For Adam Selzer, spooky season is his Super Bowl.
During October, the popular Mysterious Chicago tour guide and prolific author is hard to keep up with due to commitments that take him around the city. Want a haunted walking tour? He’s got one. Prefer to see scary sites by bus? Selzer has that too. You can also catch Selzer broadcasting live from his living room, or out and about on what he calls a daily “mini” tour. A subscription to his Patreon provides fans with photos of cemetery coyotes and access to his archival files.
Selzer rounds out his busy days this month working on his next book, which he expects to be about “antique” serial killers in the city’s history. We joined him as he looked for grave locations in Graceland Cemetery, 4001 N. Clark St. The final resting place for prominent Chicago families, Graceland has been Selzer’s muse for years and so many visits that he’s lost count. The history buff compiled his findings in the 2022 book, “Graceland Cemetery: Chicago Stories, Symbols, and Secrets.” The book includes deeply researched insights into some of the 175,000 lives — both famous and not — behind the names inscribed on the grave markers and cenotaphs placed there since 1860.
In order to learn the tales of the dead, however, takes time, patience and a bit of luck, as we learned following him earlier this week. The subject: Henry Meyer. The Tribune’s archives have limited details about the early murderer, but Selzer worked with Graceland staff to locate records of adjacent family members and has viewed stories on microfilm from the city’s long-gone newspapers to zero in on where he thinks Meyer’s body is buried.
While we navigated Graceland’s grounds, Selzer pointed out the names and locations of more obscure Chicago residents. What follows are some of his favorites.
Chicago history headlines
Henry Meyer
Selzer says Henry Meyer, a physician, could be buried in an unmarked plot in Section H, Lot 116, Grave 4.
Meyer made a business of insuring people’s lives then poisoning his victims, which caused their illnesses and subsequent deaths to appear to be due to dysentery. In the late 1890s, Meyer took out a $8,500 insurance policy on a New York man named Ludwig Brandt, who Meyer fed small doses of a dangerous drug. Meyer, taking pity on Brandt, then ended the man’s life by giving him arsenic. An autopsy found evidence of the poison. Meyer was tried and convicted of second-degree murder and served time in Sing Sing prison.
After his release, Meyer moved to Chicago where he was accused of poisoning five other people, including two of his wives and his child.
Edith Ogden Harrison
Though she was first lady when her husband Carter H. Harrison Jr. served five terms as mayor, Edith Ogden Harrison also made a name for herself as an author. Harrison, whose first child died at just 3 days old, crafted elaborate stories for her son and daughter. She began her literary career in 1903 when “Prince Silverwings,” a novel for children of seven individual sagas was published.
The Tribune didn’t love it: “The stories display no extraordinary originality — it is indeed a difficult thing to devise an original fairy tale.” Yet, there was something pleasant about Harrison’s tales: “They have a great deal of prettiness, and a delicate fancy wavers over them like sun glints on a wall.”
The material was used as the basis for an opera — with lyrics written by Harrison’s friend and “The Wizard of Oz” author L. Frank Baum. Six other books of fairy stories followed and inspired a Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans, her hometown, based on the characters Harrison created.
Harrison’s first novel, “Princess Sayrane,” was published in 1910 at the urging of President William Howard Taft’s sister. Her second novel, “Lady of the Snows,” was made into a motion picture by a Chicago-based company — Essanay. She also dabbled in writing books about her travels around the world and even won a Tribune contest in early 1923 for creating this tongue twister: “We Want Worthy Women’s Wonderful World’s Work.”
She died in 1955 at age 93, and is buried in Section G, Lot 69, Grave 15.
James L. Wilson and Clarissa R. Wilson
The elderly couple was discovered dead in their Winnetka home on Feb. 13, 1884. James L. Wilson, president of the Winnetka Village Board, had been shot twice, his pockets emptied and a large sum of money taken and his valuable gold watch “wrenched off its chain,” the Tribune reported. Clarissa R. Wilson, an invalid, was discovered beaten to death in a bedroom. Speculation suggested robbery may have been the motive since Wilson was known to lend others money.
Neal McKeague, a local butcher, was indicted but later acquitted of the murders.
The Wilsons are buried in Section B, Lot 408, Graves 3 and 4.
