Haunted Gary

by Ursula Bielski

  Passage through the Dunes—like settlement in the area—was never easy, and attempts to traverse the sandy shoreline became legendary in Indiana lore. The first evidence of trail mapping in the Region comes from the writings of Joseph Bailly in 1822, when he became the first settler in the area, just south of the Calumet Beach Trail (also known as the Lake Shore Trail). After the War of 1812, the American government turned an eye to the area of passage, as leaders of the growing populace looked to establish military roads joining the scattered forts of the westward-moving nation. The intended road (meant to link the fort at Detroit with that at Chicago) is still a major route between Chicago and Detroit today. That road followed the Great Sauk Trail from Detroit to modern LaPorte, Indiana. Here the traveler had two options: to head somewhat south to enter Chicago from the west or to follow the lakeshore all the way to Fort Dearborn. Interestingly, travelers from Northwest Indiana to Chicago today still have the options of entering the city by the free highway of I-94 or by following the old military road of present day I-90 along the lakeshore and over the Skyway bridge, along the soldiers’ route originally called the “Chicago Road.” It was this road to which the evacuation party at Fort Dearborn was headed in the summer of 1812, when the group—led by Billy Wells—was attacked by Indians in today’s South Loop neighborhood of Chicago, their bodies scalped and abandoned on the windswept sands south of the river.

  With the opening of travel routes, the Dunes erupted into a flurry of activity in the decades that followed. Miller Beach, the northern tip of the Dunes, was an early center of interest. By the mid-1830s, today’s Miller Beach land had been purchased and laid out by traders William and George Ewing and George Walker. They called it “Ewing’s Subdivision,” and the name still marks the lots bounded by this original plat. In 1851, with the coming of the railroad, the land—and the Dunes—would never be the same.

  The dawn of the Lake Shore and Michigan Railway brought the establishment of the “Miller’s Station” stop. Today, the famed South Shore Line—a mostly commuter rail line (to Chicago) operated by Chicago’s Metra Rail service—runs through Miller, which historians variously believe was christened to commemorate a local contractor or innkeeper or a foreman who lost his son in an accident near the site. Immigrants of Swedish origin, who came to the area after the Scandinavian famines of the time, made up the early settlement of Miller. These settlers made their living from sand mining, ice harvesting and—literally—working on the railroads, maintaining the rail lines between Detroit and Chicago.

  Truly from the beginning, as now, the combination of its closeness and the beauty of the region made the Dunes—starting with Miller—a natural point of escape and intrigue for Chicagoans. It would be impossible to survey the history and ghost lore of Gary without taking a close look at the artists, innovators and eccentrics who have kept up a steady stream of traffic from the start—and who, some say, still seem to linger.

  One particularly bizarre early incident concerned Chicago’s infamous Whitechapel Club, a ragtag organization of urban rogues who met in secret, indulged in myriad strangeness and adhered to a strict system of rituals and revelries. One of the club’s members was Honore Joseph Jaxon, a Canadian who was rumored to have fought in an Indian rebellion and escaped hanging by fleeing to Chicago. Part Blackfoot Indian, he arrived in Chicago and immediately began causing trouble, organizing unions and commandeering an office in the Chicago Times building in the Loop. He built a teepee in the office and networked with newspapermen, becoming enamored of their clubby nature and impressing them with his eccentricities.

  Jaxon was soon a member of the Whitechapel Club, and it wasn’t long before he brought along a friend to a meeting one evening: Morris A. Collins. Collins was already known to the membership, as he had made headlines for lobbying to legalize suicide. In a perhaps unsurprising turn of events, Collins shot himself after the meeting, leaving a note asking Jaxon to have his usable body parts removed for scientific study and then to burn what was left over. Collins’s sister refused to allow the dissection, but she gave Jaxon permission to go ahead with the cremation. So Jaxon, at the next meeting of the Whitechapel Club, asked his fellows for help.

  Someone suggested building a funeral pyre on the sands of the Indiana Dunes, in imitation of Lord Byron’s cremation of Percy Shelley. At a time when even cremation in private was considered an abhorrent, sacrilegious practice, everyone in the club loved the idea.

