Haunted Gary

by Ursula Bielski

  Incidents involving a Cline Avenue ghost follow the phantom hitchhiker’s typical unfolding: a motorist—usually a man traveling alone in the wee hours—comes upon a woman walking by the side of the road. She is usually wearing a white dress of another era. The driver offers her a ride, and as they drive on, he finds that his passenger is beautiful but despondent, sullen. After a few minutes of wordless travel, she abruptly asks the driver to pull over, usually near the banks of the Little Calumet River, in the neighborhood of Black Oak. Once the car stops, she leaves without a sound and disappears into the dark water. Numerous witnesses have called police to report what seems to be a suicide attempt, only to be told that there’s “nothing to worry about” or that an officer would be sent “later, to check it out.”

  Some legends say the Cline Avenue ghost drowned herself in the Calumet River, seen here from a bridge at Indiana Harbor. Others say the drownings occurred farther south, in the Little Calumet. Photo by Clarence Goodman

  To understand these encounters, one must recognize that they typically occurred years ago, before the Cline Avenue highway was built. In those days, the old road passed right over the Little Calumet River, not high above it.

  “Butchie” was living in a neighboring town in the 1980s when he found himself traveling alone on Cline after midnight:

  I had left the airport after dropping off a pilot friend and was driving back to Griffith, where I lived, and I was taking Cline Avenue. It was a little before 1:00 a.m., and it was drizzling. I remember because my friend didn’t know if he would be able to fly out in a few hours to pick up his client in Indy. I had just passed Fifth Avenue when I saw this lady in a long dress, like a prom dress or wedding dress, all dressed up, walking in the rain the same direction I was going. I thought right away she must have been going home from a wedding reception or something—it was Saturday night late—and maybe broke down or got into a fight with her boyfriend. It was almost winter—very early November and pretty cold—and she had no coat or even long sleeves on, and she was already pretty soaked. These were days when people wouldn’t accuse you of stuff, so as most people would have, I pulled over and rolled down the window and asked her if she needed a ride. She turned and looked at me, and she was very, very sad. Just very sad. She got in the car and sat in the passenger seat. As I pulled away, I let her sit for a few seconds, then asked where she lived or if she was going somewhere else. She didn’t look at me. She said, “Just drive.” I said, “To where?” and laughed. It was raining harder, and the wipers were going and she was soaking wet. She still didn’t look at me or answer, so I figured I’d keep going toward my house and wait for her to speak up. Which she did after maybe a mile and a half or so. Right after we passed 80, right before the [Little Calumet] River, she yelled, “Stop here!” and I almost jumped it was so loud. I slammed on the breaks, thinking I was about to hit something, and she opened the door and got out and ran toward the river. I got the car out of the road and parked and got out to see where she went, but she wasn’t there. Nothing, nobody around. I tell you, I stood there for a long time, just dumbfounded, just in shock with my mouth open. When I went back to the car, even crazier was that the vinyl car seat where she was sitting, soaking wet, was dry as a bone. Not one drop of water. This was before cellphones, and I don’t know if I even would have called the police right then if I had one because really I didn’t know what had happened. It was just too weird. But when I got home, my conscience got the better of me, and I called to make a report. It was the desk number I got for whatever station was in that area, and the desk sergeant or whoever said, “OK, thanks for calling!” after I told him this woman jumped out of my car and ran into the river. Like it was totally normal. Like, “OK! Have a great day!”

  The Little Calumet River actually plays an important part in several popular versions of Gary’s vanishing hitchhiker story. Perhaps the most well-known is the region’s own version of an old Mexican folktale known as “La Llorona” or the “Weeping Woman.”

  For half a millennium, a phantom known as La Llorona has chilled the blood of Mexico City residents with her cries of “Mis hijos, mis hijos! (My children, my children!)” According to prolific tales, she has been seen for centuries, wringing her spectral hands, her blood-soaked gown trailing behind her. The faithful say she is one of the damned—a murderess condemned by God forever for the killing of her illegitimate children. Like many such wandering phantom “women in white,” La Llorona is attached to a real-life counterpart. Her name was Dona Luisa de Loveros, an Indian princess who fell in love with Mexican nobleman Don Nuno de Montesclaros in 1550. Although Dona Luisa loved Montesclaros deeply and bore two children with him, he refused to honor her with marriage due to her lower social station. When her lover deserted her and wed another, Dona Luisa went insane and stabbed their children to death. Gazing upon her mutilated babies, she immediately realized her deed and took to the streets of the city, crying, “Mis hijos! Mis hijos!” until she was arrested and hanged for infanticide.

  According to many Mexican American accounts, the Cline Avenue ghost was a young Mexican immigrant woman who worked in a factory in the largely Mexican Cudahy neighborhood of Gary and fell in love with a married Anglo foreman. When she became pregnant with his child, she begged her lover to leave his wife so they could marry and raise the child. But he denied even having a relationship with the girl, ending their affair and publicly abandoning her. Desolate, she drowned the baby in the Little Calumet River before stepping in front of a bus and dying herself.

  Another, also ethnic, version of the story centers on a young Polish girl from the nearby town of Whiting who fell in love with a Puerto Rican immigrant—anathema to her strict parents. The couple eloped and settled in the Cudahy neighborhood of Gary, where her husband found work in the steel mills. They lived a happy life and had welcomed two children when disaster struck: the girl’s husband was killed when he fell into a vat of molten steel. Desperate to support her family, she worked to strike up a new relationship and found a willing partner in a wealthy white man in town. Though he saw the girl as far beneath him in social standing, he promised her marriage and security, and she fell madly in love. Though he bought the girl jewelry and gave her money, showering her with affection and adoration, he made it clear that her children were a problem. Slowly, as she fell under his spell, she began to despise her babies. When the man made it clear that he would never marry her because of them, she smothered the children in their sleep. She then made her way to her lover’s house to tell him the children were dead, but he turned her away in horror. Legend has it that she wandered the streets, afraid to return home to face her deed, until she was fatally struck by a truck near the intersection of Cline and Fifth. Other accounts claim that she wandered all the way to the Little Calumet River and, hopeless and alone, walked into it and drowned.

  Yet another version of the story concerns a young woman from Griffith who was in love with a local boy. Their parents shunned the relationship, as the couple was very young. The two would meet on the banks of the Little Calumet River, discussing their plans for the future and trying to think of a way to make their parents understand their feelings. But despite their bond, their families wouldn’t budge. Desperate to wed her love, the girl implored a local priest to marry them, and he finally agreed. On the day of the wedding, the girl told her parents she was going to school but instead went to pick up her wedding dress from the dressmaker’s shop. Leaving her street clothes behind, she left the shop in the dress and hailed a cab to the church. Upon arrival, she was informed that her fiancé had been killed in a car accident on the way to the wedding. The girl sat and wept for hours in the rectory parlor, where the priest and housekeeper tried to comfort her and soothe her nerves. Finally, the priest convinced her to go home to her parents, who had been informed of her plans and were waiting at home, and he called a cab to take her there. Once in the cab, the girl said she had to go to fetch her clothes from the dressmaker’s and directed the cab to take Cline
Avenue into Gary. As they approached the river, she cried, “Stop here!” and dashed from the cab, running across the road and disappearing into the water. Though the driver, stupefied, radioed for help, police were too late to save her. Drivers along Cline to this day—especially cab drivers—still report a young teenager in a wedding dress at the side of the road near the banks of the Little Calumet.

  The Cline Avenue ghost often vanishes from the car somewhere within the floodplain of the Little Calumet River, most often in the gravelly or marshy riverbank areas just off the road. Photo by author.

  Folklorists have long said there is no truth to this Gary tale—that the story is simply a folktale that migrated to Indiana from Mexico, carried by the immigrants who settled here. But there have been, in fact, numerous suicides and drownings in the Little Calumet River, which is often the tragic endpoint of the Gary stories, including one incident reported by the Hammond Times on April 16, 1918, in which twenty-five-year-old Anna Valentivich, the wife of a Gary steelworker, left their baby at a neighbor’s home, walked to the South Broadway bridge, mounted the parapet and leapt into the Little Calumet River, drowning herself.

  It is interesting that many of these encounters end at the Little Calumet River, which has, in fact, a much older haunting history. In the early 1800s, those making their way to and from Chicago following Lake Michigan’s shoreline generally took the route across the beaches. In the wintertime, this path was fairly easy to traverse, due to the frozen sands, but in the temperate months, it was slow going, especially for those traveling by coach. Drivers were often forced to reroute to the south, generally through the Baily homestead, to find firmer ground, which forced the building of bridges across encountered waterways, most notably the Little Calumet River, which at times could be more than a mile wide from floodwaters. Indeed, it was the bridge that crossed the Little Calumet just west of the mouth of Salt Creek that became one of the most infamously treacherous spans in the Region’s history. The bridge, built by Lake and Porter Counties in 1836, consisted of a series of poles stretching about a thousand feet across the river. All but the most devil-may-care dismounted their coaches and wagons to cross it, and even those on horseback overwhelmingly walked their steeds across the treacherous span. Despite the precautions, countless numbers perished attempting to cross the Little Calumet. Those who crossed safely continued through Liverpool, Munster and through Blue Island to Chicago.

  Despite the temptation to dismiss the complex paranormal phenomenon of the phantom hitchhiker as simply a hallucination or a jumble of various renditions of some ancient ghost story, firsthand reports of eyewitnesses continue to hold up under scrutiny. And so some researchers, spurred on by more than a century of experiential accounts, have tried to find an explanation for them in the roads themselves. Many researchers have come to believe that so-called ley lines have a lot to do with paranormal encounters along certain famously haunted roads.

  The concept of ley lines originated in Britain, where Alfred Watkins, a retired brewer, first noticed that the English countryside was covered by long tracks intersecting at various points. He termed these tracks “leys” (lea meaning “meadow”). Watkins’s 1925 book on ley lines, The Old Straight Track, drew quite a following upon its release and created a breed of researchers (called ley hunters) who began to locate and map these leys. Upon further inquiry, Watkins found that residents commonly reported paranormal activity along these roads: apparitional sightings, disembodied voices, mysterious lights and, at the points of their intersection (nodal points), poltergeist activity. Observation of these nodal points led some researchers to believe that such crossroads were, in fact, ancient sacred sites, and that extraordinary events were occurring there and along the lines themselves. Guy Underwood, a dowser, claimed that these nodal points were actually the sites of underground springs, which seemed to create spiral-shaped patterns of some kind of force around them. He also found straight lines of this same force, which he termed “holy lines,” passing through these sites. Occult investigator Stephen Jenkins speculated that poltergeist activity and other haunting phenomena may actually take its energy from nodal points. Like-minded observers have wondered if ancient cultures harbored an awareness of these energies and used them as sacred paths and sites for their ritual activities.

  But are there ley lines in America? In Chicago, after the Great Fire of 1871, the city was redesigned along the much-copied grid system, which organized the metropolis on a grid of ninety-degree east–west and north–south thoroughfares. A few diagonal streets from the old city were retained for ease of travel. These were all built on old Native American trails, and today they are all known as haunted: Milwaukee, Lincoln, Grand and Archer. And in another example, in the mid-nineteenth century, one of the most ambitious engineering projects in American history played itself out over an ancient Native American trail: the building of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. Poorly funded from the start, the project resulted in countless deaths of the Irish American workers who built the waterway literally along the route of the old Indian highway and, over it, Archer Avenue, named for Colonel William Archer, head of the canal project. Starvation, thirst, disease and infighting—all are part of the deadly legacy of the project, as are the ghosts that traipse the canal’s storied street. Is Cline Avenue built over an ancient Indian trail? Perhaps.

  Beyond the question of the road itself, researchers also point to another reality common to most road ghosts: the presence of an ancient culture tainted by modern encroachment. PHH expert Sean Tudor noted a marked increase in sightings of the phantom of Blue Bell Hill during times of environmental upheaval, especially during the construction of roads and highways. Gary researchers, too, are mindful of the fact that the development of the highway system in Northwest Indiana—and the epidemic unrest that always tags along—certainly seems to coincide with the extraordinary ebbs and tides of the Region’s epic supernatural history, including the heightened unrest of the ghosts of Cline Avenue.

