THE SPELL OF CRICKET HILL: Ghosts of Montrose Point
A soccer goal awaits warmer days at Cricket Hill (site library)
Many years ago now—way back in high school—I wrote a poem called "Leaving Cricket Hill" after my then-boyfriend--an Edgewater kid from the local neighborhood--took me to the modest sledding hill at Chicago’s Montrose Point one summer night. It was an experience I’ve never forgotten: one of those moments where you feel the unmistakable truth of something greater than yourself. There was something intangible yet almost--almost--palpable about the place. It was a soft, warm night. A slight breeze swirled around us as we climbed the hill at dusk. Small groups of people played music and sang; the sound of a guitar, a pennywhistle, a barely perceptible drum keeping pace with our steps up the grassy summit. We met a blind man who walked dogs for a living. The lake spread out to the east in the moonlight.
Though I had been there countless times before, from that night on I was (as they say) taken with the place.
I soon found out I wasn't alone. 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. The Peace and Music Festival, which began in the 1980s, has surely been a big part of creating the Cricket Hill "vibe." Along with African and other ethnic music and cultural fests, Native Americans hold pow-wows here. The "non partisan, non political" FreeFest joined in, with singers, poets and speakers from psychedelica to punk and everything in between. In August of 1995, thousands gathered in the misty air to sing Grateful Dead songs, mourning the passing of Gerry Garcia.
There's regular stuff that goes on here, too. The soccer fields are awash with players on the weekends. The Hill is the site of the annual Chicago Kids and Kites Festival, which used to include a candy drop. Fun runs and fundraiser 5Ks are almost constantly winding through the lakefront roads and trails. And always, with the snow, the sledders return. Even now, in my own family, each New Year's Day that we wake to snow, off we go.
No one is quite sure where Cricket Hill got its name. Some say that, in spring, the hill used to be covered with the jumping little guys, rejoicing in the sunshine with their spring-feverish human friends. Others seem to remember their granddads (or maybe it was great-granddad?) talking about a cricket field here where English immigrants used to gather, and it's true. The Chicago Cricket Club did play their games on the green at Montrose Point.
Some have a much more fanciful explanation for the naming of this popular hill. As the story goes, the Ringling Brothers circus train was on its way to its winter quarters in Baraboo, Wisconsin one fall morning. Tragically, the train was struck by a runaway engine; three elephants died in the disaster. Two, the story claims, were buried in a cemetery nearby, but the third elephant, named Cricket, had to be interred elsewhere due to lack of space in the burial ground. Here, the story gets a little seedy. A driver was instructed to take Cricket's body to another North Side cemetery, but he got lost and found himself at Montrose Point, where he got talking with a couple of lifeguards at the beach. Instead of getting directions to the cemetery as he had planned, the driver joined the lifeguards--who had just finished their shift--in a shot and a beer at an Uptown tavern. Stories and glasses piled up, and soon it was closing time. But when the driver returned to his truck, they found that someone had dumped the elephant into a sinkhole near the beach. As the years went on, visitors to the beach paid their respects to Cricket by dumping sand buckets full of dirt onto the poor elephant's grave. Thus, Cricket Hill rose on the Montrose Point green.
This creative tale must have been concocted by a bored lifeguard one drowsy day. No circus train wreck occurred in Chicago; no Ringling wreck in Illinois (it's the Ringling Brothers circus that winters in Baraboo). But of course, the Cricket Hill tale includes many motifs from the story of the terrible Hagenbeck-Wallace circus train wreck that happened in Northwest Indiana in 1918. If you’re familiar with the stories surrounding its memory, legend erroneously holds that elephants who died in the wreck were buried at the cemetery in Forest Park, just west of Chicago. And certainly, both the nearby Burlington railroad up to Wisconsin as well as plentiful local cemeteries add to the realism of the Cricket Hill tale.
Those who grew up in the neighborhood don't remember it as Cricket Hill but Crooked Hill. The jagged line through the middle, they say, was caused by a lightning strike back in the day. Kids of the time would ride their bikes up and down that line all day in the hot summer sun.
Before Cricket Hill, they remember, this place was called "the Jungle." In the middle of the wide green here was a tangle of sumac trees and other thick flora. The Jungle extended west past the viaducts, in some places as far as a block back. The jungle was the home of hobos, drunks and perverts. Local kids knew to never go into the Jungle alone, as one or another of these lost souls would invariably invite the young boys into the thick.
Some say it was this kind of thing that led the city to level the jungle, including the biggest concentration of shrubbery at Cricket Field. More than one old timer holds the magical hill is actually a garbage dump--built up by dumping trash at that site and covering it with more and more dirt over the years. Yet despite such unromantic backstories, there remains something decidedly . . . elevated about this seemingly ordinary little hill.
In recent years, I read on a warlock's website that Cricket Hill was chosen to be the center of some nationwide crystal matrix, presumably creating an ethereal web of energy for some esoteric purpose. Though I’ve not been able to uncover any more information about this, it’s always in the back of my mind, and whenever I meet a local occultist, I always ask about Cricket Hill. To this day, none have known anything about the mysterious energy web of lore.
That’s not to say that the supernatural doesn’t dwell here. Long ago now, in my book, More Chicago Haunts, I documented one Lincoln Square man’s memory of a now-classic story of the ghost of the Magic Hedge, the old Nike Missile site-turned-bird sanctuary where a dreadful tale reportedly played out when soldiers lived in lakefront barracks. That’s a story for another day, but suffice it to say that birders still sometimes encounter a certain something during their twilight excursions at the old base site adjacent to Cricket Hill.
The ghost of the Magic Hedge doesn’t roam here alone. A few years ago now I was contacted by a woman who had attended school at St. Mary of the Lake on Sheridan Road, just a few blocks from Lake Michigan. While in eighth grade, on All Souls’ Day of 1960, she had a most unusual experience at Cricket Hill:
Since (it) was a Holy Day, we were out of school. My friend and I, along with her aunt and mother, decided to walk to the park, which was only a couple blocks east. As we were walking the path, my friend and I started running toward Cricket Hill, and as we approached we saw “hooded monks” going up the side of the hill (north to south). As we continued we noticed how they seemed to glide. The first one had reached the top and the rest followed, gliding on air. Of course it scared the —— out of us, and we ran back toward her mom and aunt. As we reached them, they too had noticed that they could see clearly from the ground to the end of their robes. I remember they had the hoods up and appeared to have their hands folded in prayer.