The Belden Avenue 'Gang of Ghosts': Dr W. C. Rowe's Haunted House, Chicago

Chicago, summer 1889. Lake View had just been annexed. In May, the murder of Dr Patrick Cronin had given the city what the Chicago Tribune called "a world renowned tragedy in its Carlson cottage." On the North Side, a few blocks from the lakefront Lincoln Park, Dr W. C. Rowe rented a two-storey house on Belden Avenue. He was a physician and a deacon of a Congregational church. He lived there with his wife, a housekeeper and their children, among them Belle, 15.

It began with a tremendous noise in the front hall. Belle woke to it. In the Tribune's words, "the noise grew gradually louder and louder, then dwindled away into silence." Then came the sound of men in the hallway, "stamping up the front stairs to the second floor." Shortly after midnight, the house erupted. "There was a great rushing and banging in the upper hallway, as if two men were grappling in a death struggle. There was the loud report of a pistol and the sound of a heavy body falling down the stairs."

Dr Rowe struck a match and lit a lamp. The housekeeper came up the back stairs with another light. They searched. "The doors were all closed and locked, and even the windows were found to be fastened."

The noises returned "with variations every night." The housekeeper heard men running up and down the back stairs. The family heard sounds like parlor matches being lit. They heard the chairs in the parlor move about. Nobody ever saw a thing. "They cannot be seen," the Tribune wrote. "They do not softly and silently glide all in white." Instead, "they yell, and fight, and fire pistols, and fall down stairs."

Mrs Rowe told the neighbours and invited people to stay the night. "Everyone who has done so has heard the noises, been mystified, not to say frightened, and investigated without result." The Tribune judged the doctor "presumably a man of truth" and gave its verdict. "The truth of the matter is that the Rowe household is the abiding place of a gang of ghosts." Other houses were said to be haunted. A lawyer living a block away declared that a ghost had stopped him in the street as he walked home from Clark Street.

The story ran on 18 July 1889. About 1,000 people came to see the house the next day. About 5,000 came the day after, according to the rival Chicago Inter Ocean. Dr Rowe still refused to believe in the ghost theory. He decided to move anyway.

Frank Turner, a real estate agent connected with the property, had his own theory. He suggested that Nellie Wilson, the former owner, had staged the noises to undo her sale of the house and get it back. "I don't know anything about how she did it, but depend upon it, she did do it." Wilson sued for $10,000 for libel. On 1 August 1889 she withdrew the suit. Turner then denied making the remarks and blamed the reporters for inventing them. No court ever ruled on whether a hoax took place.

Outside Chicago, the story drew scorn. On 21 July 1889 the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle declared that "Chicago is not old enough to have ghosts." The city had "an odor of damp mortar and a glistening of new paint" that "the ghostly character cannot abide."

The Belden Avenue house belongs to a busy year for newspaper hauntings. 1889 also brought the Dagg poltergeist in Quebec and "Shakespeare's Ghost" in Brooklyn. Even the house number is uncertain today, given as 394 in one place and 334 in another. Whatever fought on the stairs of the Rowe house was never explained.