Haunted Gary

By Ursula Bielski

“Highlights the most infamous and spine-tingling haunted places scattered throughout Northwest Indiana” (The Times of Northwest Indiana).
 
In 2014, the story of Gary’s “Demon House” shocked the world, drawing millions into the terrifying tale of a contemporary exorcism. For many residents, however, ghosts are just part of the community. From the haunting of the Jackson Five to the ghost ship Flying Cloud, local legends abound. Ghostly echoes may linger from a fiery 1918 train wreck that claimed the lives of eighty-six circus performers. A young murderess, said to have drowned her children in the Little Calumet River, reportedly haunts the Cline Avenue freeway. And the spirit of Alice Gray, the most famous of myriad recluses, is said to remain in Duneland. Meet these and other eternal inhabitants of “America’s Ghost Town” with author Ursula Bielski.
 
Includes photos!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781625850959

Ursula Bielski

Ursula Bielski is the founder of Chicago Hauntings, Inc. A historian, author, and parapsychology enthusiast, she has been writing and lecturing about Chicago's supernatural folklore and the paranormal for nearly 20 years, and is recognized as a leading authority on the Chicago region's ghostlore and cemetery history. She is the author of six popular and critically acclaimed books on the same subjects, which have sold in excess of 100,000 copies. Ursula has been featured in numerous television documentaries, including productions by the A&E Network, History Channel, Learning Channel, Travel Channel, and PBS.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

GHOST HUNTING IN THE FORMER MURDER CAPITAl OF AMERICA

It’s the crumbling capital of what they call the Region: the northwest part of the state of Indiana that skirts Lake Michigan to the north and borders Chicago to the west. They say that if you’re from Indiana and want to know whether you’re from the Region, ask yourself if there is corn around and whether you are within one mile of a person of African American or Mexican descent. If the answers are no and yes—in that order—then you are. But today, not even those dyed-in-the-wool residents of the Region quite know what to make of Gary, the name of which for years made most people think of the The Music Man and smooth-talking salesman Professor Harold Hill. Hill claimed to be from Gary at the time of its glorious inception. Gary was a model city, by all accounts, so when he declared Trouble in River City, Iowa (with a capital T, no less), folks felt he knew what he was talking about.

Ironically, it was Gary on which the trouble actually fell—and with a gusto reserved for only a particular brand of American city: the industrial, instant city that grew dangerously fast and whose people could not possibly foresee that the progression that had built it would eventually kill it. To say that Gary, Indiana, is haunted by the kinds of ghosts in this book seems not quite right. Gary is haunted all right, and it’s certainly been called both a ghost’s town and a ghost town—but the city is haunted first and foremost by the living.

A worldwide symbol of the triumph of industry for more than half a century, the so-called Magic City was in its glory days a model of the marriage of industry and community, a towering presence overlooking the waters of Lake Michigan along the stunning Indiana Duneland, a perfect place to work and live and raise a family. Today, Gary has become the poster child for what happens when technological advancement kills the need for human labor.

Even today, with the shards of Elbert Gary’s dream scattered across the Dunes, it is impossible to talk about Gary without talking about the steel mills. Gary was the steel mills, but it also is the steel mills. There is a misconception that the steel mills in Gary are gone; they are very much still here, though U.S. Steel has been largely usurped by Arcelor Mittel, which today claims output levels unheard of even in the glory days of U.S. Steel, before the technological revolution rendered the majority of its workers obsolete. Still, the condition of Gary then and the condition of it now are absolutely and totally reflective of the number of people who were and are employed by the mills.

Broadway, downtown Gary, 1937. Courtesy of the Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest.

Funeral procession of Elbert Gary, 1927. Author’s collection.

The city was founded in 1906 to produce steel. Period. Everyone who worked here or came to work here made steel. And every school, church and community organization founded here was founded around, by and for the community of steelworkers. Over the past forty years, the steel mills of Northwest Indiana—including today’s Arcelor Mittel giant, the largest steel producer on earth—have maintained the enormous output levels of the past, but the mills now use state-of-the-art production technology, meaning that about one-fifth of the previous employees are producing the same amount of steel as before. The city, too, is half the size it was in 1970, its population reduced from 170,000 then to 80,000 today. Neighboring Hammond, formerly a sleepy hamlet to the west, actually has a larger population today than the blown-out shell of the once-matchless city of Gary.

The administration of the city is constantly on the defense against attackers who ask, from all corners of the Earth, Why don’t they do something? Why don’t they clean it up? Why don’t they tear it down? The city has one blunt answer to all the accusations: taxes pay for a city to operate. If people don’t work, they don’t pay taxes, and without taxes, a city shuts down. Though the unemployment rate stands at about 9 percent, this number reflects only those actively looking for jobs. In Gary, there is a shocking percentage of people who have never even had a job, people who, because of the absolute lack of opportunity here, have been raised to not even try to find one. That is the level of economic reality that the outsider has to come into Gary being aware of.

What has it come to? In 1994, Gary gained a new title, eclipsing Steel City and Magic City, when it was declared the Murder Capital of America, with ninety-one murders per capita: three times the number in neighboring Chicago that year. Those numbers are down because the people have all but disappeared. But murder still takes most of the headlines in Gary—and sometimes around the world—like in 2014, when Darren Deon Vann was taken into custody for the serial killings of at least seven women over as long as two decades. There is even a New Hampshire–born writer who calls himself Gary Indiana and who specializes in creative fiction about—no surprise—serial killers.

About a quarter of the city’s buildings are abandoned and shuttered at best, in ruins at worst. City Methodist Church, the Palace Theater, St. Mary’s Mercy Hospital and even a Sheraton Hotel loom over the ruins of the Magic City due to lack of funds to tear them down. Citizens are asked to clean the parks, as the city has only enough money to pay to keep up six of more than fifty parks in the city. The mayor has apparently thought of asking citizens to sweep the streets themselves, as the city has no working street sweeper. Shelters and food banks are the busiest places in town. About a quarter of the city’s teachers have been laid off. The library has been closed for a year. There are few restaurants or stores and not one movie theater. In Gary, which still has a population of almost eighty thousand people, there is no Starbucks.

This is the setting for Haunted Gary, the book you are about to read. There is no shortage of housing for ghosts here and no shortage of reasons for them to gather. Besides the true haunting of the city by its long-gone pioneers of industry, Gary continues to be what it has always been, even before the decline and fall of the dream: a place that—like Chicago, inextricably joined to it—has forever drawn those searching to do great things and awful things, to find both incredible beauty and endless vice. Since ghosts are nothing if not the residue of the passions of both good and terrible persuasions, Gary is, of course, one enormous, sprawling haunted house. But the ghosts of Gary do not come out of the shadows easily.

Mayor Richard Hatcher with Muhammad Ali, circa 1977. Courtesy of the Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest.

Ruins of City Methodist Church, 2015. Photo by John B. Stephens.

Number 413 East Forty-third Street, where one of accused serial killer Darren Deon Vann’s victims was found in 2014. Photo by John B. Stephens.

The stories in this book are the few that have managed to survive in a place with little community to keep them alive. They are stories of abandoned hospitals and homes, treacherous highways, brothels and bank robbers, the violence of race and labor riots, drownings and shootings, deadly rail mishaps, the residue of gangland—both past and present—and always, always, accidents in the mills. They are also stories of Duneland, the hermits who left Gary and other civilizations for a life of solitude and beauty in the windswept heaven of one of the most beautiful places on earth; strange creatures sighted or imagined in the dense local forests and wide waters; ghost ships of this Great Lake; silent film stars; and even the pioneers of flight.

For all its ghosts, those who see beauty—including some passionate residents who refuse to abandon it—see it still in Gary, looking past the rubble (or perhaps into its very heart), living with its ghosts and, in some ways, as them.

CHAPTER 1

NERVES OF STEEL

GHOSTS OF THE GARY MILLS

How the City of the Century grew up where it did is its own particular story, a story quite similar to—and intertwined with—the development of neighboring Chicago, which also grew from swamps and sand dunes long deemed hostile to permanent human settlement.

By the 1800s, not even Native Americans had made their homes here on the southernmost Indiana shore. In the earliest days of the area’s recorded history, migrant tribes of Miami, Ottawa and Potawatomi made use of native plants and fauna during their transient periods in the area, but none thought of staying awhile. Farming was difficult, and no permanent villages were settled until the seventeenth century. Father Jacques Marquette, too, led a posse of traders and missionaries through the region along the Calumet River and reportedly camped at present-day Miller Beach, near the Gary park that bears