Haunted Gary

by Ursula Bielski

  They planned to go to Texas via the Cal Sag Channel, the Illinois River and the Mississippi, but before they could depart, Alice died of uremic poisoning. At the funeral, when reporters once again accosted Wilson, he drew a gun and threatened to kill the reporter and himself. Wilson was thrown in jail—and Alice was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, against her wishes to be cremated on Mount Tom.

  The fascination with Diana continues to thrive even today, almost a century after her premature death. Visitors seek the site of her shack, wonder what really happened in her last days and look for the most famous apparition in Duneland: the site of Alice Gray swimming nude in the earliest morning light, as she often did in life.

  By all reports, it was the fishermen who had witnessed these dawn dips who began reporting sightings of her after death—a dark figure shooting through the water or flitting across the sands. But while legends of Diana persist, actual experiencers of her are rarer than the solitude she sought.

  In 1969, “Ryan” was a college kid home to Chicago for the summer, staying for a month at his family’s weekend home in Ogden Dunes, by many reports the area where Alice’s cabin once stood. The house was on a dune along the shore, and Ryan had gone out onto the front porch early one morning after waking:

  I was very groggy, you know when you wake up and you’re almost in a trance. I went out to wake up in the fresh air, and it was cold, very early morning, with the sun just starting to come up, and I sat down on one of the chairs and just looked out over the lake. There was a lot of brush in front of where the house was, and so I couldn’t really see the beach except for a sliver of it, with the water beyond. I watched a figure swimming parallel to the shore, almost doing laps, just very steadily and quietly swimming back and forth, about fifty yards at a time, then flipping over and swimming back. Like I said, I was very groggy and kind of hypnotized by this, and then after about five minutes, the figure flipped under the water but didn’t come back up. The fact of this woke me up fast, and I got up and looked more closely at where the person had gone under. There was no sign of anyone there at all. I was rattled by then and got my shoes and ran down to the water. It took all of probably three minutes. There was no one in the water, and there was no one anywhere around. I don’t know if you know there are riptides in the area that kill people every year. But the water was completely still, and it happens with the big waves. So I was very panicked and confused, but you know, you just immediately start second guessing yourself, so I figured this must have been my imagination or maybe I had fallen back asleep on the porch. I told my mom when she got up, and she said, “You saw Diana!” and told me the story. And all the hair on my arms stood up.

  Stairs to the beach from the Dunes, circa 1920. Courtesy of Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest.

  CHAPTER 5

  A SHOT IN THE DARK

  LOOKING FOR THE LADY IN RED OF BLACK OAK

  The neighborhood of Black Oak teeters on the far southwest side of the city. Many locals wryly nickname the area “White Oak” as it is the only predominantly white neighborhood in the city of Gary. Originally a somewhat lawless, ragtag settlement outside of town, Black Oak was annexed in 1976 under the administration of Mayor Richard Hatcher. Prior to that, Black Oak had been an unincorporated area informally associated with nearby Hammond, and the area still has the Hammond area code for telephone numbers. Illegal dumping is a serious problem in the floodplain here, where standing water and garbage are an omnipresent problem, and the neighborhood includes Lake Sandy Jo, a Superfund site used as a toxic waste dump from 1967 to 1975, when it was closed by court order.

  Today, the neighborhood is a mixture of trailer parks and environmental waste, haunted—as is the rest of the city—by better times…and more than one ghost. Most of the neighborhood lies within the floodplain of the Little Calumet River, which is rife with ghost stories of vanishing hitchhikers and other phantoms. (See Chapter 9: “A Girl in the Road.”) But these wraithlike women do not wander Black Oak alone.

  Tales persist here, too, of a so-called Lady in Red of Black Oak, who is supposed to have been the proprietor of a local brothel during the days of Prohibition. According to rumors, the site—though the building is now demolished—is still a place where passersby will hear residual sounds from the brothel’s violent past: car tires screeching, women crying out from violence, machine gun and pistol fire and even the wail of babies crying, perhaps aborted or abandoned children. According to the legend, the owner—the “Lady in Red”—was shot to death in the basement tavern, and to this day, her horrifying specter is still sometimes seen. It is said she will materialize from nothing and attack unsuspecting passersby in the dead of night, either on the property or in the street, lunging at pedestrians or throwing herself on the hoods of passing cars.