  But carrying out the deed would be expensive: materials for the pyre would have to be purchased, and the Whitechapel club was full of wit but thin of wallet. Two of the members—both reporters—appealed to the publisher of the Herald, who fronted the cash on one condition: that they burn the body on a Saturday night so he could publish the story in the Sunday papers.

  And so, on July 16, 1892, the body was taken by train via the lakeshore railroad and then driven by wagon to the pyre on Miller Beach: a one-hundred-foot-tall tower of cord and driftwood set on the highest dune they could find. Lodged inside the pyre were two kegs of tar bound with cotton rags and drenched with kerosene. Several members gave eulogies or made remarks before ceremoniously lighting their torches, accompanied by harp and zither music, and setting the tower on fire. Rice and Dunne sent the whole story to Chicago from the Miller telegraph office, and the copy sold like hotcakes.

  Miller Beach made headlines again a few years later, in 1896, when aviation pioneer Octave Chanute flew a series of experimental runs from the Dunes near Miller’s Lake Street Beach. The experiments were directly influential for Wilbur and Orville Wright. This was also the time of the first serious ecological research into the staggering biodiversity of the Dunes; it was in the late 1890s when pioneering botanist Henry Chandler Cowles conducted early studies of ecological succession in Miller Woods.

  In subsequent decades, Chicago’s Selig Polyscope and Essanay Studios used the Miller dunes and beaches as scenery in numerous silent films, including Essanay’s The Fall of Montezuma (1912), starring Francis X. Bushman—the Brad Pitt of his day—in which the Dunes suggested the Mexican coastline. Filmed at Miller Beach, the studio employed for the final battle scene the entire First Regiment of the Illinois National Guard.

  But all was not great in Miller. In 1907, local residents had fought to incorporate as the Town of Miller after the staggering growth of Gary threatened annexation. But in the 1910s, Gary again eyed Miller for annexation in order to provide a lakefront park for the employees of the mills, and a joint parks department was founded in 1915, establishing shared administration of present-day Marquette Park between Miller and Gary. But when problems arose in the land sale, Gary threw a fit and petitioned to annex Miller and claim the park property according to eminent domain. In 1918, Gary won, and Miller became a part of the Magic City, though it had been, actually, quite magical on its own.

  Still, Miller continued to thrive as its own little—but growing—world, becoming the center of summer resort activities and adding a bathhouse, a shooting gallery and more than one hundred rental cottages. In the 1950s, Miller began to attract Chicagoans as well, many of whom came for vacation and ended up staying or buying vacation property. Miller’s new settlers included author Nelson Algren, who bought a house on the East Lagoon with the proceeds from the Pulitzer Prize and sales of The Man with the Golden Arm. Another wave of migration from Chicago began in the 1990s, with numerous upwardly mobile Chicagoans—especially those of alternate lifestyles—attracted to the unique and tolerant atmosphere of Miller Beach.

  Millerites were not living in a bubble, however. With the increasing tensions of the century, the Miller neighborhood became a deeply segregated white area, where blacks were for some time allowed only if they had business as workers. In the 1960s, local residents formed the Miller Citizens Corporation (MCC) to slow integration and avoid the “white flight” that was happening all over Gary and other U.S. cities. Along with integration issues, the MCC also became involved in environmental issues, supporting the founding of the Nati
onal Lakeshore in 1966 (which actually did not originally include any part of Miller but which was expanded in 1976 to include Miller Woods and Long Lake). Even in the 2000s, Miller continued to lead the state in important matters, even successfully getting a residential property tax cap written into the Indiana constitution.

  Strom’s bus from central Gary to Miller Beach, 1931. Courtesy of Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest.

  Ghost stories are epidemic in Duneland, beginning even farther northwest of Gary, where visitors to Whiting Beach (known today as Whihala Beach) have long reported shadowy figures from another era walking onshore, dripping wet, dressed in both ancient bathing wear and also fully dressed in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century clothing. After taking a few steps onto the beach, the figures typically vanish. Other visitors to Whihala report hearing laughter ringing on the wind off the lake, though no one is near, and the sounds of children playing in the tree-filled areas of the adjacent park. Also haunting that park is the frightening figure of an elderly man, who is reported to appear directly in front of hikers, seemingly out of thin air, sometimes with a startling cry or moan.

