In search of Elgin's ghosts
Inside a spooky trip with the Elgin Paranormal Investigators
It was a dark and stormy night in early October when Greg Stout drove his dark-colored GMC Suburban through Elgin's southeast side.
The wipers swished across his windshield as he passed the cemetery. He drove by the schools, the "painted ladies," some of the city's oldest buildings. He pointed out its oldest tree and the site where he believes its first graveyard, one older than Bluff City Cemetery, once stood.
(Marina Makropoulos/Staff Photographer)
(Marina Makropoulos/Staff Photographer)
• Web site: Elgin Paranormal Investigators
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A lot of times, when people find out you are a journalist, they want to hear your stories. That's a change: Usually we're listening to — or cajoling people into telling us — their stories.
The stories I usually tell include the time Tom Brokaw came to my goodbye party when I left an internship at NBC News at 30 Rockefeller Center in New York City. Those stories also include the time I knocked on Craig Stebic's door. And the time I encountered Drew Peterson in an elevator while at The Courier-News' sister paper, the Naperville Sun, during the Summer of Missing Moms when the searches for Lisa Stebic and Stacy Peterson dominated area news coverage.
At the top of that list also would be the night I spent in a "haunted" house with the Elgin Paranormal Investigators in March 2008.
If a house in Elgin truly were haunted — that is, if paranormal activity did occur there — Greg Stout and his team of investigators would know. Everything that happens on an overnight investigation is documented on both handheld and stationary video cameras and voice recorders, then played back later and analyzed. Anything out of the ordinary that happens is debunked — or, at least, the investigators make every effort to debunk it as scientifically as possible.
But some things really do appear to be paranormal. Some things are beyond the range of normal experience or a scientific explanation.
You could say some places are haunted.
There are residual hauntings and there are intelligent hauntings, according to paranormal investigators.
Residual hauntings are like re-tellings of past stories, the energy left behind by a person or event. The same things happen at the same times.
Intelligent hauntings are the spirits supposedly left behind. Their stories continue on without them.
They can be benevolent or mischievous, depending on the reason they are haunting places. Maybe they are their homes, and they want intruders to leave. Maybe there is something that bonds them to certain locations, and they don't want to leave. Maybe humans can see them, and they feel noticed.
Maybe they don't want to accept they've died.
It seems to me, in a completely unscientific sort of way, all old cities like Elgin, with a 155-year history of people and events and their stories, are haunted.
Here, residual hauntings would include places like the Elgin National Watch Co. and the Illinois Iron & Bolt Co. in Carpentersville. They are places that no longer exist today, or at least in the same way they once did, although undeniably, their presence is felt.
And our local intelligent hauntings would include the people left here, yearning for the Elgin or Carpentersville or Hampshire that once was. Meantime, those cities and villages continue on without them: New businesses move into old buildings. Demographics change. Broadsheet newspapers become tabloids.
They can be benevolent or mischievous, too, I suppose — either embracing change or complaining bitterly against it.
Yes, Elgin is haunted, if by nothing else than by the "Elgin That Once Was." So is Hampshire and Pingree Grove and "insert the name of your town here."
Stout told us, as he drove EPI co-founder Mike Rohr, Courier-News staff photographer Marina Makropoulos and me through some of the city's oldest streets, "It's Elgin. I was born and raised here. It's things I've seen and done all my life. The places have been here.
"There's got to be something there."
— Emily McFarlan, staff writer
All these things together, Stout said — "It's Elgin."
"I was born and raised here. It's things I've seen and done all my life. The places have been here. There's got to be something there."
He meant something paranormal.
Stout is lead investigator of the Elgin Paranormal Investigators, a group he founded in January 2007 with Mike Rohr, who is its tech manager and one of its field investigators.
Since then, the group has added seven more members, including Stout's wife Maureen, who researches the history of the places EPI investigates, and his step-daughter Nicki Holley, an alternate investigator. (You don't want too many ghost hunters spooking the ghosts, after all, so only a certain number of members can attend each investigation.) Then there's Krissy Kurtz, the video technician and field investigator, who produces podcasts and videos for the group's Web page and Twitter, MySpace and Facebook profiles.
It's grown from two guys and a handheld camera with a flashlight taped to it to an office in a converted garage behind the Stouts' home that's packed with equipment such as digital voice recorders, handheld and stationary cameras, electromagnetic field meters, a K-2 meter and an infrared thermometer.
EPI doesn't solicit business and it doesn't charge for its investigations. Still, its members have spent late nights using that equipment to document and debunk anything that might be considered paranormal at about 20 homes and businesses in the Elgin area and around northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.
This month, Stout and Rohr also offered tours of some of Elgin's most haunted places, driving through the city in Stout's Suburban.
"We've done it before, basically for friends and stuff. We figured it could be a good fundraiser so we can buy equipment," Stout said. "It's just a fun thing to do, and we can raise some money" for what Rohr calls their "extremely nonprofit" group.
Those tours end today, but not before the investigators shared with The Courier-News some of those places — four of Elgin's most storied haunts.
