Month: October 2020

Ghosts of Halloweens Past

It snowed a bit on Saturday (October 17th). I was out for a long walk in the morning and it started to spit some big, fluffy, white stuff for a few minutes. It was pretty, and no big deal, especially since it was five days later than last year’s first snow, which came on October 12th. Then we had some more flurries on Monday. On Tuesday, I woke up to a winter weather advisory and the expectation of several inches of snow. I guess the most alarming part about this prediction was the phrase which our local newspaper meteorologist used at the end of this forecast: “this snow will probably melt.” In other words, he was saying he can’t promise anything, but he’s hopeful that this particular snow won’t still be on the ground in late March, or whenever the thaw comes. When we went out to vote on Tuesday, the snow had started. I had left my driver’s license in my running clothes, so we had to go back home to get it. Then we were stopped for a TV interview on the way out of city hall. (I think they were intrigued by the fact that I wore a Chicago Cubs facemask, while Kathleen wore her St. Louis Cardinals mask.) The upshot of all of this is, that by the time we were winding our way back home, the snow was several inches thick and getting deeper; the streets were so slick that we couldn’t make it up the hill to our home. Luckily, Ben and his family lived right there, at the bottom of the hill. I borrowed a shovel and cleared two tire tracks up the steep, 150-yard hill, so we were able to get home. We received 8 or 9 inches of snow officially before it stopped, the biggest October snow since the “Halloween Surprise” of 1991.

Still, I’m not scared. Hell, I’m a Wisconsinite now, with one mild winter under my belt, so a little snow can’t frighten me. When I was a child, though, I feared many things. As Halloween approaches in this, the strangest of years, I thought back to those early days in Chicago and some of the things that scared me.

Growing up across the street from a cemetery, I suppose it was inevitable that ghosts would figure prominently in my childhood fears. In fact, my neighborhood of Mount Greenwood was surrounded by cemeteries. Even our local gang called themselves “The Graveyard Gents.” There is a reason for all of the cemeteries. Back in the 1800s, city officials determined that it was a health concern to have disease-ridden corpses buried within city limits. At the time, my neighborhood was outside the city, and at least ten cemeteries existed within about three miles of our house. Later, when those health concerns subsided, Mt. Greenwood was annexed by the large metropolis and became a Chicago neighborhood ringed by graveyards containing tall trees, green grass, and, to my young mind, ghost-infested graves.

Many of Chicago’s best stories about haunted places and ghostly spirits originated in this area and probably stem from the presence of so many cemeteries. People still talk about the ghostly parade of monks that supposedly visited St. Rita Catholic Church in 1961. The Batchelors Grove Cemetery in the nearby forest preserves has produced stories of mysterious lights, phantom cars, and ethereal apparitions. The most famous tale, though, is that of “Resurrection Mary,” a spectral woman dressed in white who was spurned by her boyfriend at a nearby dancehall in the 1920s and has been seen hitch-hiking along Archer Avenue late at night for nearly a century. We knew all of those stories while growing up, and even engaged in a graveyard challenge that was designed to test our fortitude. Al Capone was originally buried in Mt. Olivet Cemetery, directly across the street from our house. Later, his body was moved to the suburbs, but a family plot and a large marker remains in Mt. Olivet. The game consisted of climbing under the fence and entering the cemetery, alone and after dark, going in several hundred yards and touching Al’s grave, then running like hell back to our secret entrance without getting caught by ghosts or the Mt. Olivet night watchman. I believe that my later prowess as a runner developed in those stress-filled excursions into the graveyard. (The picture above is from my brother’s Christmas greeting from a few years ago. That is the Capone family gravestone in the center)

My house proved to be no haven from such terrors. When I was about 7 or 8, I had a nightmare involving some Halloween novelties that we owned. My siblings and I had these scary-looking, life-size, plastic heads on sticks that we would carry while trick-or-treating. One was a white skeleton skull, and the other was a red devil’s head, complete with sinister horns. In my dream, I was down in our basement—which was dark and scary under the best of circumstances—when these two heads suddenly became animated and began bouncing in the air and chasing me. I woke up screaming, with cold sweats, and I never again felt safe going down to the basement alone. Of course, soon after that terrifying nightmare, my parents built a bedroom for my brother and I down in the very place that produced such uneasiness. On many nights, I slept with my eyes open, ever alert for dancing skulls and devils.

Like many children of my generation, we also had a “witch” living on our block. It should be noted that, as in the Middle Ages, any older woman living alone was suspected of being a witch. Ours was a widow named Nellie Shevlin and she lived in a big, imposing home built on the corner in the early part of the 20th Century. The rest of our houses on Sacramento Avenue were new,1200-square-feet, tract homes, all indistinguishable from the others. We tormented poor Mrs. Shevlin by calling her nasty names or running through her yard to avoid capture. Chicago folksinger Michael Smith had his own neighborhood witch, as he explained in his song, Crazy Mary:

“Crazy Mary from Londonderry, lived next door to the cemetery;

How many lovers have you buried?” we would shout

As we ran along the green and golden path

That took us home away from Crazy Mary.

