“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.

Review: Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

Why didn’t I pick up this book sooner?  I’ve been writing papers about how (albeit fictional) ghost stories are inextricably connected to societal fears and anxieties for what seems like forever now … okay, to be honest, probably only a year. But still!

This read made my devilish little pseudo-skeptic’s heart happy. Dickey addresses how America deals with its numerous tragedies and white guilt by concocting stories of literal hauntings; he deals especially with the treatment of marginalized people in the U.S. As someone who is, put politely, obsessed with this topic, I didn’t think I would really learn anything from this book. I was so wrong! Among my favorite subjects were the gender politics behind the demonizing of Sarah Winchester and the disapproval of the female-dominated Spiritualist movement. If you’re into thanatology as well, Dickey also briefly acknowledges the history of our funerary traditions and our anxieties surrounding the dead body. Fitting, since I recently found out that he’s a member of The Order of the Good Death, a society founded by practicing mortician and death positivity advocate Caitlin Doughty. Its members are scholars, artists, writers, and morticians who work to revolutionize the death industry. Swoon.

His vast exploration of America’s ghost tales is well-organized and interestingly broadens from the domestic sphere to civic hauntings and even cursed cities. This impressed me, since explaining the ghost lore of an entire country is a particularly daunting project, and also helped me compartmentalize the reasons for the generation of stories in different locations. Dickey is clearly a fan of Shirley Jackson and makes multiple sly references to The Haunting of Hill House throughout his book, which I enjoyed as a friendly nod to other haunted-house enthusiasts. At times, certain references took the heaviness out of a text that addresses the horrors of American history.

There was an understandable bitterness in Ghostland, not only toward our exploitation of indigenous people and people of color, but toward the fact that this exploitation can sometimes continue through the way we structure our ghost stories, either omitting the reality of the tragedy because we see it as verboten, or making a buck off of embellishing the gory details of someone else’s suffering. However, at times, the tone came off as looking down on all ghost hunters and legend trippers. We’re not all vandals, and we don’t all believe that everything we see or hear is a ghost! In fact, some of us, like me (and I think like Dickey himself) tend toward disbelief, finding only one or two absolutely inexplicable cases in our lifetimes. I think this was truly what the author was going for, but that point got lost behind the horror of many thrill-seekers’ behavior. If the book was lacking in any area, I wished Dickey would have explored the possibility of people using some types of ghost stories as a positive cultural influence. I think this exists, and I believe legend tripping can have its benefits if done respectfully: it’s how some of us learn to cope with death and mystery, for one thing. And it’s how some of us (again, maybe like Dickey, but I’m mostly talking about myself) cut through the facade of the “this-great-country” speech and get down to the truth of history and the naked acknowledgement of our inner struggles. When it comes to discerning cultural truths, I find ghost lore as transparent as an apparition.

Although this is a history-driven book, it is peppered with some harrowing tales of spirits. It doesn’t matter that Dickey pretty much systematically lays out the legends and subsequently disproves them as mere tall tales– because, as he says, “the ghost is too important” to us. This is a must-read for any fan of horror or the supernatural. Despite their impossibility, these stories still chill.

Review: The Ghost Hunters

My segment on the podcast requires a lot of research this week, so I’m pushing the Campo Santo post back yet again. However, my goal for the rest of the summer is to read 100 pages a day, so I bring you yet another book review!

I do love me a good epistolary novel! At 522 pages, this one was still not too long, considering it spans from the late 1920’s to somewhere in the 50’s or 60’s. The pacing was decent, only dragging during a couple of moments throughout and never seeming rushed; a tough feat for stories of this nature. In his Author’s Note, Spring shows his knowledge of the “layered narrative” as”a well-worn technique in the ghost-story genre” (521). I think he executed it well for how difficult it is to mimic classic stories that use this modus operandi.

