Case No.2| SWEETS TO THE SWEET: The Haunting True Tales Behind the Candyman legend
In Chicago’s vanished Cabrini Green housing project, the children held that Candyman was no mere legend. The children were right.
Cabrini-Green in 1998 (Library of Congress)
Transcript of Podcast Narration:
They say that life imitates art imitates life, and that's nowhere truer than in this tale.
In the early 2000s I was invited by the Chicago Public Library Foundation to give something like 50 children's programs in three months over the summer. The series took me to just about every neighborhood in Chicago, from Rogers Park to Hegwisch and everywhere in between, and I met kids from every cultural, ethnic and economic background. My job was teach them about Chicago history with my true ghost stories of the city's past. Day after hot summer day, after I’d told them my tales, they--deliciously--told me theirs.
I heard from the children in Englewood that, every Halloween night the ghosts of all the people murdered in the neighborhood since the last Halloween rise up out of the Jackson Park lagoon. These creatures have until dawn, they told me, to prey on the living. The kids in Lincoln Park told me about the gunshots you can hear on Clark Street "where Al Capone shot everybody." And it was at the Near North Branch on Division Street that a group of sweltering eight to twelve year olds told me, "Candyman is for real."
The story of Candyman--the mythical villain who lived in Chicago's notorious and now-vanished Cabrini-Green housing project, has (as they say) taken on a life of its own since the Hollywood film of the same name debuted so many years ago now . After we started our Chicago Hauntings ghost tours in 2003, almost every night someone would ask, at the end, "What about Candyman?" After many such nights, we finally put the story on the tour. And that's all I thought it was at first.
A story.
And so, each evening I started directing our bus driver to turn right on North Avenue from Clark Street, and then left on Larrabee. We'd park at the side of the deserted street, in a perfect place to view the old German church that, as of this writing, still stands facing what was then a vast open field. And there, I'd tell that story of the unfortunate young African-American man who suffers a horrible death and lives in infamy as an urban legend, preying on those who don't believe in him.
A VICTORIAN HORROR
The son of a slave living in 1890s Chicago, the boy who became Candyman was, according to the legend, gifted with superior artistic talent. A prominent Chicagoan recognized his ability and commissioned the young man to paint a portrait of his daughter. Of course, artist and subject fell in love and the young woman became pregnant. The irate father called on the men of the town to avenge his daughter's honor. Needing no coaxing, the mob seized the young man and carried him to a field, the future site of Cabrini Green, where they cut off his right hand with a saw. Then, spotting a nearby beehive, the men broke open the hive, covered the boy with honey and watched, unmoving, as the angry bees stung him to death.
Through some otherworldly mechanism, the young victim became trapped between the real and imagined worlds, where he lives in the figure of a towering, cloaked stalker, with a bloody hook for a hand. As in another urban legend, Candyman won't bother those who fear him, provided of course that they refrain from provocation—provocation which consists predictably of facing a mirror in a darkened bathroom and calling his name five times.
In the film, the legend of Candyman is investigated by a graduate student (played by Virginia Madsen) at the University of Chicago. The unsuspecting young scholar delves into a world where the violence of Cabrini creates a universe where reality and nightmare hopelessly overlap. Confident of her own scholarly superiority over superstition, our foolhardy folklorist flippantly tests the legend's verity, inevitably provoking her own destruction at the hands of the mythical monster.
The story of Candyman was so brilliantly intertwined with the reality of Cabrini-Green, and the filming was done right on scene in Chicago, including at the Carl Sandburg apartments on the edge of Old Town--where Madsen’s character lived--and at Cabrini-Green itself. With its authentic scenery, sinister storyline and intriguing plot, it was inevitable that the film would make a deep impression on just about everyone who saw it, and that it would leave a chilling question in the hearts of most: How, in a place like this, is it possible to distinguish a horror movie from reality?
STRAIGHT OUT OF HELL
The horror of Cabrini-Green didn't start when the iconic red and white buildings went up. Long before, the area was known as "Little Hell," and the heart of it was "Death Corner": the intersection of West Oak Street and Milton avenue. There, within two decades--between 1910 and 1930--more than a hundred unsolved murders were committed. At the onset of Prohibition, killings in the neighborhood shot to almost three dozen a year, many of them the result of mob action tied to bootlegging.
It was a long time still coming, but in the mid 1930s, Elizabeth Wood, head of the Metropolitan Housing Council, announced a plan to raze 36 square miles of Chicago to rebuild it, with the help of thousands of out-of-work laborers. The full project never materialized, but in the early '40s a good portion of Little Hell was demolished, and the Frances Cabrini Homes rose from the rubble.
The low rise townhouses were low income housing, but the application process was tough. Only United States citizens could apply, and even those must be living in family units with children under the age of seventeen. No criminals, bad credit, or anti-social tendencies would be entertained for tenancy. In other words, few from "Little Hell" need apply. Later, Wood would tell the federal government that most of the neighborhood residents were too poor to live in low income housing. They couldn't make the miniscule rent.