Out of curiosity, I looked up Mrs. Shevlin while writing this article. She died in 1984, at age 95, and was buried across the street from her huge house, in Mt. Olivet Cemetery.

The centerpiece of any Halloween for most kids was the wonderful ritual of trick-or-treating. You knock on a stranger’s door, yell some nonsensical phrase, and they give you candy. Great stuff. One year in particular stands out in my memory. In 1964, I was ten years old, and Halloween fell on a Saturday. As soon as my brother Dan and I realized that we would have a longer time than usual for trick-or treating, we planned our attack as if it were a military operation. We had maps, charts, timetables, and contingency plans. We carried pillow cases, assuming our puny paper Halloween sacks would prove unequal to the task of carrying multiple loads of heavy candy. We had to plan carefully so that each time we ventured out, we ended our route just as our bag was filled and ready to empty. We started before noon and continued, with only a short break for dinner, until nine o’clock at night. Each time we circled back to our house, the mountain of candy in our basement bedroom grew larger.

As time has passed, the legendary nature of that eventful Halloween has been aggrandized in the hyperbolic recesses of my memory. I seem to recall other kids in the neighborhood lining the streets and cheering our efforts as we trudged out, time after time, with a dogged determination to fill our bags yet again. I could even swear that at one point General George S. Patton himself stood on the side of the road, his be-medaled chest swelling with pride as he said, “Never before in the history of trick-or-treating have two kids engaged in a major conflict before dinner, emptied their bags at home, and marched right out to do battle again in the evening. By God, I’m proud of those boys!” Then, as the theme music swelled, he fell into step with us and marched along by our sides, just to share in our glory. At least I’m pretty sure it happened that way.

This year, like everything else, the annual cycle of holidays, events, and rituals will be disrupted by the Covid crisis. We have decided that it would not be safe to open the door repeatedly to dozens of kids while Wisconsin Covid cases are spiking dramatically. So no trick-or-treaters this year. Abigail and Lucas are busy building a haunted house, so we will probably just visit with them and give them way too much candy.

That is, unless their haunted house is in the basement. I’m not going down there alone.

Anniversary of the Great Fire

This week marks the anniversary of one of the worst natural disasters in American history. Every school-child in Chicago learns about the Great Chicago Fire that occurred on October 8, 1871. The terrible flames that swept the city that night killed over 300 people and leveled 2000 acres of wooden homes and businesses. The popular myth about a cow belonging to Mrs. O’Leary having kicked over a lantern that started the blaze persists to this day and is part of Chicago folklore. The city rebuilt rapidly, with the best architects of a generation flocking to Chicago to use the blank slate created by the devastation to experiment with new building styles, materials, and techniques.

Few are aware, however, that 149 years ago, on the same day as the Chicago Fire, a much more deadly and destructive fire broke out near the lumber-mill town of Peshtigo (pronounced PESH-tig-oh), about 260 miles north of Chicago right here in Wisconsin. That conflagration raced over 1,250,000 acres (600 times bigger than the Chicago Fire) in less than two hours, obliterating a dozen towns, 2,400 square miles of old-growth timber, and killing an estimated 2500 people. The exact number of dead is impossible to ascertain, because many people were reduced to ashes, while hundreds of unidentified people and body parts were interred in a mass grave. To this day, after a century and a half of tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, blizzards, and forest fires, only one disaster has claimed more lives in the U.S. (The five worst disasters have been, 1) The Galveston Hurricane, 1900, 2) Peshtigo Fire, 1871, 3) The Johnstown Flood, 1889, 4) The San Francisco Earthquake, 1906, and 5) The Tri-State Tornado, 1925 in Mo, Ill, and Ind.) As is the case in many horrible catastrophes, however, there were human factors that made the Peshtigo fire much worse that it would otherwise have been.

Peshtigo lies on the western side of Green Bay, a finger of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. It was a lumber town that sprang up to take advantage of the gigantic white pine trees that grew in the area. These trees, many of them six-feet and more in diameter and stretching two-hundred feet into the air, were part of a virgin forest that once spread across the northern US, from Maine to the Dakotas. Lumbermen in the area harvested the trees, cut them into 12- or 16-feet lengths, dragged them to local rivers, and floated them to sawmills along Green Bay. There, they were cut into boards, loaded onto ships, and taken to Chicago. The treasured wood made its way via railroads to the treeless prairies of the Great Plains to be turned into houses, stores, railroad ties, wagons, and myriad other items. In 1871, lumber was one of the most valuable commodities in the nation, and northern Wisconsin was the center of that industry.

