NERVES OF STEEL: Ghosts and Hauntings of the Gary Mills
A bird’s eye view of U.S. Steel’s Gary Works on the Lake Michigan shore (Wikimedia Commons)
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. But how Gary, Indiana, the “City of the Century,” grew up where it did is its own particular story.
Like Chicago, Gary grew from swamps and sand dunes long deemed hostile to permanent human settlement. By the 1800s, not even Native Americans had made their homes here on the southernmost Indiana shore. In the earliest days of the area’s recorded history, migrant tribes of Miami, Ottawa, and Potawatomi made use of native plants and fauna during their transient periods in the area, but none thought of staying awhile. Farming was difficult, and no permanent villages were settled until the 17th century. Father Jacques Marquette, too, led a posse of traders and missionaries through the region along the Calumet River and reportedly camped at present day Miller Beach, near the Gary Park which bears his name. It wasn’t until 1822 that the first white settler, Joseph Bailly, made a home in the Dunes, and even he had little company until the century turned and brought settlers with big plans
But not for farming.
Beginning in the late 1880s, countless tons of sand were removed from the Dunes and shipped to Chicago for building and industrial use as the post-Fire city built with a fervor rarely seen before in human history. Forests, marshes and sand dunes were leveled to support the burgeoning “City of Big Shoulders,” leading many other seers to imagine similar cityscapes in many other parts of the world… including the adjacent terrain.
Elbert H. Gary was a judge in these bustling days of development, and when he became chairman of U.S. Steel, he was determined to secure for his corporation a piece of the industrializing American world. Having watched the center of national industry moving from the East coast to the Midwest, Gary chose what he saw as a prime location for his company to put down roots: a site close to the business hub of Chicago, the rail center of the country, and set on the shore of Lake Michigan, perhaps the most important port along the Gulf-Atlantic trade route.
Elbert Gary’s plans spawned the creation of the Gary Land Company and the Indiana Steel Company, to build housing and the mill itself, respectively. The resulting complex held twelve blast furnaces, forty-seven steel furnaces and a reimagined harbor to hold the largest steam vessels of the day. Would-be workers from every corner of Europe poured in, along with migrant workers from all around the United States, creating an instant city which grew to 16,000 inhabitants in scarcely three years’ time. In 1909, when Gary was officially incorporated, it was one of the fastest growing cities in the nation, but still an infant. In the next ten years the city would more than triple in population, claiming 55,000 residents by 1920. It was also something of a black sheep amid the great labor upheavals of the time.
From the beginning, Elbert Gary attempted to avoid labor uprisings and strikes by fostering close employee relations with the extremely varied ethnic populations which manned his empire. The Great Depression changed the good times in Gary, as elsewhere, however, and U.S Steel laid off workers to a low of fifteen percent. The future brought unionization, with U. S. Steel recognizing the Steelworkers Organizing Committee as its workers’ representative.
World War II was a financial godsend, when steel production skyrocketed, and Gary workers and bosses mourned the dead but counted their currency.
Until the strikes came. The nationwide strike of 1919 was hardly the last. After the War, the first two of three strikes from 1946 to 1959 slowly wore away at the foundations of the “Men of Steel.” The final strike, lasting more than one hundred days, allowed foreign steel companies to get a foothold in Gary and elsewhere in the States. Later, as technology gained ground and made inroads in the industry, human labor began to measure as obsolete. From the 1980s onward, the human workforce in Northwest Indiana has shrunk to about 25 percent of its most flourishing state, though the same amount of steel continues to be produced.
The massive presence of U.S. Steel—most of its operations now overtaken by Arcelor Mittel—continues to reign over the City of Gary and the southernmost point of Lake Michigan, despite the shrinking and saddening of the once-mighty settlement below. The folklore of the mill—including its ghost stories—has also declined with the population of workers. But some of the old stories are still told, of the days when the steel mills formed the entire structure of life in Gary, and where death by the mills is still a very real occurrence, and typically sudden and horrifying. Loss of digits and limbs, men crushed by railroad cars, decapitations. More than five hundred steel workers have perished at the Gary plant since 1906. Rumor has it that tragic accidents and deaths are still extremely common, but unpublicized by these highly secured, locked-down corporations. Still, when someone dies, supernatural stories often follow, the dead perhaps making the cause of their fate known despite exceptionally secretive conditions.
One of the most feared fates in the mills is of falling into “the Heat”: the vats or “ladles” of molten metal. The steel can reach a temperature of almost 3,000 degrees, and a human body will apparently disintegrate in the substance in a matter of seconds. The question of what to do with the ladle after such a mishap is one that allegedly continues to be a problem: Should the mill use it anyway, since there’s no trace of the unfortunate, vaporized body? Should it be disposed of respectfully, despite the tremendous loss in product: about 150 tons of steel?
