a number of small storefront businesses and offices. The heaviest smoke seemed to billow from the upper floors.

  Truck 12’s crew was ordered onto the roof to cut a hole in it to ventilate the upper floors. They hoped to reach the center of the fire in that way.

  Leavy was among the men from Engine 107 ordered to the second floor. On their hands and knees, the men groped their way up a stairwell through t
he black, choking smoke, coughing and vomiting all the way. There were no oxygen masks in those days. Once they reached the second floor, the men took turns going out onto the fire escape for fresh air.

  The minutes ticked by. It seemed the firefighters were gaining the advantage when suddenly a voice screamed from below.

  “Get out! Get out!”

  A fire captain outside saw what the men inside could not—the exterior brick-and-stone wall was falling in, crumbling.

  Leavy and the others scrambled to the fire escape and started down. But it was too late. The wall caved in with a sickening crunch, like a giant roll of thunder, one witness recalled. It took the fire escape with it.

  Heavy canvas hoses split, sending streams of water exploding in all directions. Ladders snapped in two, like so many matchsticks. Firefighters and their equipment were buried under an avalanche of brick and mortar.

  Frank Leavy never had a chance.

  He was only partway down the fire escape when the wall collapsed on him. Hours later the battered and broken bodies of eight firefighters were found under the rubble. Leavy was one of them; his face was the only one recognizable.

  The next day was Holy Saturday, of course. Edward McKevitt did his best to explain to his fellow firefighters at the station house what had happened the day before. It was not easy—eight of their buddies were dead; twenty others were injured, two critically.

  And yet what McKevitt most troubling were Frank Leavy’s words of the day before—“This is my last day at the department.”

  Was it a premonition of death?

  As McKevitt glanced around at his colleagues, trying to understand the senseless events, his gaze rested on the window Leavy had been washing the day before. He walked over and looked more closely. There seemed to be the perfect outline of a man’s hand on the glass. McKevitt remembered Leavy resting his hand at that same position the previous afternoon.

  “My God! It’s Frank’s handprint,” McKevitt muttered, almost to himself.