Last week I shared with you a story of photographs purchased on the eastside of Indianapolis. They were photos of ships cruising through the once busy port of Michigan City. The photos revealed images of a long-lost northern Indiana attraction known as “The Hoosier Slide”, a giant mountain of sand which tourists traveled to in droves to slide down for amusement. Over the course of two decades, the sand was removed by the Muncie Ball Company (among others) to make those famous blue Ball fruit jars so familiar to collectors worldwide. However, the main attraction in these images remained the ships. Each of these ships had a story, some mundane, others spectacular. And it is the spectacular that we remember, the spectacular that captures our imagination.
The steamer O.E. Parks, built in 1891 in Saugatuck, Michigan, departed May 3, 1929 from Sault Ste. Marie bound for Alpena with a cargo of pulpwood when it encountered heavy seas and snow. As water began entering the hold, an SOS message was sent out and the crew was rescued, but the ship was lost. The lower bilge survives from stern to bow as do two of her fuel tanks located astern. The sunken ship remains a popular destination for thrill-seeking divers today.
The SS America was a steel-hulled packet boat transporting passengers, mail, and packages on Lake Michigan between Chicago and Michigan City. The ship carried mail and supplies in and fish catch out. Launched on April 2, 1898, America sank in Washington Harbor on the morning of June 7, 1928. America struck a submerged shoal which tore the fatal hole in her hull and she ran hard aground before settling to the bottom. All passengers and crew made it safely to the lifeboats and abandoned ship. America is one of the most popular Great Lakes wrecks for diving, averaging 500 dives a year.
The short-lived SS Pere Marquette launched on August 16, 1902, was a steel-hulled Great Lakes train ferry on Lake Michigan. Pere Marquette had two decks, two masts, and four railroad tracks on her main deck, which could accommodate up to 30 railroad cars. On September 9, 1910, while bound for Milwaukee with 62 passengers and crew and 29 rail cars filled with general merchandise and coal, Pere Marquette began taking on massive amounts of water. Bilge pumps were turned on, but all attempts to save her failed. With her bow rising high up into the air, as she sank, the air pressure that built up in her hull caused her to explode, killing several people on board. She sank off the coast of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. 27 people on board died while 35 of her passengers and crew survived. 22-year-old Pere Marquette Purser Stephen F. Szczepanek transmitted the message: “Car ferry No.18 sinking – help!” repeatedly for nearly an hour. He was the first wireless operator to die in active service.
As none of her officers survived to recount what happened, the true cause of Pere Marquette’s flooding remains a mystery. It was rumored that there were two stowaways on board, who may have contributed to the sinking by not securing their portholes. The wreck of Pere Marquette was discovered in July 2020 in about 500 feet of water 25 miles east of Sheboygan. Until her discovery, Pere Marquette was the largest undiscovered shipwreck on Lake Michigan.
The 171-foot steamer SS Soo City, built in 1888, had a good career as a passenger steamer on the Great Lakes. In 1908 the boat was sold to carry passengers and freight between New Orleans and the Texas coast. On December 4, 1908 the Soo City set off towards the Atlantic and Caribbean. After leaving Quebec City, the ship disappeared off the coast of Newfoundland. Life preservers with the ship’s name and other debris washed ashore at Cape Ray, Nfld. Nothing else was found, no bodies were ever recovered. Her fate remains unknown to this day.
One of the photos in the collection stands out among all the rest: The USS Wilmette. Stationed at Great Lakes Naval Base, the U.S. Navy gunboat was commissioned on September 20, 1918, too late for service in World War I. On June 7. 1921, Wilmette was given the task of sinking UC-97, a German U-boat surrendered to the U.S. after World War I. Ernie Pyle, the famed World War II correspondent from Dana, Indiana, was a trainee aboard the Wilmette during that summer of 1921. In 1943, the Wilmette was given the honor of transporting President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Admiral William D. Leahy, James F. Byrnes, and Harry Hopkins to Whitefish Bay to plan war strategies.
