Newest:
A February, 2012 shot from the location the Tribune once called "The Alley of Death and Mutilation;" the humanesque form behind the women may be a trick of the light, but it does bear a resemblance to a woman who died there in 1903. More info and discussion
Jean Marie Andersen's October, 2012 shot of the Hull House staircase looks so much like a baby that my first instinct was to assume she'd faked it when she took it on the tour. It could always still be a reflection in the glass, but rarely do you get one that requires so little imagination.
Full version, discussion
A February, 2012 shot from the location the Tribune once called "The Alley of Death and Mutilation;" the humanesque form behind the women may be a trick of the light, but it does bear a resemblance to a woman who died there in 1903. More info and discussion
Jean Marie Andersen's October, 2012 shot of the Hull House staircase looks so much like a baby that my first instinct was to assume she'd faked it when she took it on the tour. It could always still be a reflection in the glass, but rarely do you get one that requires so little imagination.
Full version, discussion
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I'm quite certain that this is a snowflake at the Dunning cemetery site, but it's one cool shot; less scrupulous ghost hunters would probably claim that this one proves every theory they ever had!
It This was taken during the podcast recording. | |
A shot of a figure against the tree at the "Sobieski Street" body dump. Is that a bowler hat? Is it just me?
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2011 Shots:
12/30/11: Shot from the H.H. Holmes glass bending factory/body dump site. See the thing at the center right that seems to be facing the person in the middle?
More info, discussion, and another pic.
12/29/11 Shot by Brandon L. in the alley, the night before the anniversary of the Iroquois theatre disaster - two witnesses contend that there was no one present when the shot was taken:
Larger image and more info
12/30/11: Shot from the H.H. Holmes glass bending factory/body dump site. See the thing at the center right that seems to be facing the person in the middle?
More info, discussion, and another pic.
12/29/11 Shot by Brandon L. in the alley, the night before the anniversary of the Iroquois theatre disaster - two witnesses contend that there was no one present when the shot was taken:
Larger image and more info
10/15: Here's an odd shadow shot by Haley Wittwer:
"HALL OF FAME" PICS FROM 2005-2009 (in no particular order):
A particularly interesting shot that looks vaguely like a girl in a hoop skirt, photographed from behind. A couple of squiggly lines probably give this away as a weird camera malfunction - but one so weird that it counts as a weird photo all on its own!
A somewhat similar shot captured in summer, 2007 by Anna Schultz, who noted in her email that no one was in the garden when she took the shot. I somehow didn't notice this in the email until just recently (years later):
Maybe the coolest reflection shot ever. I'll go ahead and play devil's advocate by pointing out that while this is fairly obviously a reflection, it doesn't seem to resemble anyone present when the photo was taken.
Taken, if I remember correctly, by the same woman who took the "hoop skirt" photo. Most of the "entity in a long dress/ robe coming down the stairs" shots actually turn out to be reflections of peoples' ears.
An a "girl with a doll" shot. The blown-up version looks more like reflections or smudges to me, but on the LCD screen this was quite a shocker!
And one more "figure on the stairs" that I'm pretty sure is really a reflection of an ear (you can see the nose and lips in the full version)
"The Devil's Hand," or "The Hand of Drywall Dave," found in a hole in the wall in a back hallway at the Congress Hotel. We thought it was a glove that got plastered over, but it's deteriorated enough now that we can see that there's no glove in there. My guess: it's Congress Hotel regular Teddy Roosevelt, carrying his trademark "big stick!" I used to make jokes about it being a guy who was walled up inside the place, but found that the joke was being repeated as fact all over the web. I learned a few lessons there.
There's no such thing as "good" ghost evidence - only COOL ghost evidence. Here's some of that - a mysterious silhouette in the Florentine Ballroom at the Congress taken by John at bachelors-grove.com in November, 2008. Here's a more detailed analysis.
A similar picture taken by a tour customer named Krissy about eight months later in the same room on one of my old "Weird Chicago" tours (I was a founder of that company, but stopped being involved in 2009). These two shots have been anayzed like crazy without a particularly good explanation. Krissy's shot was noticed later on in the tour, so there was no way she had time to go back and photoshop it in.
Could these shadow shots above be hoaxes? Of course. There are a million ways that the people who sent me these could have faked them, especially if I didn't see them on the tour itself. But I have no reason to believe that they did. Of course, everyone ELSE has to take my word for it that I didn't fake them, and the fact that I can't explain something offhand doesn't mean it's really dead person, which is part of why (all together now) "there's no such thing as GOOD ghost evidence, only COOL ghost evidence."
Another shot from the ballroom - note the thing on the left!
(more info and closeup)
Ghosts seem to have a habit of turning up just outside the left part of the frame in this room. Here's a close-up from another weird one (it looks like Buffalo Bill, who stayed there once, but it's really just a shot of a coat when the camera was moving):
more info/discussion
Ghosts seem to have a habit of turning up just outside the left part of the frame in this room. Here's a close-up from another weird one (it looks like Buffalo Bill, who stayed there once, but it's really just a shot of a coat when the camera was moving):
more info/discussion
Here's a picture taken on one of my tours at the site of the Eastland Disaster a couple of years ago:
See a face in the waves? The odd thing about "faces formed from waves" shots is that I'll go months without seeing one, then get five good ones a night for a week or so, which gives them a BIT more credibility than most "find the hidden face" photos (you can see a face in just about anything if you look hard enough - there are MANY words for this). This one is actually in waves on the other side of the bridge from the Eastland site.
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