“What You Got Here, It Ain’t For Me”: The Haunting of the Congress Plaza Hotel, Part I

“Here in the Overlook things just went on and on. Here in the Overlook all times were one.”
– The Shining (Stephen King)

Then, the doors opened, and a river of blood came cascading out …

Dear Readers,

What I’m about to relate to you could very well get me sued if rumors of the notoriously-haunted Congress Hotel in Chicago didn’t already abound on the web. In the words of the male half of a young couple staying on the 12th floor who, unfortunately, retreated to his iPhone after running into our ragtag band of paranormal investigators at about 10:45 that evening: “Thanks, man. I just read all that stuff on the Internet.”

It is also well-known, to anyone who goes poking around for ghosts in the pm, that the Congress’s management does not particularly appreciate it when people perpetuate the rich body of lore surrounding the hotel (read: “when people claim that it’s haunted as all get-out”). It’s not that investigators are disruptive; you have to be quiet when you’re attempting to communicate with the spirit world. It’s more that they simply think it’s bad for business, and they seem to view legend trippers as juvenile nuisances.

My opinion on this brand of dismissal should by now be clear to you. If done respectfully, I think legend tripping is a vital part of our culture that helps us deal with the trauma of our collective pasts, not a phase for adolescents who fancy themselves “edgy”. It’s not that we don’t read news articles about grave vandalism in spades; it’s that I believe equating all legend trippers with these types of motives (boredom, the need to enact/experience salaciousness) is reductive and misses a vital, not to mention interesting as hell, part of our social psychology.

However, it would be remiss to say the entire staff of the Congress shares these views. Our paranormal investigators, whose names I will respectfully omit from this post, have made the acquaintance of a security guard who has worked at the hotel for over 35 years (for those who are as bad at math as I am, that’s since 1983, three years after Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining hit theaters). Although I’m pretty sure the security guard doesn’t give a flying banshee in hell what management thinks about his opinions, I’ll also use the pseudonym “Jack” when speaking about him and will blur his face out of any photos in which he appears. Jack has been in this establishment for a long time, and he’s called to almost every incident where a guest believes they’re in serious danger, so he has just a few stories to tell.

But Jack was not with us the whole time. We began on the 12th floor, working our way down; Jack would meet us after a complaint was called to the front desk about us on the 6th floor.

Floor 12 (actually floor 13) boasts one of the most heartbreaking tragedies the Congress has ever seen. These are the types of ghost stories that can easily seem exploitative to me, as I consider myself a healthy skeptic. But it’s hard not to understand the terror of this tale because it’s undeniably a real one with newspaper articles to back it up. What frightens you here depends on how you define the concept of a ghost. Is it a literal manifestation of a dead person, or is it the lingering trauma of several individuals, or of a whole city?

On August 5th, 1939, Czech immigrant Adele Langer took her two children– Jan, 4 and a half, who is misidentified as female in many accounts, and Karel, 6, who seemed to go by his middle name, Tommy– to the zoo. She then returned to her room on the thirteenth floor of the Congress Hotel, opened the window, and, depending on the account you believe, either leapt to her death with a child under each arm or threw the children out first and jumped after them. If this isn’t real enough for you, here’s a photo of the children’s shoes:

Picture Sources: Newspapers.com

Adele was either terrified of Nazi persecution, distraught that she was separated from her husband, or both. She cracked under the immense pressure that immigrants to America and other countries face to this day. And that’s why accounts of Tommy Langer’s ghost roaming the halls of the Congress are among the most poignant and terrifying of the hotel’s paranormal stories.

Jack himself claims that he once saw Tommy’s apparition: he came up to the 12th floor to check something and saw a little boy walking down the hall. He could tell from a first glance that the boy was wearing breeches (knickerbockers, to be exact, a detail that you’ll be surprised to find is historically accurate. Jack’s been around for a while, but not for that long). When the boy turned around, Jack noticed he had dark circles under his eyes and his face was drained of blood. After the boy dissolved in front of his face, he had a hard time “working up the courage to go up there” for a few months.

Here’s the moment where we have to pause and consider the possibility that Jack is an older guy who enjoys a good story, and one of the highlights of his long night shifts is yanking the legs off a few millennials. I get that, and I debated it for a good hour and a half while we were with him that night. I have no empirical evidence for this claim … but I somehow did not get that impression. As you’ll see in the upcoming second part of this post, there was plenty I saw that was rationally explainable to me. But as we go on, you can perhaps see for yourself that John’s stories are too generic– and somehow, still too specific– to ring as a bored employee’s prank on gawking tourists.

I have gone, as I suspected I might, into too much detail of the story surrounding the Langers.  I promise you a second post on the Congress tomorrow, with far more photos and maybe even a book review.

-N.