Haunted Gary Read online

  Published by Haunted America

  A Division of The History Press

  Charleston, SC 29403

  www.historypress.net

  Copyright © 2015 by Ursula Bielski

  All rights reserved

  First published 2015

  e-book edition 2015

  ISBN 978.1.62619.561.5

  Library of Congress control number: 2015946492

  print edition ISBN 978.1.62585.095.9

  Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For all the Gary faithful, who “bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king.”

  —Mark Van Doren

  I walked down towards the end of the road

  And in the fog a woman appeared.

  She said, “Don’t you worry my friend, I’ll take care—

  Take my hand, I’ll take you there.

  O, Take me to a place without no name…”

  —Michael Jackson

  “A Place with No Name”

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction. Ghost Hunting in the Former “Murder Capital of America”

  1. Nerves of Steel: Ghosts of the Gary Mills

  2. St. Mary’s Mercy Hospital

  3. Ghosts of the Great Circus Train Wreck

  4. The Haunting of Duneland

  5. A Shot in the Dark: Looking for the Lady in Red of Black Oak

  6. On the Way Home: Ghosts of Reeder Road

  7. The House of 200 Demons

  8. The Lost Boy of Small Farms

  9. A Girl in the Road: The Ghosts of Cline Avenue

  10. Never Can Say Goodbye: The Haunting of the Jacksons

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  People often say, “I couldn’t have done it without you” with flippancy, meaning that someone was helpful in some small or big way. But when I say that there are two people I could not have done this without, I mean it absolutely literally.

  For those who don’t live or work there, going into Gary, Indiana, for any reason is not something that is generally done. As a researcher, I have spent much time researching, lecturing and hosting tours in the very worst neighborhoods of Chicago—some of the deadliest in the world—including Englewood, an enclave that was once home to serial killer H.H. Holmes and today has one of the highest murder rates of any area on earth. But Gary is a different story. Gary is Gary, Indiana, and even Chicagoans—with very rare exception—simply do not go there.

  As soon as I announced this project, however, two people who have been my dear colleagues for years sent me instant messages saying, “We will help you with whatever you need.” Len Miller and J.C. Rositas are both lifelong residents of Northwest Indiana, and Miller is a Gary cop. To say that I felt angels had been dispatched to help me tell Gary’s ghost stories would not be exaggerating.

  And so they generously—so generously—escorted me to some of the most harrowing places in the city, from the frigid ruins of St. Mary’s Mercy Hospital to the lawn of the “House of 200 Demons,” the story of which rocked even the mainstream media in 2014. They are so smart, so sweet and so kind, and I was thrilled that they were always accompanied by Len’s delightful and equally smart daughter, Tori—a dyed-in-the-wool historian and investigator like her dad. I cannot thank the three of them enough, not only for being my guides but also for being truly wonderful and loyal friends.

  In the city of Gary, too, I must wholeheartedly thank former Gary chief of police Wade Ingram for allowing us to investigate St. Mary’s Mercy Hospital, and Brandon Crofton, another wonderful officer who helped so much by looking out for us and sharing his own experiences during our investigation of the Small Farms area. I am deeply thankful to Stephen McShane of the Calumet Regional Archives for helping me find the photos I needed and for being so accommodating to my schedule. Many thanks, too, to John B. Stephens, for the beautiful contemporary photos he captured for this book. John has one of the most appreciative eyes for things many don’t find beautiful, and I think you will agree that his photographs capture the true magic that still lives even in the rubble of the Magic City. He and his partner in paranormal investigation—David Scott—have been great supporters of my work, and I am grateful to be their associates and friends.

  My good friend Bill Swinford is someone I met delving into the history of Chicago ghost stories, and he turned out to have a deep love for the Region as well. His frequent messages to me, full of fascinating facts and tales of Gary, steered me toward stories I may have missed if not for his help, and I continue to be so grateful for the friendship of this tremendous local historian.

  I was thrilled that my closest friend, Clarence Goodman, offered to read this book as I wrote it, and I cannot thank him enough for his very helpful criticism and ridiculously kind accolades. I’m grateful for the support of another superb historian, Chicagophile and writer, Laura Mazzuca Toops, who was to be a partner on this project before our busy schedules sabotaged the plan.

  Of course, I must thank my wonderful daughters, as always, for being so patient with me as I wrote this book and for being a big part of my own personal connection to the Indiana Dunes. I cherish the hours we spend traveling through the Dunes together, and I hope you will always remember them—and discover the equal but different beauty of Gary with me someday.

  To my friends Wanda and Michael Spudic, Marcia Soyster and Barb Spitler, who made a home for me in Northwest Indiana and introduced me to so many people and places I love so much—you are my lifelong pals, even though the stretches between our times together have grown too long. I hope that, in this book, you see reflected the love for the Region’s history and ghostlore that all of you ignited in me.

  Finally and overwhelmingly, I thank God for letting me help people tell their stories—and believe in ghosts.

  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.

&nbs
p; 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 his name. It wasn’t until 1822 that the first white settler, Joseph Bailly, made a home in the Dunes, and even he had little company until the century turned and brought settlers with big plans—but not for farming.

  Beginning in the late 1880s, countless tons of sand were removed from the Dunes and shipped to Chicago for building and industrial use as the post-fire city built with a fervor never before seen in human history. Forests, marshes and sand dunes were leveled to support the burgeoning “City of Big Shoulders,” leading many other seers to imagine similar cityscapes in many other parts of the world—including the adjacent terrain.

  Elbert H. Gary was a judge in these bustling days of development, and when he became chairman of U.S. Steel, he was determined to secure for his corporation a piece of the industrializing American world. Having watched the center of national industry moving from the East Coast to the Midwest, Gary chose what he saw as a prime location for his company to put down roots: a site close to the business hub of Chicago, the rail center of the
country and set on the shore of Lake Michigan, perhaps the most important port along the Gulf-Atlantic trade route.

  Elbert Gary’s plans spawned the creation of the Gary Land Company and the Indiana Steel Company, to build housing and the mill itself, respectively. The resulting complex held twelve blast furnaces, forty-seven steel furnaces and a reimagined harbor to hold the largest steam vessels of the day. Would-be workers from every corner of Europe poured in, along with migrant workers from all around the United States, creating an instant city that grew to sixteen thousand inhabitants in scarcely three years’ time. In 1909, when Gary was officially incorporated, it was one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation but still an infant. In the next ten years, the city would more than triple in population, claiming fifty-five thousand residents by 1920. It was also something of a black sheep amid the great labor upheavals of the time.

  From the beginning, Elbert Gary attempted to avoid labor uprisings and strikes by fostering close employee relations with the extremely varied ethnic populations that manned his empire. The Great Depression changed the good times in Gary, as elsewhere, however, and U.S Steel laid off workers in unprecedented numbers. The future brought unionization, with U.S. Steel recognizing the Steelworkers Organizing Committee as its workers’ representative. World War II was a financial godsend, when steel production skyrocketed, and Gary workers and bosses mourned the dead but counted their currency.

  Blast Furnace, Gary mill, 1930s. Courtesy of the Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest.

  Until the strikes came. The nationwide strike of 1919 was hardly the last. After the war, the first two of three strikes from 1946 to 1959 slowly wore away at the foundations of the “Men of Steel.” The final strike, lasting more than one hundred days, allowed foreign steel companies to get a foothold in Gary and elsewhere in the States. Later, as technology gained ground and made inroads in the industry, human labor began to measure as obsolete. From the 1980s onward, the human workforce in Northwest Indiana has shrunk to about 25 percent of its most flourishing state, though the same amount of steel continues to be produced.