After World War II, more buildings went up, but these were high-rise apartments, and by the early 1960s, "Cabrini-Green" was a massive complex consisting of more than 3,500 units, most of which were still housing families not from the neighborhood and who made enough money to pay a reasonable rent.
There are probably as many theories about what happened to Cabrini-Green as there were apartments in those iconic towers. Most agree that housing so many people under one roof--with economic stress and gangs so prevalent for most in the area --was a foolish idea. And indeed, the low rise units enjoyed significantly fewer problems as the years passed. The real trouble, however, seemed to have begn with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., at a time when the majority of Cabrini's residents were now Black. Two years later, a Cabrini-Green sniper killed two Chicago police officers.
Soon after, gangs began to grow with a vengeance, dividing themselves into the Reds and the Whites (for the different colored buildings of the project), and they ruled day and night, to the point where, in 1982, former mayor Jane Byrne moved into one of the units herself, both to show solidarity and to try to quell some of the violence. It accomplished little and didn't last long. Later that decade, the Chicago Housing Authority brought in Vince Lane as its executive director. He began a program of sweeps to elimate drugs and dealers from Cabrini, but the patrols were expensive in both police time and city money.
The killing of 7 year old Dantrell Davis in the fall of 1992 was a loud and clear signal that things could not go on as they had for so long. Davis was walking to school across the street from his family’s Cabrini apartment, holding his mom's hand, when he was shot by a stray bullet presumably discharged by a gang member.
Davis' death came at about the same time as a federal Housing and Urban Development program was focusing attention--and cash--on the problem of modern housing. When the Chicago Housing Authority received a grant from this the so-called HOPE program, it was decided immediately that it would go to the problem of Cabrini-Green. Most of that grant money had still not been used twenty years later. One of the biggest issues was a haunting one from the neighborhood's long-ago past. Only a scant fraction of the proposed new development would go to extremely low income tenants.
As the new millenium turned, most of the real hope would come not from the HOPE grant but from private developers who introduced mixed-income housing communities skirting the old Cabrini-Green site, including Old town Village West and North Town Village, the latter offering 50 percent market-rate rental and ownership units, 20 percent subsidized units and a full 30 percent for former Cabrini residents. In an area where townhouses can sell for well over one million dollars, this was a radical development indeed. But available units are woefully below any ability of the city to, as Mayor Richard M. Daley promised, return to the neighborhood anyone who had to leave with the demolition of Cabrini-Green.
There is much more to this convoluded story, as much of a horor story as anything from Clive Barker.
But I digress.
The culture of Cabrini-Green and the real horrors of life there--despite a strong sense of community that couldn't be shaken--made the film, "Candyman" a powerful one. But, as so many of our tour guests wanted to know, was any of the story story true? Was Candyman a real person, and did the things in the movie really happen?
Well that's a long . . . story.
REAL-LIFE ROOTS
The screenplay for the film Candyman was written by Bernard Rose, an English filmmaker and music video director. It was based on a short story by Clive Barker called "The Forbidden," which was part of a collection called the Books of Blood. The plot of Barker's tale is similar to the film's storyline. A graduate student in Liverpool, England investigates local urban legends and finds more than she bargained for in a run-down council housing complex. Barker was from Liverpool, and he set his story in urban England--not Chicago, and definitely not Cabrini-Green. That was Rose's idea.
It was also Rose who made Candyman Black, and some have suggested he did this because he felt this would make him automatically scarier to white audiences, but this isn’t true. Rose came to Chicago to see if the city would be a good fit for the film (Chicago, as you may know, is very hospitable to filmmakers, going back to when the Blues Brothers tore up the town with the full blessing of Mayor Byrne). He was deeply affected by the social fabric of Chicago, especially Cabrini-Green. He chose the site before he created his version of Candyman. Of course, he told the online magazine “New Musical Express,” now Candyman would have to be Black.
“There was no way it could be a white guy. It just wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever,” said Rose.
I did find out some very interesting things while searching for a real-life Candyman.
Dean Arnold Corll was a serial killer and sex offender who had terrorized Texans in the early 1970s, He tortured, raped and murdered at least twenty-eight teenaged young men and boys between 1970 and 1973. His crimes are known as the Houston Mass Murders, and Corll’s deed’s were only discovered after he was shot to death. Corll’s had standard protocols that he employed in each of his crimes. First, he’d offer a ride to a young man or child—or invite one to a party at his home. Once there, he restrained his victim and either strangled or shot him. Corll worked with accomplices, and together he and a dark pal would dump the bodies in a rented boat storage unit, in the woods near Lake Sam Rayburn or on beaches on the bolivar Penninsula.
Corll became known as “The Candy Man” and as “The Pied Piper.” His family had formerly owned a candy factory outside of Houston. Before his crimes were revealed, he was known and loved because he regularly brought home candy from the factory and distributed it to local children.
Corll was most definitely White. But before I read the interview in which Bernard Rose described his process in making Candyman African American, I found out something else intriguing. In England, where both Clive Barker and Bernard Rose had grown up, there had been something like a real life version of Candyman on the prowl starting during their youths.
And he was Black.
