844 SOULS: Ghosts of the Eastland Disaster
At 7:30 a.m. on Saturday morning, July 24, 1915, more than 2,500 passengers had boarded the Eastland steamer, docked between Chicago’s Clark and LaSalle Street Bridges. The ship was bound for Michigan City, Indiana, where a picnic was to be held for Western Electric employees and their families. Five vessels had been chartered to take the excursion parties on the journey across the lake. The Eastland was the first of these to fill with cheering passengers eager to partake of one of the largest lake excursion parties ever assembled in Chicago. Just after the gangplank had been pulled in, the mooring lines loosed, and the anchor posts pulled, there followed one of the most horrific of all the city's disasters and the worst of all Great Lakes maritime tragedies.
Though there would be much speculation regarding circumstances of the event, the following account was eventually established as true. As the Eastland prepared to make its way towards the lake, a passing ship caused a sudden interest on one side of the ship's deck, creating a massive rush of bodies toward the diversion. Because the crew had emptied the ballast compartments to allow for more passengers, the result was a sudden and significant imbalance of weight. As the festive crowd waved from the Eastland's deck, the ship simply toppled over. The Chicago Daily News surveyed the scene:
The river seemed covered with struggling forms. Life preservers were thrown from other boats, lines from shore, boxes and everything movable that would float by frantic spectators on shore, but dozens of those in the water disappeared under the waves or were dragged down by others.[i]
Yet, the true horror of the moment was at first unseen. The weather had turned foreboding and many hundreds of passengers had already settled inside for the trip across the lake. When the Eastland capsized, they were thrown together into a nearly solid mass which was immediately covered by the inrushing waters of the Chicago River. A few of these struggled to escape their ghastly prison, fighting to reach the upturned side of the vessel. Chicago firefighters and workers from the Commonwealth Edison Company rushed to the scene to chop away the woodworking above the waterline and to bum escape holes through the steel plates of the hull. Initially, bodies were pulled out and resuscitated. All too soon, however, no more lifesaving was possible. The corpses of the drowned were wrapped in sheets and carried to the Roosevelt, another of the excursion vessels docked across the street, to await identification.
By five o'clock that afternoon, nearly 500 bodies were laid out on the floor of the 2nd Regiment Armory at 1054 W. Washington Boulevard. Less than an hour later, a diver who had been recovering bodies since mid-morning went out of his mind and had to be subdued by four policemen. City workers were dragging the river as far south as West Adams Street, having stretched a net across the waterway at West 12th Street to stop the drift of bodies.
At the end of the count, more than 800 passengers had been pronounced dead, among them 22 whole families.
The Chicago Daily News listed the "Dead, Injured and Missing” in its afternoon edition, offering what identification could be given to panicked friends and family dreading news of the worst. Too often, the descriptions of the deceased were maddeningly meager, such as “GIRL, blue dress" or "MAN, dark suit and white shirt." Others, however, were appallingly familiar, as one which read "WOMAN, about 21 years old; wore three rings, and another marked 'From D.L. to M.F.,' and a locket marked M.F."
The wreckage was eventually cleared, the legalities relatively settled, the living as comforted as they could be by their families, friends, and even the strangers who pitied their losses. But for years thereafter, passers-by on the Clark Street Bridge reported hearing cries of horror emanating from the river and its banks. Many assumed these screams to be those of the vanquished passengers of the ill-fated Eastland or of the hundreds of helpless bystanders who watched them perish. Even today, such reports continue.
In the 1980s, Oprah Winfrey established Harpo Studios in the old 2nd Regiment Armory, which had served as a temporary morgue for the Eastland's victims. According to the experiences of employees, and of Winfrey herself, that grim moment in Chicago history seems to have imbedded itself in the very heart of the building. Winfrey and her staff apparently reported unusual occurrences and sensations during their time there, which some have attributed to the victims of the Eastland. In recent years, before the building was torn down to make way for the McDonald’s corporate headquarters, I recorded voices from the walls of the building, voices of numerous ages and both sexes, speaking of a “watership’ and crying out while experimenting in hopes of proving the “Stone Tape Theory” that buildings can sometimes seemingly record the events of the past.
Today, wanderers along Wacker Drive may pause a moment at the Clark Street Bridge to cast their eyes down upon the river and to study a plaque commemorating the Eastland dead, the casualties that comprised the greatest loss of life in Great Lakes history. Yet while these words carved in metal are at best silent reminders of that tragic excursion, the cries said to ring across the river are hardly as hushed, and, according to those who have heard them, infinitely more imperious.
After many a tour during operations of our Chicago Hauntings bus excursions, tour guests later share their experiences of such sounds in sober emails. Others send photographs of what seem like luminous forms in the water.
One woman, who’d never had an unusual experience, visited the site on her own, no knowledge of what had occurred there—and before the memorial plaque was there to tell its tale. She told me that, standing at the concrete rail that used to be there, looking across the river, she heard a baby cry.
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[i] “919 bodies recovered” Chicago, Illinois · Sunday, July 25, 1915