In fact, what I appreciate most about Ghost Hunters is how evident Spring makes his love for research, history, and deducing the reason for our need of the paranormal through his main character, Sarah Grey. He found this important enough to include the fact that he wrote his thesis on “the significance of paranormal events” in his author bio, which immediately made me warm to him. It’s clear he wants us to understand which bits of the story were taken from real historical events, photographic evidence, and personal correspondence/media and which were fabricated for the purpose of the story. The amount of detail he went into on the subjects of Harry Price and the Borley Rectory case is astounding, and it is worth reading the book for this alone.  I did find the writing a bit lacking in some areas (“I melted into his embrace” = not a thing) but marrying creative writing and historical research is hard, people, and I don’t think that should be overlooked.

Sarah Grey was a very interesting character; here, again, we have an unreliable female narrator that is pulled off pretty well by a male author. Though he clearly has his plate full with all the detail, tweaks he’s making to history, and several attempts at plot twists, he doesn’t neglect Sarah’s substance for the rest. I was very frustrated with Sarah for not taking charge of her situation, but I soon came to realize that feeling that way would be totally hypocritical. At one time or another, pretty much all of us have been sucked in by someone who is charming, manipulative, and a total narcissistic liar. So, I remain firm in the opinion that Sarah’s character isn’t a reason to give the story a lesser rating. If you want perfect women, read a Harlequin romance!

While we’re on the subject of gender, I thought that this story was another prime example of frustration over gender roles. We have the staunch, reasonable, masculine “scientist” who wants to prove that ghosts aren’t real, and we have a bunch of females (and one male) with some real power as mediums, or at least with some good common sense intuition. We also have some fake female mediums, and these types believe that a seance should be extra flashy.  On one of the spectrum: hyper-masculinity. On the other: hyper-femininity. Feeling like we have to strictly adhere to either one of these extremes when experiencing, interpreting, and influencing the world around us, can lead to ruin. But somewhere in the middle, where we’re able to balance both, lies the sweet spot. I think this story, in its way, highly advocates gender fluidity and shows both the merits and downfalls of what we label as “masculine” and “feminine” behavior. It kind of tells us how important it is for us as humans not to stay solely in one fabricated category, but to be able to travel between the two; and this, in turn, takes away our capacity for prejudice in certain areas. Both the prejudice that ghosts absolutely can’t be real, and the assumption that every scratching noise is a malevolent entity.

For me, the interactions between the characters and trying to interpret the reason for their motives was far more entertaining than trying to predict the plot twists, which, to me, didn’t seem all that revelatory. This is a pretty formulaic ghost story; it’s an age-old tradition and there’s nothing wrong with that, but the consequence for me as a reader was that I had things figured out halfway through the book– which not only made Sarah Grey seem a little nearsighted but also kind of made me wonder what the author thought of his readers’ deduction skills. This is mostly my reason for giving three and a half stars.

As far as the scare-factor goes: nothing was too frightening, but the apparition of the nun did start to creep up on me. Especially post-Conjuring 2. She was reminiscent of one of my favorite ghost stories, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black. Overall, if you haven’t experienced something like this and you’re into haunted house narratives, I’d recommend giving this one a go.

Price, Harry. The End of Borley Rectory. Harrap & Co., Ltd., 1946. http://www.harrypricewebsite.co.uk/Borley/ModernBorley/modernphotographs.htm.

Is that the, uh,  the full-body apparition of a nun in the window? Okay. It’s cool. It’s fine. We’re all fine here. Let’s just move on.

Of course, Borley Rectory is a real place. Or was. You can’t visit it today; it was gutted by fire in 1939 and they tore it down in 1944. This is probably just as well, since in 2000, Louis Mayerling, a frequent visitor to the house until its destruction, published a very aptly-titled book by the name of We Faked the Ghosts of Borley Rectory, exposing the hauntings as a hoax perpetrated and perpetuated by several families over time. However, in keeping with the theme of The Ghost Hunters, Mayerling did experience an event during a seance at the Rectory that he could not explain. So who knows?

As for Harry Price, he too was a real person. I’ll leave out any speculations about his personality and earnestness, partly because that could be a post on its own, and partly because I want you to experience the trust, doubt, anger, and scepticism I did while reading the book without your opinions being colored by any real-life documentation of his character. Spring clears up the line between fact and fiction a bit in his Authors Notes, but in the end, his guess about who Harry Price really was is probably as good as ours. And that is one of the greatest strengths of this novel: its ability to make you believe, doubt, and question in a single breath.