  Abandoned trailer park, Black Oak, 2015. Photo by J.C. Rositas.

  Diligent searching and talking with locals uncovered no clues about the historical reality of the legend of the Black Oak Lady in Red—nor more than the faintest notion of where her brothel might have been—but a police officer colleague did say that the area continues to have a reputation as a sort of “anything goes, Wild West kind of place.” According to stories told by old-timers, the area was a hotbed of vice, filled with taverns and gambling dens and even an opium den and more than just one brothel. But memories are so sketchy and written history nonexistent, so the locations of any such establishments are lost to time.

  Though no trace of a Black Oak Lady in Red could be found, a curiously fitting setting came to light in the city proper, with some interesting similarities to the folk tale. The ghost at this location, however, is much more famous.

  In 1910, more than two hundred taverns thrived in Gary, including the notorious Bucket of Blood, which was operated out of the basement of the Kostur Hotel, formerly located at 1210 Broadway. The Kostur Hotel was actually the famed Gary brothel operated by Ana Cumpanas or Anna Sage, the madam who marked history forever with her fatal betrayal of Public Enemy Number One: Indiana-born John Dillinger.

  Born in 1889, Anna was a native of Comloşu Mare, a village of Banat, in present-day Romania. After wedding Michael Chiolak in 1909, the couple immigrated to the United States, setting up housekeeping in East Chicago, Indiana, adjacent to the bourgeoning city of Gary. Within two years, the marriage fell apart, and Anna fell into prostitution to support herself. She was an astute judge of character and wise to the ways of men, and it wasn’t long before she herself was a madam, establishing a brothel in her hometown of East Chicago and then in Gary, catering to a wide variety of clientele. Anna then married a lawyer, Alexandru Suciu, whose surname was changed to “Sage” by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

  The marriage lasted until 1932, when she again left home. Far from destitute this time, Anna continued to expand her well-known “gentlemen’s entertainments,” opening another brothel in Chicago, on Halsted Street on the city’s north side. By the mid-1930s, Sage was of keen interest to the local authorities, who tracked her as an “alien of low moral character.” Anna eluded deportation by carefully sidestepping the authorities until the lover of Polly Hamilton, one of Anna’s prostitutes, seemed to offer a way to permanent citizenship. Hamilton’s companion, John Dillinger, the notorious Indiana bank robber, had recently killed two Chicago police officers, and Sage saw the chance to turn him in in exchange for naturalization—plus a hefty reward.

  On July 22, Anna tipped off Chicago police and FBI: she would be accompanying Hamilton and Dillinger to a movie at the Biograph Theater on Chicago’s North Lincoln Avenue. When asked how police could recognize her in the crowd, Anna promised to wear a blazing red dress.

  Hours after the pact, Dillinger was shot in the narrow alleyway just south of the theater as the threesome left the film that night. Hamilton fled down nearby Fullerton Avenue, jumping a northbound elevated train, wracked by panic and horror. Anna received only half of the reward money—$5,000—and in 1936 was deported to Romania, where
she died of liver disease in 1947.

  Anna had not worn red that night. She had appeared at the theater dressed in orange, but newspapers wrote of it as it appeared: seemingly red in the shining lights of the Biograph’s marquee. According to legend, a stranger wrote in chalk on the Lincoln Avenue sidewalk that night:

  Stranger, stop and wish me well

  Just a prayer for my soul in Hell.

  I was a good fellow, most people said

  Betrayed by a woman all dressed in red.