  CHAPTER 10

  NEVER CAN SAY GOODBYE

  THE HAUNTING OF THE JACKSONS

  In 2013, four years after Michael Jackson’s shocking death, his mother, Katherine Jackson, brought Michael’s three children to Gary, Indiana, to celebrate their father’s birthday. He would have been fifty-four years old. The family toured the city before visiting the family home in the evening for a candlelight vigil swarming with fans. The Reverend Jesse Jackson said, “It all began right here on this corner.” As part of the festivities, the mayor’s office gave the children “I Heart Gary” T-shirts.

  Every year, thousands of fans of the peerless “King of Pop” visit the Jackson family home in Gary, traveling from around the world to this point of pilgrimage, vigil and awe. Despite devastating allegations of pedophilia, abuse and neglect of his own children; questions of gender confusion; family fighting; bankruptcy; and betrayal, nothing can blacken the idealized image of the man the world still sees—at least for the most part—not only as an extraordinary performer but also as a pure heart, a good soul and “a lover, not a fighter.”

  Michael Jackson was born on August 29, 1958, at Gary’s now-abandoned St. Mary’s Mercy Hospital. As an adult, he recalled his childhood as “isolated” and complained about the verbal and physical abuse of his father, the infamous Joe Jackson. Alternately, he credited his father’s drive and discipline for much of his and his siblings’ success. Michael’s reports that his father often criticized the largeness of his nose have led many to blame Joe Jackson for Michael’s longtime abuse of plastic surgery. But it was Michael who shone for his father more than any of his other sons from the start. The world saw it too, right away.

  Joe Jackson himself had a less than lovely childhood. Born in 1928 in rural Arkansas, Jackson was raised by his father, a schoolteacher, but joined his mother in East Chicago, Indiana, adjacent to Gary, at the age of eighteen. Jackson’s dream was to become a professional boxer, but just three years after the move, he fell in love with Katherine Screws, a ninet
een-year-old beauty who changed all his plans. Like so many young men in the area, Joe gave up his childhood dreams to build a life, taking a job as an overhead crane operator with Inland Steel.

  Joe himself would have some involvement in music. As a young head of household, he performed with a group called the Falcons. Like his boxing career, however, the dream of musical stardom fizzled. Indeed, many have charged Joe Jackson, for better or worse, with projecting his hopes onto his children.

  Katherine Screws Jackson was also a non-native of the Gary area. She was born in rural Alabama, the child of Prince Albert Screws (for whom Michael’s son is named) and Martha Mattie Upshaw. As a child, Katherine Jackson contracted the polio virus and was left with a limp throughout her life. Her family moved her to East Chicago, Indiana, where she met Joe Jackson and married, then moved to Gary. Most do not know that Katherine was a devout Jehovah’s Witness and raised her children in the faith, which—among its strict doctrines—eschews the celebration of birthdays and holidays. Like her husband, Katherine was a gifted musician, with dreams of becoming a performer in a country and western band. With motherhood, she gave up her fantasies to support her home, working part time at the local Sears store but sharing her talents for piano and singing with her numerous children. Also like Joe, she was a deeply involved supporter of the Jackson 5 from the beginning, creating their costumes and monitoring their dedication. Joe and Katherine felt blessed to fill their tiny bungalow in Gary with nine children, very close in age. From their earliest days, they saw in them the musical talent they deeply respected.

  In 1964, now in his mid-thirties, Joe gathered his sons Jermaine, Tito and Jackie into the Jackson Brothers band, appointing himself as their manager. Succeeding in local shows and winning some talent prizes, young brothers Marlon and Michael soon joined the group, which was re-christened the Jackson Five. It was at this point that Joe Jackson’s infamous “discipline” took real shape. Though he has come to be known as a prolific abuser, his sons and other observers have remembered his physical abuse as typical of many fathers of the time and his strict rehearsals and training an extension of his loving discipline.