PETRIFIED: the ghost of mother galway
On the night of September 18, 1908, in the heart of Chicago’s West Side ghetto, a reported five thousand spectators gathered at the site of the former Sacred Heart Convent and Seminary girls’ school at Taylor and Lytle Streets. The throng had begun to assemble when an elderly couple, the caretakers of the building, rushed into the streets, the man crying,
“It is a spirit! I saw it with my eyes!” [i]
Those drawn to the scene were entranced by the claims of the old man, who swore to have seen the shadowy figure of a woman in black, gliding down the dark halls of the building bearing a lantern in her diaphanous hand.
The account soon gathered other testimonies to back it up. Spectators said they were seeing “a pale, ghostly light” flit from window to window through the old convent, the vision convincing many present that a phantom was afoot.
It wasn’t long before the spectral sightings were tied to the ghost of the long dead Mother General of the convent, the revered Mother Galway, who had passed away some twenty years before. Those gathered believed the nun had returned in agony that her beloved convent had been recently closed and her body disinterred from the convent grounds for removal to another resting place.
The suggestion of it caused an immediate sensation and spread like fire through the streets. It was reported that within an hour, from seven to eight in the evening, a crowd of five thousand had filled the streets surrounding the old fortress:
With every hour the excitement grew. The crowd became so great that traffic in the street was blocked and two riot calls were sent into Maxwell Street Police Station. A detail of a dozen policemen was rushed to the scene to preserve order.
A little after eight, a “thin, white glow” had reportedly been seen in an upper window by a number of the crowd, and in response (as was customary at the time), spectators responded to the ghost sighting by physically attacking it, throwing objects from the street at the window where the apparition had appeared, shattering the glass. Patrolman Frank Fournier, who had been detailed to the scene, ran up into the building to investigate the vision, but to the disappointment of the crowd, emerged with the news that he had seen nothing.
The crowd had grown by that time so great that the streetcars were stopped from passing, and backup officers were brought in to disperse the crowd. By morning the thrilling hours of the night before were only a memory.
Like most things Catholic on the Chicago’s South Side, Mother Galway’s ventures were connected to Fr. Arnold Damen and the parish of the Holy Family. Fr. Damen was one of a dozen Belgian Jesuits who had been sent to America to take on various missions. The group first regrouped in St. Louis before spreading out across the developing nation to follow their instructions. Fr. Damen was to establish a Roman Catholic church and parish in Chicago from where he was to minister to the poor and convert citizens to the Catholic faith.
Damen, in 1858, had barely secured authority to purchase the land for his future church before he received instructions from the Bishop of Chicago to ensure that the Sisters of the Sacred Heart would be called upon to establish a girls’ school in the city. By that same year the sisters had already been living in Chicago. Their first school was a rented brick house on Wabash, but the school quickly outgrew its digs as the quality of the school’s education spread. The sisters moved the school to a large frame house at Rush and Illinois streets, but again the growth of the school led to the enrollment soon bursting the seams. The Sisters bought a large parcel of land in the parish of the Holy Family, Dr. Damen’s own.
The order was one of the wealthiest on earth, having enjoyed the generosity of the wealthy who praised the nuns’ teaching of their children going back to the order’s inception in France. Mother Galway and the order decided to build a new seminary on the near west side, within Fr. Damen’s parish of the Holy Family. The new school was designed by the same architect who had been contracted to design the inside of the parish church, and by the summer of 1860 the spire of Holy Family and the sisters’ nearby convent and girls’ seminary school could be seen rising from the landscape along present-day Roosevelt Road.
The old frame school at Rush and Illinois streets was floated down the river to serve as a free school for the poor, according to a long-standing tradition of the order: Where there was a private, tuition-based school there must also be a free one. One reporter observed the exodus from the old quarters the day of the move:
“Yesterday the Seminary of the Sacred Heart was removed from its late quarters in the North Division, on the corner of Rush and Illinois street to its new edifice on West Twelfth street. This removal of ordinary household goods, chattels and fixtures was made quite imposing by a procession of forty drays and thirty-five express wagons, in all seventy-five loaded vehicles, looking, especially the last in the line, like the evacuation of the North Side.”
Many prominent Chicagoans (both Catholic and non) sent their daughters to the school as the parish it was affiliated with grew to a reported five thousand students, which was the largest in the world, according to a written account in a 1953 dissertation about Chicago parochial schools by Sr. Mary Innocenta Montay. But another immigration influx in Chicago and the Midwest in the 1890s led to the movement of well to do locals, with the immigrants who moved in sending their children to the free school run by the Order. As a result, only 22 students remained at Sacred Heart when the order moved their school to Lake Forest in 1904. where they experienced another increase of students to 100 before long. There, in the new well to do digs, enrollment increased again. The school, too, was beginning to offer junior college courses, leading to the growth of Barat College in 1918. Sacred Heart graduated its last high school student in 1961 and was re-named Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart, which today still operates. Barat College was closed in recent years.
When she died, the body of Mother Galway was laid to rest on the grounds of the Sacred Heart Convent and seminary at Taylor and Lytle streets in Chicago, one of the last private burial sites in the city.
At the time the woman in black began to haunt the building the convent was undergoing a major transition. Two months before the sightings the building had been sold for $150,000 to a local Jewish society who planned to use it as an orphanage. and as part of the conversion the graves of Mother Galway, and her colleagues had been dug up for reinternment in the Roman Catholic Calvary Cemetery at the Chicago Evanston border on the lakefront.
When the bodies of the nuns were disinterred, Mother Galway and her successor, Mother Gauthreaux, were found to have been “turned to stone” or petrified, their bodies described as “pillars of ivory” by astonished viewers who saw that, upon exhumation, their cloth habits and even the wooden crosses on their chests had crumbled away, but that their bodies remained untouched by decomposition.[ii]
The story was a national one, reported in many local papers, including Colorado’s Ordway New Era:
“(W)hen the men sought to raise the coffins the task was one which taxed their strength to the utmost. Neither casket had survived the test of time perfectly, and that in which Mother Gauthreaux was burled was badly crushed. Because of the tremendous weight the caskets were opened and a startling state of affairs discovered. There was the body of each woman almost exactly as it had appeared the day the casket had been closed and lowered into the earth beside the seminary.
When a member of the ladles of the Sacred Heart is buried, she is clothed in the same black habit she wore during life. Instead of the silver cross on her breast a small wooden one Is placed there and nothing metallic is allowed to remain Then the folds of the black veil are carefully drawn across the face of the dead nun.
When the wondering nuns looked upon the bodies of Mother Galway and Mother Gauthreaux the little wooden cross was gone with the passing of the years, and the features looked upon for the last time when the veil was placed over the face were no longer visible. But the outline of the figures was there as perfect as ever. Every line of the body that had been visible 20 years ago was still there, and the color of the black habit gave the somber hue to the solid figure weighing more than 1,000 pounds, where both of the women had been but slight In stature during life and weighing hardly more than 100 pounds For a moment the nuns of the Institution were allowed to contemplate the wonders nature had wrought with the bodies of their predecessors. They saw where the familiar white cap had crumbled away, as had the texture of the habits. leaving only a solid figure aa If hewn out of Ivory.
Then the bodies of the dead nuns were encased in new caskets, and they were borne to Calvary to the little plot where the sisters of the Institution now bury their dead.”
Many believed the Sisters had been preserved by the metallic caskets in which they’d been interred, or that water had seeped into the caskets, changing the structure of the cells of their bodies, giving detailed scientific reasons for the biological transformation of the corpses. Certainly, many others, including numerous of the thousands who gathered on that thrilling night later that fall, just wondered.
FOR FURTHER READING
I hope you enjoyed this story, which I collected for my book, Haunts of the White City: True Ghost Stories from the World’s Fair, the Great Fire and Victorian Chicago (History Press). The book is filled with 19th-Century stories of the supernatural from my native city, and it’s the perfect read for the dark winter nights ahead. If you like history or ghost stories, I think you’ll enjoy it very much.
Thanks so much for being here, and let’s pray for Mother Galway and the sisters of the Sacred Heart, as well as for all the students and faculty at the Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart, the current incarnation of Mother Galway’s original Sacred Heart school, which is still operating today in Lake Forest, Illinois, on Chicago’s North Shore!
Happy New Year and God bless you,
Ursula
#prayforghosts
NOTES
[i] “5,000 in mob surge about old convent,” The Inter Ocean. Chicago, Illinois. 19 September 1908. Page 2.
[ii] “Bodies of nuns turned to stone,” San Francisco Chronicle. San Francisco, California. 13 October 1907. Page 51.