A Week of Ghost Busting

I spent most of last week at work on ghostly business - that's my night job.

Monday and Tuesday I was working with the History Channel an episode of a new, untitled show - the episode in question will be all about HH Holmes, Chicago's first serial killer. On the first day I taped several hours of interviews with them, then drove them out to the "body dump" site that I take people to on tours. I started taking people there as a historical curiosity on Holmes-themed tours (he's big business around here), but wound up having to add it to the ghost tours after a few sightings that I can't explain (hard though I always try). Hector talked to them there about the night a woman disappeared in front of the bus.

Tuesday was the big one: the filming that day was at the post office built on the site of Holmes' infamous "murder castle" on the south side, with Jeff Mudgett (Holmes' great great grandson) and a couple of people I know for the "strange Chicago history" scene who were working with Jeff. I got to go into the basement, where some 1890s bricks are still standing, and got some of the most baffling "ghost evidence" I've ever seen - the first such stuff ever captured there. I always tell people that "there's no such thing as good ghost evidence, only cool ghost evidence." This is some of that.

For my full report, see the new Chicago Unbelievable post.

While I was in the castle, I got an email from the producers of the Ghost Hunters show, and spent Wednesday and Thursday doing some location scouting for them here. I've only seen that show a couple of times (watching ghost shows for me is like being a cop and watching cop shows), but that show tends to seem more level-headed than some of the other ones.

In the middle of all this, I did seven tours for Chicago Hauntings last week and started work on re-vamping their webpage.

In my day, kids, we didn't have a million ghost hunting shows. If we wanted to see a ghost story on TV, we had to hope the latest In Search Of... or Unsolved Mysteries episode had ghosts in it. And it usually didn't! Usually it was some missing persons case or something about UFOs. If we were really lucky there might be a good episode of Sightings on, but that seemed to air irregularly, and that was usually UFOs, too!

Speaking of those, though, a couple of weeks ago I saw a couple of things circling the sky over Chicago that looked like airplanes that were on fire. A small crowd gathered, trying to figure out what the heck they were. We all agreed that it was too high up to be on fire, though it was flickering and orange. First one of them made a wide circle, then another. Not too into "alien" stories myself, but I gotta wonder what the heck those things were.