  John Dillinger reportedly went on to haunt numerous locations associated with the most thrilling moments of his career, most notably the alley—still called “Dillinger’s Alley” by Chicagoans today—where he was gunned down that hot Chicago night. But he also has never quite left behind his native Indiana. For years, visitors to the Crown Point jail where he made his daring escape in 1934 have claimed to encounter the dashing Dillinger, reporting banging coming from the cell area, photographing odd white clouds of mist and smelling the scent of cologne.

  Located a short drive from Gary, the jail is a popular point of pilgrimage for ghost hunters, who have spent many nights in the jail and in the Halls of Justice downstairs. Investigators aren’t sure if it is Dillinger himself who haunts the site or if the residue was left by the many violent men who have been housed here. They also wonder if he’s about to take up residence now that the Dillinger Museum is moving in.

  The staff of the Dillinger Museum—previously located in the Indiana visitors’ center in Hammond but recently moved to Crown Point—have talked for years about the odd goings-on around the late public enemy’s artifacts, including the clothes he was shot in and the wicker basket used to move his body. They would report shadowy figures moving through the museum and picked up by security cameras at night.

  But what of Anna Sage? What of the Lady in Red? And what about Black Oak?

  There is no doubt that Black Oak is a deeply haunted place, but its elusive lady continues to be just that. As for the Bucket of Blood—and its headstrong proprietor—they are gone on the wind as well. Today, the site of the Kostur Hotel is a strip of stores composing the 1200 block of Broadway in the heart of struggling Gary. Still, every once in a while, driving by on a summer night with the windows down, some claim to hear faraway screams of women and children, the desolate sounds of a faraway time and place, carried off on the wind over the silent Dunes.

  CHAPTER 6

  ON THE WAY HOME

  GHOSTS OF REEDER ROAD

  Haunted roads run all through the history of Northwest Indiana, stretches of dirt road or dark highway that have become legendary in the minds of locals. Sometimes there is a historic event that starts the stories: a car accident, a train wreck. Sometimes there is a cemetery near the road, where ghostly sightings are said to occur. Sometimes strange creatures appear—vicious black dogs or towering winged figures and even mysterious lights or vessels in the sky above.

  The Gary area has its share of haunted highways. In nearby Munster, teenagers seek out a stretch of Sheffield Road near an old Nike missile base known as “Werewolf Road,” where a long-ago killer reportedly slit the throats of an unsuspecting couple, stringing the young man upside down in a tree. In Portage, Old Stagecoach Road was reportedly the home of local witches, who practiced their craft in the roadside woods. Drivers say that if you stop in the road and turn off your headlights, you’ll see shadow people crossing the road in front of your car. Keep driving and you may meet a silent, black, 1930s-style sedan or the “phantom 4x4” that is reported to chase cars down the road before vanishing. In Burns Harbor, Old Porter Road is the home of a band of ghostly but ferocious canines with glowing yellow eyes that are sometimes seen running along moving trains here, their howls making passengers’ blood run cold. Though these numerous paths send excited thrills through local ghost hunters, there is no highway in the region more notorious than Reeder Road.

  The entrance to Reeder Road is closed to vehicle traffic today, though it once provided a shortcut from Griffith to Merillville. Photo by John B. Stephens.

  The road is today an abandoned footpath leading through the woods on the outskirts of Gary in the little town of Griffith. To find Reeder’s point of origin, one must approach from Colfax Street and head toward Oak Ridge Park, where the old, blocked-off entrance can be found. In the early part of the twentieth century, the road went all the way through to Merillville and was used by Griffith businesses as a transport shortcut. According to some stories, the area was also used as a spot for body dumping during the Beer Wars of the Prohibition era. After the road fell into disuse and was closed to traffic to Merrillville, the area only continued to gain in notoriety, becoming famous in the early 1970s as a lovers’ lane and drug den, where local pushers would go to sell and users to shoot up. For at least two generations, local young people have shared legends of the road, including urban legends of “hooked maniacs,” stories of mass murders and tales of ghostly lights, screams and shadow figures on the road.

