Curses! We take you on a terrifying tour of 6 haunted objects, from an ancient book to an arcade game
Illinois likes a good curse.
You know about Wrigley Field, cursed by an angry goat owner.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the curse of Kaskaskia, a once bustling town near Missouri that was briefly the capital of Illinois. What happened was — so says an old, racist legend — a French fur trapper in the 18th century, upset that his daughter fell in love with a local Native American boy, found the boy and drowned him in the Mississippi River; as the boy was dying, he condemned Kaskaskia to be reclaimed by nature. The story is apocryphal, but Kaskaskia certainly looked doomed forever after: It suffered crop failures, flattening tornados and even an earthquake, though the final blow came when the Mississippi reversed course in the 1860s and ate at the town’s banks until it fell into the river. Kaskaskia still exists, but according to census figures, the population is 17.
Maybe you even know the curse of the (former) John Hancock Building on Michigan Avenue, hexed by George Streeter, whose boat ran aground near its land in 1886, in what we now call Streeterville. Streeter declared himself sole ruler of the area, and never light on trouble, he passed in and out of jail, for everything from selling liquor on Sundays to murder. By 84, he was reduced to selling hot dogs at a stand on the Calumet River, and, as he died, Streeter cursed his old Chicago home. That curse has been used to explain 90-story falls, spider infestations, improbably broken double-pane safety windows, the overdose (who died in his apartment there), and the death of 12-year-old actress Heather O’ Rourke, whose final movie, “Poltergeist III,” was filmed in the building.