Peshtigo was surrounded by forest, although some of the land had already been cleared by loggers and farmers. To make access to the valued trees easier, lumbermen cut down every single tree in a contracted forty-acre lot, but they took out only logs that were bigger than two feet in diameter. Further, loggers were notoriously sloppy about what they left behind after they clear-cut an area. Everything else—smaller trees, branches, sawdust—was left on the ground to rot. Thus, much material around Peshtigo had been there for years, drying in the sun. Loggers left a virtual desert landscape behind them—a desert piled high with dry, combustible kindling.

Local farmers often sold the lumber rights on their land to companies who would do the heavy work of clearing the big trees from their property. The farmers then pulled the stumps and dragged the remaining material—stumps, dead trees, branches, etc.—into huge piles and burned it. Fire was just another tool for many farmers, and black ashes swirling in the autumn air was a familiar sight. That summer, however, the northern Midwest had experienced a summer drought so severe that the local swamps had all dried up and were as desiccated as tinder. There had been only one sprinkle of rain in Peshtigo since July, and every piece of vegetation was parched. Cranberries, the state fruit of Wisconsin, were a big crop in the area, and they grew in the many marshy bogs in and around Peshtigo. These bogs, too, had dried up. Even the two-to-three-feet-thick layers of peat beneath the surface were dry as dust. A strange phenomenon had been reported repeatedly before the fire in which whisps of smoke or even flames would be seen emerging from the ground to dance along the forest floor or curl around tree trunks. This indicates that fire was smoldering beneath the surface in many areas. All through September, people would be called to fight these fires with bucket brigades before they spread. Dense smoke in the area blocked out the sun on many days and led people to wear handkerchiefs as facemasks that would look familiar in the Covid year of 2020. By October, these fires had become so frequent that people were exhausted from fighting them, and a sense of impending doom was palpable in the town.

On October 8th, something sparked the flames. Like the Chicago Fire, no one knows exactly how it started, but conditions near Peshtigo were primed for a fire. Making matters much worse, a perfect storm of weather conditions was closing in on the area. A warm-weather system from the Gulf of Mexico that had driven Wisconsin temperatures into the eighties—unusually high for the upper Midwest in October—collided with a low-pressure cold front moving in from the West. That collision produced “cyclonic” winds that gusted to over 110 miles per hour and spun off F-5 “fire tornadoes” that slammed into Peshtigo and generated funnels of fire that stretched high into the sky. The tornadoes ripped houses from their foundations and tossed railroad cars high into the air. That terrible day in Wisconsin, the small, existing fires coalesced into a massive wall of flames and spread rapidly, whipped into a fast-moving frenzy by those hurricane-like, swirling winds. Further, a forest fire often generates winds of its own while sucking all of the oxygen from its path. These flames erupted into an actual firestorm that reached temperatures of 2000 degrees—hot enough to melt iron and metal. The only previously recorded firestorm of this intensity had been the Great London Fire of 1666.

Horrible scenes unfolded in which people tried to survive by jumping into the Peshtigo River only to have their hair or clothes catch fire; many drowned or succumbed to hypothermia in the cold water. Dozens of people huddled together in a plowed field, but were consumed by the fast-moving, overheated air. Some people jumped into wells to avoid the blaze only to suffocate when the flames sucked all of the oxygen from the confined space. Because of the strong winds and flaming debris, the fire jumped rivers and destroyed everything in its path. Peshtigo had been a thriving town with lumber mills, a large boarding house, a factory that made wooden implements of various sorts, hotels, churches, homes, and stores. Nothing was left standing. Forests, farms, and towns were destroyed. At least 2500 people in the area were completely vaporized or left as unidentifiable lumps of charred flesh. In an area ten miles long and forty miles wide, well over a million acres of timber were burned.

Because it took place in a large city that was quickly rebuilt, the Chicago Fire on the same day has over-shadowed Peshtigo historically, but this blaze was much worse. Peshtigo never recovered from this disaster, and today, it is only slightly larger than it was on the eve of the fire.

The combination of landscape, wind, and specific conditions that created the firestorm have been studied numerous times since 1871. Scientists began calling it the “Peshtigo Paradigm,” and American and British military tacticians in the 1940s examined the blaze closely. As difficult as it is to believe, they were trying to learn how to recreate firestorm conditions for bombing raids against Germany and Japan. In February and March, 1945, similar firestorms were purposely generated by incendiary bombs in Dresden, Germany and Tokyo, Japan, killing a combined 125,000 people in those two crowded cities.

Next year will mark the 150th anniversary of these fires. You’ll hear a great deal about Chicago, Mrs. O’Leary, and the city that, like the mythological Phoenix, rose from the ashes to become greater than before. Don’t forget Peshtigo, however, and the incredible natural disaster that took place on that same day.