5 Real Terror Haunts of Chicago

Maybe the most famous of Prohibition killings. Here is where Al Capone's Italian gang was believed to ambush seven men affiliated with rival Bugs Moran German and Irish gang. Early on a Thursday, five known Moran gang members, a mechanic and a follower of the Moran gang were lined up against a brick wall in the garage of SMC Cartage and mowed down with Tommy guns.

It was believed that the killers were dressed as cops, and that the mobsters thought it would be just another booze bust for the press and public, according to the Prairie Ghost. In those days, many of the cops were on the make, as were the politicians in Chicago. (Not much has changed in this respect -- with the politicians, anyway).

Capone wanted to consolidate control over the bootlegging racket, and Moran was his biggest competitor. SMC Cartage was located in what is now an upscale neighborhood in Chicago, Lincoln Park. Over the years, there have been reports of rapid gun fire (Thompson Sub Machine Gun) and screams and groans. There was one survivor of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, "Highball", the German Shepard pet of one of the slain mobsters, John May. The location of the slaughter in now a landscaped parking lot for a nursing home.

As a child, I remember driving past the old SMC Cartage and wondering if I would hear the ghostly sounds of the old Prohibition mobsters -- or even the whining and yelps of Highball, which residents of the nursing home claim to hear from time to time.

Visit the location at 2122 N. Clark Street, Chicago.

2. Camp Douglas

Few know that Chicago's south side is the site of the largest mass grave in the Western Hemisphere. Camp Douglas, at 31 and Cottage Grove, was first a Union training camp during America's Civil War, but then became a dismal prison for captured Confederate soldiers from the Rebel Southern States.

It is difficult to get an accurate count on the number of Confederate soldiers who died of disease, mistreatment and literally freezing to death at Camp Douglas, because the camp records were deliberately destroyed after the war, according to 80 Acres of Hell, an A&E documentary. Most estimates hold that up to 6000 Confederate Soldiers died. Another 1500 were "missing" and "unaccounted" for.

It's a safe bet they did not escape.

A vicious Union Colonel with the unlikely name of B.J. Sweet oversaw the treatment of the captured Confederate soldiers. He cut rations to virtually nothing, tortured prisoners for information by hanging them from their thumbs (one of many means), and made them sit naked in the snow.

Eventually Camp Douglas was decommissioned and the buildings were demolished and the land cleared. Today, the former camp grounds at 31 & Cottage Grove are mostly condos and residences.

Until recently, there was an African American-owned funeral home occupying part of the site. Though it has recently closed, it used to keep a Confederate flag at half staff outside the building.

A little further south, in Oak Woods Cemetery, is Confederate Mound, a mass grave that contains the remains of the lost Confederate soldiers.

Any visitor to the site of Camp Douglas who knows what happened there 140 years ago, can't help but hear the helpless cries and screams of soldiers that left their homes far away never to return.

3. Eastland Sinking:

On, July 24, 1915, The Eastland passenger ship was docked at a wharf on the Chicago River and was taking on board some 2500 workers and families from the Western Electric Plant for an employee picnic and cruise to Michigan City, Indiana.

Suddenly the ship rolled to the starboard and then to the port, and then suddenly rolled on its side, trapping and killing 844 souls in its hull. Some 22 entire families were wiped out, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Though often compared with the Titanic sinking in 1912, this was much different, and, for many years lost to history, except for those who passed the tragic spot along the Chicago River and claimed to hear the screams of the doomed passengers and the weeping of the survivors.

Many of those who died that day were young. They were single and married and had just started out in life. Many were recent immigrants from Poland, German, Bohemia and Lithuanian.

The Eastland Memorial Society commemorates the sinking of the ship each year now since 2000.

Until September 11, 2001, the Eastland's sinking represented the greatest loss of life in a single disaster in the United States, according to the Eastland Memorial Society.

The site of the Eastland's sinking is between Clark and LaSalle Streets, on Wacker Drive at the Chicago River.

4. The Green Hornet Street Car Disaster:

My father was a rescue witness to this tragedy. He often talked about it, especially if we were driving on the south side and passed by the fatal site.

An emergency call came out to all the wreckers (tow trucks) on the south side. He arrived in his tow truck but there was little to be done. A burning hulk of a street car sat in Chicago's State Street.

On the evening of May 25, 1950, 33 people were burned and crushed to death in a new type of Chicago streetcar, called the Green Hornet Number 7078. Recently delivered and put into service with the Chicago Transit Authority, these cars were of the latest design, colored green and cream, and replaced the rickety and decrepit wooden cars that previously covered the streetcar tracks that at one time snaked all round Chicago.

Oddly, it was water that caused the 33 people to claw and fight and finally expire at the back doors of the charred streetcar.

A heavy rain had fallen, and the viaduct at 63rd and State Street was flooded. Green Hornet Number 7078 rushed toward this impassible water, unaware of its fate. The previous street car had been turned away from the viaduct and had been rerouted north on a cross track that went east. The Green Hornet's electrical motor, which received its power from electric cables above, sat low to the ground, and to enter the water in the flooded viaduct would have meant a certain stall.

Somehow, the switch on the cross track had been left open, so Green Hornet 7078 crossed east and then collided with a gasoline track that had just eased its way through the water in the northbound lanes of the viaduct.

The new and improved Green Hornet streetcars, built by the St. Louis Car Company and had special "blinker doors" in the rear through which passengers entered. The doors were called "blinker doors", because the retracted to the sides of the cars, much like an eyelid blinking. The windows were high and could be cranked open like a car window, with a handle, but they would only open far enough for a very slender person to possibly escape.

Green Hornet 7078 became a fiery tomb for those who entered through the spacious back doors of the streetcar, paid the conductor, and then never exited though the narrower doors further up the car or in the front.

The last streetcar to run in Chicago was on June 21, 1958, but the Green Hornet cars and its 600 sisters were restructured and rebuilt and ran until the 1990's on Chicago's Rapid Transit Lines. Even parts from Green Hornet 7078 were scrapped and used on other cars.

On very rainy days the same viaduct at 63rd and State Street still floods, but the streetcar tracks have disappeared into part of the tragic history of wrong turns and awful mistakes.

The Source for this is The Green Hornet Streetcar Disaster.

5. Holmes Death Castle:

With Chicago's sights set on the Summer Olympics for 2016, it's likely the city wants to forget about a horrific killer who capitalized on the World's Columbian Expedition of 1893. While the city worked to construct a marvel of buildings and parks to celebrate America's coming of age, Herman Webster Mudgett was busy at the same time building a hotel across the street from the drug store that he owned, according to Prairie Ghost.

Known better as H.H. Holmes, he is generally recognized at America's first serial killer.

His hotel -- known as the "Holmes Castle" extended for an entire block, and was built by a series of builders who were fired after a few weeks, so only "Dr. Holmes", as he called himself, knew the entire layout of this dungeon and the torture rooms within. One hundred windowless rooms upstairs made up the maze of odd shaped rooms with hallways to nowhere. Here is where Holmes confessed to killing 27 victims, most young women, who suffered torturous deaths while blocks away the world celebrated the accomplishments of the brand new Industrial Age.

Today, the castle is long gone. Recent books have publicized the twisted mind of America's first serial killer. The intersection of 63rd and Wallace is in a fairly rough neighborhood of Chicago now, but even the dangerous streets of today pale in response to the dark deeds done so long ago while the world looked to its brighter future.

Sources:

1. Prairie Ghost

2. Eastland Memorial Society

3. Chicago Tribune

4. The Green Hornet Streetcar Disaster

5. Wikipedia

6.Illinois Civil War Organization