  At Miller Beach, rumors of gangland burials in the sands during the Prohibition era have led residents and visitors to wonder if the curious figures sometimes seen strolling or sitting at the water’s edge—dressed in fedoras and topcoats even in high summer—may be some phantom residue of that violent American era. Similarly, travelers along Route 12—the famed Dunes Highway, which skirts the South Shore railroad line and the beach beyond—have also talked about strange hitchhikers seen on the road, dressed in clothing from another time, quite out of step with the flip-flops and cargo shorts of the other men traversing the pedestrian edge of these beach towns.

  Also in recent years, increasing numbers of “squatchers” have traveled to the Dunes, in search of an elusive cryptid that has been reported on Internet Bigfoot sites and YouTube. Interestingly, sightings of a cryptid here date back to at least the 1920s, when artists and writers working at the beaches would report a stealthy, hairy “man ape” trekking across the sands or through the forests. At the sprawling, festive beaches of the National Lakeshore farther along the coast, bathers sometimes tell of hearing cries across the sands at the area where Little Fort once stood, and there are occasional reports of the apparition of a lone solider at the site of the Battle of Petit Fort (Little Fort), during the American Revolution.

  Men on the beach outside the Gary Bathhouse, circa 1930. Courtesy of Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest.

  Ghost ships, too, sail the waters off the Duneland coast, including the famed schooner Flying Cloud, which left port on November 20, 1857, bound for Buffalo, but broke against the Indiana shore at Grand Calumet, near Miller Beach. The Chicago Tribune described the wreck at the

  wild bleak coast covered with snow, and no friendly hands to render assistance. The whole of the crew were already nearly frozen and unable to swim. They consisted of nine persons, mostly belonging to Cleveland, viz: Alexander Sherwood, Captain; George Gordon, 1st mate; Paul Stedd, 2nd do [deck officer]; John —, steward (shipped at Chicago from barque Morgan); and John Small, Geo. Grimsby, Watt Bain, Francis Fox and Henry Coleman, crew. Only the last two are saved. The Captain, steward, Small and Grimsby were soon so badly frozen that they were unable to move. The captain wanted to jump overboard but was prevented by the others, as he would have drowned immediately, though he was only to die the more lingering death of freezing. Gordon, Bain and Fox jumped overboard twenty-four hours after the vessel struck, and after she had become a perfect wreck, and succeeded in getting ashore; but the two former froze to death and are now on the beach, dead. A shingle maker with a shanty nearby, furnished Fox with shoes and clothes, and assisted him to Miller’s Station, a mile or two distant, from whence he came to this city. He is badly frozen. The boy Coleman managed to get ashore alive, and remained at the shanty near the wreck, badly frozen.

  Some wonder if the myriad phantoms seen roaming the sands of Miller Beach may be the vanquished passengers of the ill-fated Flying Cloud or if the hazy schooner seen offshore each November may be the ghost ship of the long-gone vessel.

  But the Flying Cloud does not sail the Duneland waters alone. J.D. Marshall, a 154-foot wooden vessel, capsized during a furious squall more than one hundred years ago, and its wreckage still lies about a half mile off shore. Four crew members perished in the sinking. The tragedy occurred the night of June 10, 1911, when Captain Leroy Rand was headed back to Chicago after loading salvage from the wreck of the Muskegon, a ship that had been destroyed by fire while docked in Michigan City. The trip to Chicago was an easy one, but the hull sprung a leak and began taking in water. Captain Rand anchored the ship while the crew worked on the repair, but in the meantime, a freak storm came off the lake, sending 20-foot waves blanketing the anchored vessel. The ship rolled over and sank quickly to the floor of the lake, taking with it three crew members who had been working on the repair in the hull. The captain heroically swam to shore, where he found a lifeboat and rowed to attempt rescue of the rest of his men.

