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Beverly Unitarian Church

CHICAGO

THERE IS AN INTERESTING DEBATE AMONG PEOPLE of faith about whether ghosts exist or not and if a belief in ghosts can be reconciled with a belief in some religious creed. Every religion has stories of supernatural beings, creatures that exist in another realm that is invisible and unknown to mere mortals. We have various names for such beings, depending upon our own cultural beliefs—angels, spirits, demons, guides—but what they all have in common is that they are non-flesh-and-blood beings that have various forms of interaction with humans. The beings themselves were never human and are considered as purely spiritual creatures. Ghosts, on the other hand, are distinct from these entities in that they were, at one time, human beings with the same wants and desires, pains and sorrows, joys and successes that are all indicative of the human experience. It is this difference between once-human and never-human, eternally spiritual and formerly mortal that fuels the debate.

For the members of the Beverly Unitarian Church on Chicago’s South Side, the debate is of little consequence. One of the seven principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association, of which the Beverly church is a member, supports “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” a concept that allows for both a belief in ghosts as well as a disbelief. The choice is left up to the individual and is not dictated by some religious hierarchy.

It came as no surprise to me then to find that the Beverly Unitarian Church was haunted.

My wife, Mary, and I were familiar with the Unitarian Universalist church, having attended services in our hometown of Athens, Ohio, so we decided to go to the Sunday service at Beverly while we were in Chicago researching this book. The fact that the church was haunted was an added incentive, of course. It was a warm and sunny day in August when we pulled into the parking lot adjacent to an imposing building that looked like a castle, and was in fact nicknamed “the Irish Castle” by its neighbors.

The castle sat on a little hill at the corner of 103rd Street and Longwood Drive in a quiet residential neighborhood. The three-story limestone block structure was built in 1886 by wealthy real estate magnate Robert C. Givens and modeled after a castle he saw while traveling in Ireland. Givens and his family lived in the house only a few years before selling it. The building then served as a private residence for various people and, at one point, housed the Chicago Female College. In 1942, it became the home of the Unitarian Fellowship.

Mary and I were early. No one else had arrived and the door was locked, so we walked around to the front of the building. Rounded corner towers rose above the trees. The crenellated battlements and the massive Romanesque arch above the solid-wood door called to mind images of King Arthur, or maybe the moody Dane, Hamlet, chatting with the ghost of his father on a cold and moonless night. Ivy crept along the stone steps leading up to the castle and twined around the towers. Unlike a real medieval castle, this one featured many large windows.

After a few minutes, people began to arrive for the services, so we followed them inside. Those large windows admitted plenty of light and the interior was bright and airy, not at all what one would expect inside a castle. We spoke with some of the people as they entered and were invited to tour the building before the service began. The ground level, now used as the main worship space, was one large room at the front of the house and had originally been the parlor. A large piano stood before the windows.

A beautifully carved oak staircase led up to the second floor. This floor, too, was essentially one large room, with a kitchen on one side. I didn’t know for sure, but my guess was that many of the original interior walls on both floors had been removed in order to open up the interior and create larger spaces. On this floor, as on the ground floor, the rounded corner towers created cozy little nooks, some of them furnished with chairs. Another stairway led to the third-floor apartment of the caretaker, who was not at home the day we visited.

It is not uncommon for Unitarian services to be conducted without a minister, led instead by one of the members of the fellowship. We joined the others downstairs and listened as one of the members of the fellowship talked about his struggle with depression. Halfway through his talk, I heard a thump on the ceiling above me. It didn’t quite register with me until it sounded again, and I remembered that we had been the last ones upstairs. There was nobody up there now.

“Did you hear that?” I whispered, leaning toward Mary.

She nodded.

“What do you think it was?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

I listened carefully, but the sound did not return.

The service concluded and we found ourselves chatting with the woman who had been sitting next to us. Pat Haynes, a longtime member of the fellowship, was happy to talk to us about the castle ghost.

“No one is really sure who she is,” Pat said. “People have seen a young woman dressed in white, something like a nightgown. Some say she is the ghost of a girl named Clara, one of the students here when this place was the women’s college. They say she died in the 1930s from influenza.”

I wondered if a young female ghost from a women’s college would be so rude as to clump around upstairs and make the thumping sounds I had heard.

“Have you ever seen her?” Mary asked.

“No,” Pat said, “but some of the old-timers have. There’s another theory,” Pat continued, “that she may be the ghost of Eleanor Veil, a woman who lived here during the Depression.”