A LIVERPOOL LEGEND
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, reportedly hundreds of police reports were made in the Liverpool area (where Barker was raised during the same time period) by young men and boys complaining of a tall, muscular Black man with skin that appeared to have a dark purple hue. In fact, they had a nickname for him. They called him “Purple Aki.”
According to their reports, Purple Aki assaulted or sodomized his victims, often asking if he could touch their muscles beforehand. Some claimed they had seen him shot, stabbed or drowned, but that he'd come back. He wouldn't die. Or maybe couldn’t die.
Others claimed adults couldn't see him. According to legend, the fear of Purple Aki was so intense in the early 1980s that boys wouldn't take paper routes, and no young male ever walked alone outside after dark.
Then, in June of 1986, a 16 year-old boy named Gary Kelly was electrocuted at the New Brighton railway station. Bystanders told police he was running away from a pursuer, who was later jailed. When the image of the accused, an African Englishman named Akinwale Arobieke, appeared on the news, hundreds of men reportedly came forward to identify the man as "Purple Aki," the mysterious figure who had assaulted them--the figure who had lived for a decade as a Liverpudlian folktale.
Arobieke was convicted of manslaughter but appealed and won. He was also awarded a substantial compensation for alleged racial elements in the earlier trial.
But, as they all had said, Purple Aki would not die.
In late 2001, Arobieke was back in court, charged with harrassing and assaulting a total of 14 teenaged boys between 1995 and 2000. He was convicted but released two years later . . . then almost immediately arrested again. During the ensuing trial, more than 120 people were interviewed by police. He was given six years after pleading guilty to 15 counts of harassment and witness intimidation. His file contained an additional 61 counts. The judge in the case, Edward Slinger, called his behaviour "both strange and obsessive."
After his release, Arobkieke continued to end up back in jail, and in court. During a later day in front of the judge, Arobieke apologized to his victims and admitted that he was "infamous, notorious, everything from a bogeyman to whatever.”
In 2021, a video appeared on social media showing young alleged gang members shooting fireworks at Arobieke's head as he walks, unflinching. Commenters were quick to claim it as “proof” of the legend of Arobieke’s immortality.
Did a childhood fear of Liverpool's very real "bogeyman" make its way into the character of Candyman? Was Barker (who grew up with the legend in Liverpool) or Rose (who grew up in London, also likely aware of the sensationalized case) unconsiously influenced to include elements of the larger-than-life character in the now-classic tale?
THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS
Ruthie Mae McCoy was a Black woman who had lived her entire life on Chicago’s South Side. In her ‘20s McCoy had begun to talk to herself or yell at passersby. It became clear to her family and neighbors that she was suffering from mental illness, but it would be years before Ruthie was diagnosed with a type of schizophrenia. Her illness prevented McCoy from holding a job for any length of time, and she struggled to support herself and live a normal life. Between abbreviated stints with employers, she found herself institutionalized, grasping for a wellness that always seemed to elude her. In 1983, Ruthie had secured an apartment in a public housing project not far from Cabrini-Green, but just five years later she was trying to leave.
McCoy had finally been approved for SSI benefits because of her illness; finally she had a steady income as well as retroactive benefits pay of what was at the time a whopping $2000. Ruthie’s plan was to use the money to move out of the dangerous and degraded complex, and as she calculated to make her break, she also bought some clothing and other items—small things that had been unknown to her before. Police would come to believe that her spending had drawn the attention of a local, leading to what happened next.
Ruthie called the police on the night of April 22, 1987, crying out over the line in a frantic, chaotic terror. She told the dispatcher that people had “thrown the cabinet down” and were coming through the bathroom. Bewildered by what seemed to be her jibberish, police left for the scene.
It took a long time for them to enter McCoy’s unit. The call had been logged as a disturbance rather than a home invasion, so officers lagged in coming. With no answer to their knock on her door, police went in search of the building manager and his key. Oddly, the key didn’t fit the door. With all quiet behind it, the police—unbelievably—left.
The following night, a neighbor of Ruthie’s named Debra Lasley called police, asking for a well-being check. The neighbor said she was used to seeing McCoy two times every single day in the hall. She was troubled. Ruthie hadn’t been about her usual routine and her knocks on her neighbor’s door had brought no response.
Shockingly, police responded but left again when no one answered their own knocks. Alarmed, Lasley went to the manager’s office. With help from neighbors, he forced the door, and the group finally got inside. There, they made a gruesome discovery.
McCoy’s body was in her bedroom, unmoving in a pool of blood. Around her was evidence of a burglary—clothing and her personal belongings were everywhere and the smell of death hung over the scene.
Those were different times, and a public outcry against police was not forthcoming. Crimes in the projects—even murders—were a common occurrence, and most outside of them considered them as part of a different world that didn’t concern them. It’s believed that the only reason the Chicago Tribune even reported on the murder was because of a chilling detail about it.
The assailants had entered Ruthie’s apartment from the unit next door by climbing through the medicine cabinet.
Several years later, when the film Candyman premiered, audiences familiar with the story would find its plot traced crimes committed in an identical fashion, and a character with a familiar last name: a Black woman struggling in the projects by the name of Anne Marie McCoy.