Maria Julia Steinbrecker-Hoch
Johann Hoch, a German-born serial killer who had a number of aliases, was executed on the gallows in early 1906 for the murder of Maria Julia Steinbrecker-Hoch, one of his many wives. He was convicted of poisoning her and suspected in the poisoning deaths of his other wives, including one who was buried then later exhumed in Oak Woods Cemetery.
Peter Schoenhofen
Born in Prussia, Schoenhofen emigrated at age 24 and operated a brewery at the corner of 18th Street and Canalport that by the 1880s was one of the largest in the city. Its signature product was Edelweiss Beer, which a 1908 advertisement for the company claimed was “a health beer and was recognized as such by the medical profession. By 1893 — the same year its founder died — the Peter Schoenhofen brewery alone could boast an annual production of 180,000 barrels. His wealth was estimated between $2 million to $4 million (or more than $100 million in today’s dollars). The Schoenhofen brewery, which survived Prohibition by serving as a grain warehouse and shipping firm, continued operations in Pilsen until 1970.
Schoenhofen’s final resting place is an eclectic mix of traditional Christian imagery (the “homeward” angel) and ancient iconography. The face of the Egyptian sphinx, Selzer says, looks like Mikhail Gorbachev. The Schoenhofen mausoleum, which was recently cleaned, is located in the Bellevue section, Lots 16 and 17, Grave 6.
Alice Getty
Louis Sullivan, who is also buried at Graceland Cemetery, was an iconic American architect known for his early skyscraper designs and ornate ornamentation. He created the Auditorium Building with partner Dankmar Adler, the former Carson Pirie Scott & Co. store on State Street and several mausoleums within the cemetery — including one for the Getty family. Constructed in 1890, the Getty tomb was designated an official Chicago landmark in 1971 — the same year Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange Building was also recommended for the honor but ultimately demolished (its trading floor and archway were preserved and are displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago).
Yet, Selzer points out, Sullivan’s association with this monument — which is also on the National Register of Historic Places — has caused many to overlook the lives of the people who are interred within it. Henry Harrison Getty was a wealthy lumber merchant who had the tomb constructed after the death of his wife Carrie Eliza in 1890. The Gettys had one child, daughter Alice, whose life was steeped in art. She collected Asian sculptures, tapestries and clothing, loaned classic musical instruments to institutions, studied Buddhist iconography, wrote books about her collection, procured a library in France of 4,000 volumes in braille and even composed a musical. Alice and her father traveled the world together, living on the Champs Elysees in Paris in the late 1890s and during World War I and narrowly avoiding the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. The father died in 1919 and Alice Getty died in 1946.
The Gerry mausoleum is in the Triangles section. Want to take a look inside? The tomb was opened earlier this year.
Edith Rockefeller McCormick
She was born with a golden spoon in her mouth, the daughter of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller and raised in the most privileged circumstances and settings. In a match made in moneyed heaven, Edith Rockefeller married Harold McCormick, the son of another wealthy man and prominent Chicagoan, Cyrus McCormick, who invented the mechanical reaper, which helped in the mechanization of agriculture, in 1895.
This union was shouted in such newspaper headlines as “Greatest Catch of the Year! Two Great Fortunes to be Joined.” And for a time, all seemed happy. The couple spent lavishly, buying, among many, many things, the jewels of Catherine the Great and moving into a Lake Shore Drive mansion and another in Lake Forest and participating in, what Ross calls, “a merry-go-round of social engagements.”
Yet her life did not come to a happy end. In fact, the divorcee once thought to be the richest woman in the country died broke at The Drake Hotel in 1932. How she got there makes a fascinating story, parts joyous, part sad — all revealed in the book “Edith: The Rogue Rockefeller McCormick,” by Andrea Friederici Ross.
She was initially interred in a vault beneath the cemetery’s chapel, Selzer says, but was buried in the Willowmere section, Lot 10-16 Sub C, Grave 3 in 1953 —the same year her 41-room mansion at 1000 N. Lake Shore Drive was demolished.
Alexandra Pavlovna Galitzine Armour
Born into nobility, then left with nothing by the Russian Revolution, Alexandra Galitzine Armour learned to treasure life’s little things, her family said.
“She had such a regal demeanor,” her granddaughter Stephena Romanoff told the Tribune in 2006. “But the only things she wanted in life were the ability to read a hardback book and to have fresh orange juice every morning.
“And she did that every day up to the day she died.”
Known to her friends and family as “Aleka,” she arrived in Chicago in 1927, following her older brother Nicholas Galitzine to the city. She worked in the fashion industry at Marshall Field’s before becoming co-owner of the Oak Street women’s clothing store, Chez Nous. She married Chicago banking executive Lester Armour, a grandson of the founder of the meat-packing company, in New York in 1949. They lived in Lake Bluff until his death in 1970.
Despite her noble heritage, Armour rarely spoke about her background.
“I recall someone asking her once what her father did, and instead of saying, ‘He was in the court of Nicholas II,’ she said, ‘He worked for the government,’” her granddaughter said. “She never lived in the past.”
In late 2006, Armour died of natural causes at age 101. She is buried in the Ridgeland section, Lot 13, Grave 18.
Louise de Koven Bowen
A formidable presence, Louise de Koven Bowen’s biography was titled “Growing Up With a City,” at the insistence of her publisher. She, however, wanted it to be titled, “Kicking and Screaming for Fifty Years.”
“There has probably not been one forward looking movement in Chicago’s history (especially any connected with women) which has not been helped by Mrs. Bowen,” the Tribune wrote in early 1953.
Bowen was the daughter of one of Chicago’s early millionaires. At just 8 years old, she witnessed a child run down by a horse on Michigan Avenue. “She tagged along to the child’s home in a shack, was shocked by what she saw, collected 50 cents from each family in the neighborhood — $57.50 in all — and took the money to the hovel,” the Tribune relayed in 1953.
Nicknamed “Chicago’s Social Conscience,” Bowen was affiliated with Hull House for 60 years, serving as its treasurer for the settlement until she was almost 94 years old. She also pestered state lawmakers into setting up the world’s first juvenile court in 1899. During World War I, Bowen was chairman of the Illinois division of the Council on National Defense.
The Woman’s World Fair, led by Bowen, was designed according to a diametrically opposite principle: Top to bottom, its administrators could only be women. That empowered it. The fair “showed the business men of the city that women could undertake a great enterprise of this kind and put it through successfully,” Bowen wrote in her autobiography.
Chicago’s society women threw a world’s fair of their own in the 1920s to showcase female talent
Bowen was urged to run for Chicago mayor, but declined. Politics, however, followed her. The first words of acceptance of the Democratic presidential nomination by Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson II were spoken from the balcony of her Astor Street home in 1952.
She died in late 1953 and is buried in Section D, Lot 356, Grave 7.
Ruth Wanderer
On June 21, 1920, a neighbor who heard gunshots found Ruth Wanderer and a shabbily dressed stranger mortally wounded in the foyer of a two-flat at 4732 N. Campbell Ave. Ruth’s husband, Carl, a veteran Army machine gunner, explained that the couple were returning from a movie theater and had paused to turn on the foyer light.
“The man called out: ‘Don’t do that,’ and then he fired,” the Tribune reported Carl Wanderer saying. “He killed her. I had my own automatic with me, and I fired.”
Lt. John Loftus, the police commander on the scene, later recalled: “I thought he was entitled to a medal for bravery after I listened to his version.”
Initially hailed as a hero for killing the “ragged stranger” who attacked and killed his wife as they walked home that evening, Carl Wanderer was later discovered to have hired the man and shot his wife with his own gun. He confessed to the crime in July 1920, though later denied it at trial. After a hung jury ended his first trial, Wanderer was convicted of killing his wife and unborn child in the second trial. He was given a 25-year sentence by that jury, which outraged Judge Hugo Pam.
“A grievous error — you call him a wife murderer and say that he shall pay with twenty-five years’ imprisonment. A regrettable error — and, mind you, I don’t want to be in the position of criticizing a jury,” Pam told the jurors. Carl Wanderer was sentenced to hang for killing the unnamed ragged stranger.
The Chicago Herald and Examiner agreed to pay Carl Wanderer for his life story. After giving $200 to the doomed convict, Herald and Examiner reporter Hilding “Hildy” Johnson persuaded him to play a few hands of gin rummy while Wanderer waited to be executed. By the time the hands were over, Wanderer had given Johnson both his memoirs and his money. Wanderer’s last words on the gallows were, “Don’t play rummy with Hildy Johnson. I think he cheats.”
Ruth Wanderer is buried in the Knolls section, Lot 16, Grave 3/d.
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