Although I was carefully listening to what Pat was saying, I was distracted by the glass jar she held in her hands. “Can I ask you what you’ve got in that jar?” I finally said.

“Oh, this?” She laughed and held up the jar so I could see inside it. There were a few green leaves and some fuzzy little, I don’t know…things.

“What am I looking at?”

“These are monarch butterfly caterpillars,” Pat said, “and the leaves are milkweed. That’s the only thing the caterpillars will eat.”

I wondered why she had brought the caterpillars to church, but before I could ask her, she said, “You should talk to Fran Johnson. I’m sure she’s got a ghost story for you.”

No sooner had Pat spoken her name than Fran came over to us. Mary and I recognized her as someone we had spoken to earlier, although we didn’t get her name the first time.

“Are you talking about me?” Fran said, with a smile.

“They’re interested in ghost stories about this place, and I told them you might have one for them,” Pat said.

Fran looked at me quizzically.

“I’m writing a book,” I said.

Experience had already taught me that most people, contrary to what I would have expected, would pour out their hearts to me once I told them I was writing a book. Maybe they felt sorry for me, or maybe I was just cheaper than a therapist. In any case, Fran was willing to talk.

“It was during an evening meeting of the Ladies of the Castle,” Fran said. “We were meeting upstairs on the second floor. Since there was no one else in the building except our group, the lights were off down here on the first floor.”

As the ladies were talking, they heard faint tinkling sounds from downstairs. The sounds grew louder and became recognizable as someone playing the piano.

“There wasn’t supposed to be anyone down there, so I went downstairs to check it out,” Fran said. “I could hear the piano clearly. I threw on the lights and the sounds stopped, but there was no one there.”

Fran was shaken, but she went back upstairs and the ladies resumed their meeting. They froze in mid-conversation only a few minutes later when the piano began playing again. Fran crept back downstairs a second time, thinking that there must be an intruder in the building. When she got to the bottom of the stairs, she quickly turned on the lights and the music stopped. She was alone in the room.

“Not only was I alone, but there was simply no way the piano could have played. The cover had never even been removed. It was still on the piano.”

We had been standing beside the piano as she told her story. There had been no music during the service and the piano was completely hidden beneath a heavy quilted cover. It would be impossible to strike a single note from it with the cover in place.

“What do you think happened?” Mary asked.

Fran could not offer any explanations for what she and the Ladies of the Castle had heard, but said that other unexplainable sounds, such as the tinkling of silverware and glasses, and disembodied voices, were sometimes heard in the building.

Fran offered one more story about yet another female ghost. During a New Year’s Eve party at the castle, a woman dressed in red was seen descending the stairs from the second floor to the first. The partygoers saw the woman move across the room toward the door, which opened of its own accord as she drew near. She passed through the door and out across new-fallen snow. She disappeared in the night and left no footprints.

The Reverend Leonetta Bugleisi is no longer the minister at the Beverly Unitarian Church, having moved to new pastoral duties in Michigan, but she had several ghost stories of her own while she was there.

Leonetta was talking with some friends and her husband at a church reception in 1994. “I saw two thin woman’s arms wrap around my husband’s waist,” she told me, “and I thought someone was hugging him to say goodnight for the evening. When I looked around him I did not see a face. I said, ‘Michael, are you okay?’ And he said, ‘Yes, why?’ I asked him if he felt anything around his waist and he said no. Then the arms disappeared.”

Leonetta said that a former custodian had heard the piano playing when no one else was in the building. Another custodian suddenly died in the nursery school hallway while waxing the floors. The summer after his death Leonetta was alone in the upstairs library, sorting through some books. She came across a book about death and dying by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and put it aside before going downstairs. When she came back up to get the book, it had disappeared and she never found it again. “My theory,” Leonetta said, “is that Kevin, the custodian, was still inhabiting the castle he loved so much and took the book as a sign of his existence.”

Another time, Leonetta was upstairs with a church member. While Leonetta was in a storage room the other woman was in the apartment area. The woman went down to the first floor unbeknownst to Leonetta, who called out to her.

“When I looked out towards the apartment door I saw a distinct black shadow—and this was in broad daylight—flow down the stairs past me and go to the second floor,” Leonetta said.

The fellowship of the Beverly Unitarian Church may never learn the identity of the ghosts who haunt its church, but it doesn’t really matter. Those ghosts will always be accepted there and offered haven.