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

“Sometimes places create inhuman monsters.”
–The Shining (Stephen King)

This is the balcony of the Gold Ballroom. If you want to have your wedding reception here, it’s a cool $30,000. Our group had to be let in by a security guard, who has had objects thrown at him and has heard his name called in his ear when doing rounds. The room is vast, the carpet is ugly, and the whole deal gives you the vibe that the room is actually sentient. If only one place in the Congress is actually haunted, I would bet money that the Gold Room is it. Just entering it makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

A recent episode of Empire  filmed here. As one of the actresses sat at these tables during a scene, her body language became tense. After the scene cut, she left the ballroom abruptly and refused to return. When asked what it was that startled her, she said that someone had begun violently tugging on her hair. Allegedly, she is still on the show, but her contract now specifies that she will not re-enter the Gold Room under any circumstances.

A similar story surrounding celebrities revolves around the Congress as a whole. In the early 90’s, the slasher Candyman was being filmed in the Chicago area. One of the top-billed cast, perhaps Tony Todd, was supposed to stay at the Congress during shooting. According to our security guard, the actor spent no more than ten minutes in his room before fleeing back downstairs with his bags. The security guard asked him why he no longer wished to stay there, offering to move him rooms (publicity was understandably important). Visibly frightened, the actor leaned in and told our guide, “What you got here … it ain’t for me.” He would never return to the hotel.

Another of the fascinating rooms we were able to view was this nondescript upstairs banquet hall where Al Capone used to play cards. Capone had a well-known fear of being shot from behind, so his favorite seat in this room was up against the wall, which he knew had three inches of concrete behind it. The door to this room is very oddly placed; when you enter, your tendency is to turn to the left to face the majority of the rectangular space. If you were entering with the intent of doing harm to Capone, you would likely have your back turned to him, at which point it would probably be too late for you. That is, if you made it that far. The room also has several large windows with a balcony where Capone’s men would look out on the street to warn him of approacing danger.

I believe the ghost stories surrounding Capone the least. The Windy City already has a sizeable claim to the gangster, but he died in Miami Beach from refusing to take his syphillis medication. Is it logical that Capone would return to– well, haunt– his favorite haunts? Maybe.  Although I highly doubt it, this was a unique piece of history without the ghost lore.

So, too, was the nearby Florentine room, where Capone had his parties. I confess that it was around one in the morning by the time we reached our last stop and I was more interested in starting the three-hour drive home than I was in a piano that allegedly plays by itself. At this point I had been awake for almost 20 hours, so if I’d heard the laughter of any drunk flappers, I might have had to put it down to sleep deprivation.

Did I see or hear any ghosts at the Congress hotel? No. Did I see lights go off by themselves and experience some heightened alertness in rooms that contain a lot of history? Yes. I remain firm in my assertion that things have a logical explanation most of the time. But what we can’t explain is how drastically we are affected by the stories of those who have come before us. I think that’s what I’m into the ghost hunt for.

Perhaps the last thing you’re wondering is if I’ll stay at the Congress next time I’m in Chicago. The answer is HELL NO.

-N

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

“Room service? Send up a larger room.”
– Groucho Marx

(Part I here)

This is a typical upper-floor hallway at the Congress Hotel. If you even glance at it, you’ll notice two things: one, it contrasts drastically with the elegance of the lobby, and two, the twins from The Shining are missing. It’s easy to see solely from this picture how people have gotten it in their heads that this place is haunted. It’s a truly labrynthine building, constructed in a rigid U shape so that windows that hug the inside of the structure’s legs look out onto the windows of its parallell rooms. The Congress is a living cliche, Stephen King and Hitchcock and every other master of horror rolled into one.

Some of its scariest features arise from mere suggestion. Several rooms have been permanently “retired,” their key-card locks replaced with doorknobs and reinforced with deadbolts. The staff, although disgruntled with the hotel’s lore, remains reticent about the reasons for putting such rooms out of commission. If you ask any higher-up or employee who’s been there for a while for an answer, they clam up and smile. Not surprisingly, this method of fielding visitor questions only exacerbates the creation of ghost stories. Paranormal guides will tell you that the rooms are no longer in use because they’re so haunted there was nothing left to do but lock them up. We, however, got the sneaking suspicion that the poor old Congress is starting to disintegrate, and some rooms are so hazardous and deteriorated that management just decided it would be cheaper to put an extra lock on them and call it a day.

This, however, doesn’t account for the case of Room … yeah, you guessed it, 666. If you’re walking down the sixth floor corridor, you will pass 664, a large, blank wall, and then 668. It’s not that there is no Room 666; legend has it, it’s still there … under the wallpaper. If you run your hand along the wall, you can clearly feel one side of the door frame, then the other. The door lintel is still there, too, centered between the two bumps that mark the molding around the door frame. The security guard told us that the window washers are the only ones that can see in these days, and that the furniture is still there, right where they left it in the 70’s or 80’s. The real answer is probably more underwhelming. It’s likely that Room 664 is a large office. Hotel management does seem to go in and out of it. In keeping with my previous theory that some of the rooms have been closed off rather than renovated, I think poor 666 just got a lazy wallpaper job.