  A fourth crew member, Martin Donohue (the first mate), also perished. It was believed that he was killed during the rollover of the vessel. Donohue’s watch stopped at 1:45 a.m., the time of the incident. Strangely, legend has it that if you sail through the site where the Marshall went over, your watch or timepiece will stop as well. In the 1980s, salvagers were caught in mid-act by the U.S. Coast Guard, as officers attempted to raise the wreckage. Numerous artifacts, including the ship’s propeller, were recovered from the thieves, and visitors to the National Park today can see them on display.

  Despite myriad gangland-era phantoms, the chilling cries of long-dead soldiers and Indians and the vanquished crews of long-gone ships, there is one Duneland spirit who holds court over all the rest, though she is the most elusive of all. In Gary’s Oak Hill Cemetery, a simple flush marker holds her grave site, but the stone bears a curious inscription:

  Diana of the Dunes

  Alice Gray Wilson

  The stone was placed by a devotee of the headstrong hermit years after her death in 1925. That the grave exists here in Gary is odd in itself. Alice Gray, by most accounts, wanted to be cremated on a funeral pyre on one of the highest dunes, Mount Tom, her ashes carried away by the wind and water she loved in life. But it wasn’t to be.

  Alice Gray was born in Chicago and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1903, after completing a degree in mathematics at the University of Chicago. She was also awarded honorable mentions for excellence in math, Latin, Greek and astronomy. After matriculation, Gray went to work as a computer at the Division of Meridian Instruments at the United States Naval Observatory, where she cultivated a passionate interest in tide research. After only two years, she left for Germany to study at Gottingen University, where she became fascinated with the “walking commune” movement—an early version of “off the grid” living—which embraced the abandonment of material possessions in favor of living off the land.

  Gray returned to the University of Chicago to work as an editorial secretary at the Astrophysical Journal. Later that year, however, she walked off the job; abandoned her home, family and friends; and went to live in the Indiana Dunes—literally.

  Weirdly, Gray went to the Dunes having been inspired by Lord Byron. Alice took his words (“In solitude when we are least alone…”), steeled herself and made for the windswept shores with nothing but a jelly glass, a knife, a spoon, a blanket and two guns. She found an abandoned shack and made it her home, but it wasn’t long before the curious began to invade.

  It was the press that christened her “Diana of the Dunes”—having changed from “Nymph of the Dunes” after realizing what a great shot she was. The name of Diana (the goddess of the hunt) seemed a more fitting moniker for the woman whom the press had imagined as a sort of ghost of the beach—but whom they quickly came to realize was, rather, an incredibly strong warrior for self-reliance. Reporters and curi
osity seekers were eager to learn about her lifestyle: how she made driftwood boxes and sold them to buy bread. How she caught fish and gathered berries and plants for food. How she furiously studied nature at the Miller Library, engaging patrons in passionate conversations about freedom as the means to a true life.

  In 1920, the press took an even greater interest in Diana. The independent hermit had met a man. Paul Eisenblatter was what many would call a “shady character.” Going by the alias of Paul Wilson, Eisenblatter was also a recluse. Details of his first meeting with Gray are sketchy at best, but by 1921, they were literally “shacking up” in a shelter they called the Wren’s Nest. After the couple moved in together, reporters were relentless, constantly demanding interviews, prying into their love life and asking if the couple was married (no one really knows). It wasn’t uncommon for the feisty Gray to get into shouting matches and even fistfights with reporters and police. In 1923, the couple finally decided to leave the dunes behind after being accused of involvement in a sensational murder. Confronted by the local deputy, Wilson ended up shot in the foot and Alice pistol-whipped (by most accounts), her skull fractured in the altercation. The incident was the proverbial last straw for the couple. On top of the real estate development of the Dunes and the new Dunes Highway (Highway 12), the climate was too much to bear. The solitude and peace they had sought was now too hard to find.

  Sketch of “Diana of the Dunes” by artist Dale Fleming. The real “Diana” had shortly cropped dark hair and a solid physique, far from the “Dune Nymph” described by the early press. Courtesy of the Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest.