On a misty summer morning long ago, Chicago met the worst disaster in its tragic history. Each evening, the cries of its dead still echo along the bank of its dark, remembering river.

In Chicago, as everywhere in the U.S., Memorial Day weekend is a time of remembrance. But along with the dead of war, we here also tell, again, of the end of Flight 191—as do the ghosts it left behind.

Only one building remains standing on the old 1893 Fairgrounds in Chicago’s Jackson Park today: the former Palace of Fine Arts. It now houses the spectacular Museum of Science and Industry—and a whole bunch of ghosts.

The site of the Lady Elgin wreck lies today under sixty feet of water, several miles offshore from Highwood/Highland Park, along Chicago’s North Shore. For years after the tragedy, local children fished artifacts—including passenger and crew members’ clothing—from the waves and sands of the North Shore, employing them as often ghoulish playthings.

For generations, it’s been called one of the of the most haunted places on the face of the Earth. But the real history—and mystery—of the enigmatic Bachelors Grove is truly beyond belief.

As I researched it, I discovered that this little sledding hill I'd loved as a child growing up in the not-far-off Chicago neighborhood of Northcenter had somehow become a mecca for seekers of the spiritual across ages, races, ethnicities and cultures

While the Rouse Simmons—the famed “Christmas Tree Ship”—, the Lady Elgin and the Eastland have all found a welcome home in Chicago ghostlore, there’s another fascinating waterborne ghost story that I only discovered a handful of years ago: the story of the Chicora. Not only did the Chicago vanish, but one enterprising captain tried to find it using . . . unconventional (and supernatural) means.

Gary, Indiana, is connected to the South Side of Chicago not only by the snaking Calumet River, but by an industrial culture built by U.S. Steel and generation after generation of hardworking families. It is not surprising that this gritty town should have come to share some haunting folklore with its Illinois neighbors, just west over the Indiana border.

Like so many places in Chicago, you’d never know anything had ever happened at the unassuming vaduct. But the ghosts still tell the tale of labor’s deadly day.

In 1888, a band of Chicago boys, none of them older than ten, formed an impromptu “vampire-hunting gang” to find and destroy the Lake View Vampire. This strange Chicago ghost story is one like no other.

For nearly a century, drivers on Chicago’s famed Archer Avenue have reported wee hour encounters with the city’s delusive vanishing hitchhiker, the “deathly dancer” called Resurrection Mary. Ursula Bielski shares her forty years of research into the city’s most famous ghost.