"The places we're going are well-known," Stout said. "One is them is a grave site. One of them is a place we actually did verify for ourselves. The other two are just legends of Elgin."
The first stop on that tour: Bluff City Cemetery, the final resting place for many Elginites since 1889. It's the setting for a story Stout calls "The Portrait."
Its characters? A little girl, an angel statue, the devil — and a portrait.
The story goes that a little girl died in 1922 and was buried at the cemetery. A nearby granite works shop crafted a statue of an angel to mark her grave.
"The guy who did the tombstone … he was so enamored about what he'd done, he took a picture of it," Stout said.
That picture was hanging in his shop when the mother of the little girl came to pay for the grave marker. When she saw it, she allegedly fainted dead away. Later, she told the craftsman, according to Stout, "'I saw my little girl standing next to the statue, and I saw the face of the devil in the trees.'"
Rohr said he's seen the picture, and he's been to the grave site of the little girl.
It was hard to find, he said, because the angel statue had moved. He couldn't get the monument and trees in the background of his copy of the picture to match up with the monument and trees at the cemetery. But he said he didn't suspect paranormal activity — he suspected some grave markers had been moved to make way for an irrigation system on the cemetery grounds.
And there may be nothing paranormal about the portrait.
"Matrixing" is the way the mind tries to make sense of an object, seeing something that may not be there. It's a common phenomena seen in paranormal investigation, according to Rohr.
"Whether or not the devil was in the trees, I don't know," he said.
Members of EPI pride themselves on the objectivity and thoroughness of their investigations. Their motto is "Scientifically searching for the proof you need to better understand the 'unexplainable.'"
They also take seriously the confidentiality of those whose homes and businesses they've investigated or suspect to have paranormal activity.
That's why Stout won't give the name of the next stop on his tour. It's an Elgin elementary school he simply calls the "School of the Dead," and one of Elgin's most storied haunts. Over the years, its legendary claims of the paranormal have been told and retold by students and staff, and now those stories easily can be found on the Internet (hint, hint).
"It's not like an unknown thing," Stout said. "Everybody knows it, but nobody wants to verify it."
The site of the school was once a cemetery, but the city moved all the bodies to Bluff City Cemetery — or, at least, workers thought they had.
When they started building the school on that site, those workers found 13 bodies still buried there, he said. Then in 1970, more bodies were found — all children.
Today there are reports of the sounds of children "running up and down, playing," even after hours when janitors are alone in the building, according to Stout.
"One janitor actually fled the building in the middle of the night and wouldn't even come back to collect his things," Rohr said.
But none are stories the investigators can confirm for themselves. Elgin School District U46 has turned down their offer to conduct an overnight investigation at the school, Stout said.
The "School of the Dead" isn't the only place Elginites can get a paranormal education.
Just blocks away, the old Elgin High School — now the U46 Central Office — is what Stout calls one of the city's "lesser haunts."
The high school was built in the late 1880s, and sometime in its first 50 years of operation, a fire broke out inside, according to Stout. No one was injured during that fire, but a few classroom pets were lost.
The high school moved out of the building shortly after the fire, but some of those pets never did move on: During remodeling, workers reported seeing a "phantom cat," Stout said. There also are claims boarded up rooms in the old high school have been seen lit up inside, as if daylight still were streaming through the windows.
There's at least one EPI-verified haunted house in Elgin.
"That's the one," Stout said, pulling up to a private residence on Liberty Street the group was invited to investigate last November.
"We verified it ourselves."
The homeowners told investigators they've seen an apparition of a little girl standing on the stairs, Stout said. They also claim to have seen a hand — just a hand, without a body connected to it — sliding down the side of a pillar in the living room.
So has Rohr.
He thought it belonged to EPI audio technician and field investigator Dave Umbach. But Umbach confirmed he had both his hands on a camera at the time, recording the investigation.
"They all got excited, and I'm still in the dark," Rohr said.
Just so EPI members won't have expectations going into an investigation that could lead them to see or hear or experience something not actually there, not all the investigators are filled in on all the claims of activity beforehand. Rohr hadn't been told about the hand on the pillar.
"That gave personal experience to verify a claim," Stout said.
The investigators also captured a mist near the stairs in this house that moved and changed shape while keeping its mass on one of their stationary cameras. And on one of their digital recorders, they captured several electronic voice phenomena, or EVPs, including one saying, "Just because you conjured me." EVPs are disembodied voices captured on audio recordings.
That was enough to convince the investigators.
"(It's) not haunted — we can't say haunted," Rohr said. "It has paranormal activity."
So do many of the places EPI has investigated in the Elgin area.
In the last year, the members have gotten videos of a shadowy figure peeking out of a doorway in an apartment building and of something tugging the edge of Umbach's shirt from his body. They've recorded EVPs saying, "Meet me downhill," and asking, "How are you doing, Greg?" They've played "Bloody Mary" in the bathroom mirrors of houses they've investigated.
That's what keeps them researching and investigating those places around them — those places Elginites live and work and drive past every day. That and a sneaking suspicion there's something else there.
As Stout said, "There's got to be."
