Haunts of the White City: Ghost Stories From the World’s Fair, the Great Fire, and Victorian Chicago by Ursula Bielski. History Press, 2019. ISBN: 9781467139656. Softcover, 272 pages. $21.99.
Even those of us who don’t believe in ghosts can enjoy a good ghost story. And Chicago is full of them.
Ursula Bielski collects many of the more famous spectral tales, and few lesser-known phantoms, in Haunts of the White City. Spawning these claims of the supernatural are the expected historical horrors of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and H. H. Holmes’ killings around the time of the 1893 World’s Fair. Despite the title, though, there is relatively little else included in this volume about the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition except for a vague report of a spirit lurking around the Museum of Science and Industry that may be Director of Works Daniel Burnham.
Readers who pick up this title expecting to find spooky stories likely will be disappointed by this earnest inventory of ghost “sightings,” but believers in the supernatural and Chicago history generalists may enjoy Haunts of the White City. For those interested in more about the devilish Holmes and the Columbian Exposition, the author does offer a 3-hour “Devil in the White City” bus tour.
Some of the sad and gruesome deaths on the 1893 fairgrounds—the Cold Storage Building fire, of course, but also the worker decapitated by a Midway ride, and the messenger boy whose legs were cut off by a train—seem ripe for some author to explore in spectral fiction.
“The Insolent Ghost of a World’s Fair Waiter” by illustrator W. W. Denslow for the Chicago Herald, Jan. 7, 1894.