CITY OF THE DEAD

Beneath its streets lie forgotten cemeteries. Beneath its neighborhoods, the traces of vanished towns, burned churches, outlaw roadhouses, asylum graves, hidden speakeasies, murder scenes, abandoned hospitals,and the unquiet memories of two centuries of violence, tragedy, folklore, and loss. For generations, Chicagoans have passed on accounts o f ghostly women wandering lonely roads, phantom lights in forest preserves, haunted theaters, restless gangsters, cursed bars, vanished cemeteries, spectral monks, disappearing houses, and the dead who still seem unwilling to leave the city behind.Many books have explored Chicago’s ghost stories. None have gone this deep.

In Chicago Haunts: 200 Years of True Ghost Stories, celebrated Chicago historian and folklorist Ursula Bielski gathers the most comprehensive collection of Chicago ghostlore ever assembled. Spanning more than 800 pages and hundreds of stories, this monumental volume traces the haunted history of America’s most supernatural city from its frontier beginnings to the present day.

Here are the in-depth, detailed stories of the legendary hauntings everyone knows—Resurrection Mary, Bachelors Grove, Archer Avenue, Hull House, the Eastland Disaster, H. H. H.H. Holmes and so many more. But this book also ventures far beyond the familiar legends into the strange hidden corners of Chicago history: haunted schools and universities, occult societies, mysterious lights in the woods, lost settlements, deadly taverns, vanished amusement parks, spiritualist cults, old asylum grounds, lakefront apparitions, abandoned institutions, and the deeply personal experiences of ordinary Chicagoans who encountered something they could never fully explain.

Written in a richly atmospheric voice of storytelling that combines historical journalism, folklore, memoir, and supernatural investigation, Chicago Haunts is the culmination of Ursula Bielski’s life’s work as one of the pioneers of the ghostlore genre. The result is haunting, unsettling, funny, tragic, deeply human, and impossible to forget.

For believers, skeptics, historians, folklorists, paranormal investigators, lovers of Chicago history, and anyone who has ever driven a lonely road after dark and wondered what might be standing just beyond the headlights, Chicago Haunts opens the door to a city few people ever truly see.