Due to staff’s laissez faire attitude, several rooms that should be locked are often wide open. Those include this rather creepy boiler room (?), complete with a rickety wooden staircase that goes up to the hotel’s roof. Our guides told us that an angry male spirit resides here. Of late, he’s been cussing at one of the female investigators. While the guides tried to contact him using this Raggedy Ann doll with an EMF reader inside it, I was encouraged to go up the staircase.

At first, I was hesitant to go, but then realized that I was probably in as much danger of an angry man harassing me in public as I would be if I climbed the haunted stairs. I did not find any male ghosts up there. However, the brickwork at the top showed obvious signs of fire damage. Why? I don’t know. There are a lot of things that the Congress isn’t telling.

As the rest of the group turned to leave, I realized that I didn’t want to be the last one down the stairs. I voiced this aloud. One of the guides said, “That’s funny. That’s exactly what our female investigator said.”

So, you’ve probably gathered by now that I’m not sure most of the stories surrounding the Congress are true. Room 441, however, is a bit of an enigma for me. There is no particular incident, such as a suicide or murder, attached to this room. But over the years, stories of a nameless female entity have made 441 the hotel’s most infamous room.

The story itself is simple: if you stay in 441, chances are you will be awoken in the middle of the night by a woman approaching the foot of your bed from the direction of the bathroom. She will then violently begin to shake the mattress. Sometimes she will whisper in your ear. Hotel staff receives calls from upset guests in 441 so frequently that they’ve come to accept it as routine. Jack, the security guard, said that he had “a couple of Navy guys” who were staying in 441 “come running down the hallway in their skivvies” at 3 am, demanding a cab and that their belongings be sent to them at another hotel. Once, he found a woman so frightened that she was curled up crying in the room’s small closet. A man angrily reported to the front desk that someone had come into his room in the middle of the night and stolen his shoes. He had not left 441 all night and claimed he had taken them off and set them by the end of the bed, just as he did every evening at home. They were found on the sixth floor.

Whether Jack was lying or telling us the truth, it’s a shame he hasn’t written a book. As I mentioned in the previous post, some of the details are so silly, so specific, and so cliche all at once that one wonders how these stories could have possibly been fabricated. Why the story about the shoes? It doesn’t really fit with the more popular tales about the shadow woman, and it’s one of the less interesting anecdotes Jack had to share with us. Moreover, since the faces behind the hotel don’t encourage the spreading of these stories, why does every staff member you ask have an immediate response about someone  asking them personally to be moved from this room? It’s almost as if they’re warning guests in advance because they’re truly shaken and don’t want to end up dealing with it themselves later. You can read a ton of people’s personal experiences with Room 441 through a simple Google search, but one of the most notable and objective of these comes from Demented Mitten Tours’ blog. This person stayed in 441 while traveling through Chicago (they’re in Michigan, so if you’re in town and want to explore the darker side of that state, sign up for one of their many tours) and had about as much of a mixed experience with the Congress as I did.

Outside of 441, we asked this entity yes or no questions using flashlights that were placed just between their on and off settings. What? Oh, you’ve seen Buzzfeed Unsolved and you know that this trick is easily explainable because science? Well, I’m not going to sit here and deny facts, so cool your jets. I’m not the President of the United States.

What I did find interesting, though, is the timing with which the lights switched on and off outside of 441. We asked the entity several questions with nary a response. Sometimes long silences occurred as we waited for something to happen. Here are some examples of our inquiries to the spirit:

“Are you lonely?”

“Did something happen to you here?”

“Are you vengeful and angry?”

“Do you shake the bed because you’re trying to send a message?”

On and on and on. Until one of the investigators asked this question:

“Do you like scaring people?”

The flashlight did not flicker or gradually come to life, but turned on as if someone had suddenly flipped the switch. And stayed on. An excited murmur traveled through us. There was a moment of silence while we considered what to ask next. Then came:

“Do you want people to get out of your room and leave you alone?”

Flashlight off.

I know it has something to do with the reflector heating up and cooling off, but you can’t buy that careful timing. Is this a lesson in how easy it is to assign meaning to coincidence? Or is it more? I’m a staunchly reasonable person, but like many of us, I find myself unable to let go of the hope that there is something more for us to discover than science can understand.

In the final part of this series, we’ll explore some of the Congress’s private ballrooms, where spirits reportedly disrupt $30K weddings and send actors and actresses running.

I have tiptoed into the 21st century and signed up for a @macabrelibraria, but you can pry my CD’s from my cold, dead hands.

-N.

“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.