One worker talks of a woman who lost her husband in a ladle accident and demanded a body from the mill, wanting to give him a proper burial. Being unable to provide one, the company reportedly cut out a man-sized chunk of the ladle and sent it to the funeral home. The mortician sealed it in the chosen casket and convinced the widow to have a closed-casket funeral.
Stories have circulated for years that ladles containing human remains are sometimes buried in Lake Michigan, leading to stories of men in the water being picked up by fishermen off the Gary coast, who regale their rescuers with chilling stories of being burned alive—before disappearing before the fishermen’s eyes. According to one such witness, it was in the early 1970s that he was fishing offshore of U.S. Steel in the early spring and saw a figure in the water about 100 yards away. Powering up his motor, he headed toward the figure and wondered if it was possibly a man, he’d heard about on the radio who had gone missing while swimming at Miller Beach two days earlier. The riptides in the Dunes are notorious, leading to several deaths in any given year, as are cases of those who attempt suicide in the Lake by various means and either fail to drown or change their minds. As he neared the figure, he saw that it was, in fact, a man, not at all struggling or looking at all frightened, pained or fatigued. The fisherman stopped the boat and dropped anchor. Throwing a rope to the man in the water, he pulled him into the ladder and helped him onboard. As he heaved him on to the deck, the rescuer noticed that the figure’s clothes were work clothes—long pants, long sleeved shirt and even work boots, all sopping wet.
It was so odd. I almost laughed because the clothes were so weird for this guy being in the water off a beach area. I was used to seeing swimmers swimming off their boats and stuff like that. Beach clothes. Of course, things just flash through your mind and all I could think was that he was a worker on a barge or a ship of some kind and fell overboard, but there was not a boat in sight of any kind, not even rec boats or other fishing boats as it was still really cold for the year. This guy had to have been there for a long time, but he seemed completely fine, wasn’t even shivering. He had close-cut hair, like an old time buzz cut, but he dried his face with the towel I handed him and then smiled this big smile and looked right at me.
I asked what happened to him and he didn’t say anything, just shook his head, except that he was tired. I took him down to the bunk below and asked if he wanted food and he said no and wouldn’t even drink water. So I told him to just lay down for awhile and I’d radio for an ambulance to meet us at the marina. And I went up and called and told them what happened and powered up the motor to go in. And when we got there, I talked to the cops who were there with the ambulance for a few minutes, and one of them went down to talk to the guy—and he was gone. So, we thought he came up and wandered off, but there was no one around at all. They even drove around the area while I waited there, but we never found him. A few years later, I heard the stories about people picking up people off the shore at the mill, and I will tell you it gave me the heebie-jeebies.
Sometimes deaths in the mill leave behind evidence of the event in the form of disembodied voices or smells. One worker said that after his coworker was crushed by a rail accident, he’d frequently hear a male voice say, “Hey!” in his ear as he was working near the death site. Another worker told of working with a buddy who had had his skull pierced while working in a “continuous rod” mill and died instantly. For months afterward, workers would smell a strong smell of cigars at the death site from time to time. The deceased worker had been known for always smoking part of a cigar at lunchtime.
Another worker shares an incident in which a worker fell into the heat. According to the tale, the plant processed the steel anyway. Now, every time a ladle is poured, the dead worker’s face appears at the top of the pool of molten steel. Still another worker talks about the haunting that began after a laborer fell into the melting pot, which is connected to the furnace:
He had tripped on a slippery patch of ash and couldn’t get his footing and went in. Everyone was just in shock. They shut off the furnace for a few minutes just because, but there’s nothing you can do at that point. After it happened, there wasn’t a day that went by that the furnace didn’t shut itself off. They would go nuts trying to fix it, calling specialists in, even the manufacturer to complain. It would seem fine and then it would happen again.
Stories of such accidents are also joined by rumors of murder in the mills. As one millworker observed:
It’s so dangerous and so many things happen accidentally…it’s the easiest thing in the world to off a guy and not even say anything. Guys disappear sometimes and they just assume he fell in somewhere or whatever. I heard there was one guy who was messing with another guy so much that the guy dropped an air hammer on him from three floors up.
In one case dating back to the 1960s, two workers reportedly had such a hatred of each other that they seemed always on the verge of physically attacking one another. According to the story, there was a woman involved, and one was bitterly jealous, the other openly arrogant about his relationship with her. One day the latter fell five stories and crushed his ribs against a piece of machinery, causing internal bleeding that killed him in minutes. The only witness to the “accident” was his relentless rival, who said he had seen him “standing there one minute, gone the next.” Some exposed electrical wires along the ground were pointed out by the survivor, who suggested that he must have tripped.
According to his co-workers—none of whom believed his story—he quit soon after the incident, claiming that something had tried to push him to his death at the exact spot where his rival had plummeted to his end.