  Still other tales are told of the old railroad tracks that run parallel to Reeder Road, where hikers have spotted a dark figure clothed in black, holding an oil lamp and walking the rails, supposedly the spirit of an engineer who was thrown from a train in the 1940s. One witness, a naturalist who was tracking the area for wildlife one evening in the late 1980s, said:

  I had been sitting quietly on the side of the road opposite where the old tracks are. Probably I had been there for two hours or more, recording sounds for an audio study, when I saw a flashing light across the old road, from the direction of the tracks. I thought it was just a car on the paved road, but then the light didn’t pass by. I watched as it stopped, bobbed or flickered for a minute and then sort of backed up and went in the other direction. Then I thought it was maybe a police car looking for someone or even for me; maybe that someone had seen me go in and I wasn’t supposed to be there. I decided to go over and talk to the cop and explain that I was with the university and just doing some fieldwork, but as I walked toward the light, it was just gone. I mean, it just winked out like a light switch, and I came through the trees and there was no car there, nothing.

  Some travelers along Reeder Road have also claimed to hear screaming coming from a small, dilapidated country church about a mile into the woods from Griffith where, according to legend, an erstwhile pastor lost his mind during a long-ago service, dropped tranquilizers in the Communion wine and butchered his congregants, burned them alive and suffocated their children.

  One family was hiking through the area on a glorious Sunday afternoon in 2003, just before Halloween, when they were alarmed to hear a woman’s frantic, relentless screaming coming from the woods. “Rich” was with his wife and three daughters, ages seven to twelve, and remembers:

  My wife had grown up here and wanted to do something spooky for Halloween and wanted to go down this road, which was fine. The girls liked ghost stories, and it was a really nice day, very warm and sunny. We, of course, didn’t think anything of it, just wanted to enjoy being at this spooky place with the girls. We heard this woman screaming—it sounded like it was only about one hundred feet off the road, maybe less…Screaming and then moaning, crying…sobbing, what have you. It was so eerie. It was broad daylight, and I thought some girl was being attacked or raped. I didn’t know what to do. It was so weird because it went on and on, like in a horror movie when someone is being tortured. Of course, I immediately started walking in the direction of the screaming, but then my wife said, “Rich! What are you doing?!” And I realized what she meant…her and our girls were there, and we didn’t know what was happening. This wasn’t a sound like someone hurt; it was like someone BEING hurt. We didn’t have a cellphone yet, so we walked the girls out of there fast and went home to Merillville, where we lived at the time, and called 911 and that was the end of it. I asked them to tell me if they found anything, but they didn’t. Or said they didn’t anyway.

  Reeder Road today. Photo by John B. Stephens.

  Wit
hout a doubt, the most talked-about phantom of Reeder Road is a third Gary-area vanishing hitchhiker, believed to have been a girl named Elizabeth Wilson. According to the oft-told tale, the girl was first encountered by a young man who was driving home on Reeder Road after leaving his high school prom sometime in the 1970s. As he peeled through the woods, he slammed on the brakes when a young woman appeared in the road ahead. She was wearing a long gown and had flowing blond tresses. Almost before he stopped the car, the girl opened the passenger side door and climbed in. The girl was frantic, telling the young man that her car had crashed into a ditch in the woods. She directed him to drive on, and when they passed Ross Cemetery, she vanished from the car. According to old accounts, the girl was believed to be Elizabeth Wilson, who drowned in a forest ditch along Reeder Road in 1955 when the car she and her boyfriend were driving in swerved and rolled over in the woods. Elizabeth, it is said, was thrown from the car and ended up facedown in a swampy area, where she drowned before her boyfriend could save her.

  Myriad stories are told of drivers encountering this girl in the road—first on Reeder when it was still open to vehicle traffic and today along the boundaries of Ross Cemetery, where Elizabeth was allegedly buried after the accident. Typically, a male driver alone will slam on the brakes when a girl in a white gown appears in the road and immediately runs around to get into the passenger side of the front seat. Sometimes she bangs on the hood of the car, imploring the driver to stop. After a few flustered moments in the car, she simply vanishes.