Evanston is not what one thinks of when they think of the supernatural. When polled, 51 percent of ETHS students who responded said that they do not believe in ghosts, but perhaps their minds will change once they hear these haunted tales. Here are three of Evanston’s spookiest stories.
The Shipwrecked Ghost
In 1860, the steamboat “The Lady Elgin” crashed on one of Evanston’s many shores. 300 of the 400 passengers were killed, and at the time it was the greatest tragedy to ever happen in Chicago. A mass gravesite was created on the border of Evanston and Chicago, marked only by wooden stakes. The stakes were quickly lost, making the resting place a mystery. In 1899, the Chicago Tribune interviewed one of the survivors. The man quickly mentioned that the ghost of one of the dead passengers had appeared to him every day for the past 40 years. “She is a beautiful woman, in a black gown that has never been dry. She has a gold chain on and diamonds in her ears. She waves her hands at me whenever she sees me,” he said. And this man wasn’t alone, builder Henry Mowers was the first person to see the ship wash up to shore after the accident, and he remembered being visited by the ghost periodically. He described her similarly, saying she was “Clad in black, with diamond rings and a pretty face.” All of the survivors are long dead, but the question remains. Has the woman vanished from existence, or is she just waiting for someone to see her again?
Seaweed Charlie
One of Evanston’s most widely known ghosts, “Seaweed Charlie” is a common visitor to Calvary Catholic Cemetery. According to local legend, in 1951, a navy trainee was practicing his flight skills over Lake Michigan when he crashed on the rocks near Sheridan Road, drowning. His body was never found. These days, some say you can see him at the gates of Calvary Cemetery, yanking the bars and attempting to get inside and claim his final resting place. When interviewed in 1983, Oak Lawn Ghost Society president Dale Kaczmarek said that the body was found in Waukegan, after floating miles away from the crash scene near the cemetery. Kaczmarek said that the body was “still never buried, and returned to the cemetery. Seaweed Charlie exists and is very real.” Ghost expert Richard Crowe recounted that in 1993, two students were driving into Evanston down Sheridan Road and had to swerve around multiple auto collisions, caused by what they described as “a thin glowing figure wearing a heavy coat and flight goggles, crossing the street with no concern for traffic.” It is up to the individual to decide whether or not Seaweed Charlie exists, but Crowe and others recommend visiting the gates of Calvary Cemetery and seeing for yourself.
Evanston’s mental hospital
To the northwest of modern-day Ryan Field, there once stood a three-story brick house in the woods. In the 1880s, a man named B. F. Stanley bought the land and built the house himself. Ten years after the house was built, Stanley was arrested for an unknown crime and spent the rest of his life in a maximum security prison. Then occupants believed he cursed the home, because nobody lived there for more than 12 months at a time. Eventually, a mental asylum would move into the house.
According to Evanston residents at the time, changes began when the mental asylum moved in. Mrs. Henry Parsons, who was interviewed in 1955 about this subject, claimed that “ The inmates would escape and catch little children and run with them for blocks with them screaming in their arms.” All windows and doors were locked for the first time, filling the town with tension. Multiple residents said that when their families were settled down for the night, mental patients would tap on their windows and knock on their doors, begging to be let inside.
No one seems to know what happened to the house today, maybe it was demolished, and a new home was created. These stories only scratch the surface of Evanston’s storied, ghostly past.