While the tail end of her story is noteworthy, it is her beginning that ghost story loving historians remember most. The USS Wilmette began life as the SS Eastland, a passenger ship based in Chicago. On July 24, 1915, the ship rolled over onto its side while tied to a dock in the Chicago River, killing 844 passengers and crew in what was the largest loss of life from a single shipwreck on the Great Lakes. After the disaster, Eastland was salvaged and sold to the United States Navy and renamed USS Wilmette. In the case of the SS Eastland, it was likely a safety measure enacted after the most famous shipwreck in history, the sinking of the Titanic, that sealed her doom.
The new federal Seamen’s Act of 1915 had been passed because of the RMS Titanic disaster three years prior. The “lifeboats for all” law required retrofitting of all lifeboats on Eastland as on many other Great Lakes passenger vessels. The Eastland had to either reduce capacity or add lifeboats. They added lifeboats to increase its capacity to 2,570 passengers. In 1914, the old hardwood flooring of the dining room was replaced with two inches of concrete and another layer of cement was added near the aft gangway, adding 15 to 20 tons of weight. The Eastland, which before the law passed carried six lifeboats, now carried 48 weighing about 1,100 pounds each and enough six-pound life jackets (at six pounds each) for all 2,570 passengers and crew. This added weight made Eastland more top-heavy.
At 6:30 on the morning of July 24, passengers began boarding Eastland on the south bank of the Chicago River between Clark and LaSalle Streets, and by 7:10 a.m, the ship had reached her capacity of 2,572 passengers. The Eastland was one of five vessels chartered to carry Western Electric workers and their families on a day-long outing to a park 38 miles across Lake Michigan. As passengers boarded at the rate of 50 per minute, two federal inspectors kept a careful count. It was a chilly morning and a steady drizzle was falling. Many women with young children took refuge below decks. In the main cabin, a band played for dancing; on the upper deck, passengers leaned against the railing, shouting and waving to dockside friends. The ship began to list slightly to the port side (away from the wharf). The movement didn’t scare the party-goers but did alarm the harbormaster and federal observers on land.
Alarm subsided as the 275-foot-long ship seemed to right itself for a moment before listing to port so severely that water began pouring through the open gangways into the engine room. The crew there, aware of what that movement foretold, scrambled up a ladder to the main deck. The below-deck passengers never had a chance. At 7:28 a.m., the Eastland listed to a 45-degree angle, so drastic that pianos, bookcases, tables, and refrigerators slid across the decks, pinning people to the walls. Water poured into open portholes in the cabins below deck. The Eastland rolled completely onto her port side, coming to rest on the river bottom, barely 20 feet below the surface. Roughly half the vessel was submerged. The most deadly shipwreck in Great Lakes history was over. More passenger lives were lost than the sinking of the Titanic or the Lusitania.
Just 10 weeks earlier, the Lusitania had been torpedoed and sunk, with a death toll of 785 passengers. In 1912, 829 passengers had died aboard the Titanic (plus 694 crewmembers). On the Eastland, 844 passengers died; 70% of them were under the age of 25. The ship rolled so quickly, the lifesaving equipment was never launched. As the boat slowly turned on its side a mere 20 feet from the dock, many passengers simply climbed over the starboard railing and walked across the hull to safety without even getting their feet wet.
Writer Jack Woodford witnessed the disaster and gave a first-hand account to the Herald and Examiner, a Chicago newspaper: “And then movement caught my eye. I looked across the river. As I watched in disoriented stupefaction a steamer large as an ocean liner slowly turned over on its side as though it were a whale going to take a nap. I didn’t believe a huge steamer had done this before my eyes, lashed to a dock, in perfectly calm water, in excellent weather, with no explosion, no fire, nothing. I thought I had gone crazy.”
Chicago Herald reporter Harlan Babcock wrote, “When the boat toppled on its side those on the upper deck were hurled off like so many ants being brushed from a table. In an instant, the surface of the river was black with struggling, crying, frightened, drowning humanity. Wee infants floated about like corks.” About 10,000 people were milling about the riverfront that day and many of those horrified onlookers raced to the rescue, some jumping into the river. Others threw makeshift flotation devices to those struggling in the water; boards, ladders, wooden crates, anything that could float. Parents clutching children disappeared beneath the murky water.
Helen Repa, a Western Electric nurse on her way to the outing, offered extraordinary eyewitness testimony. “People were struggling in the water, clustered so thickly that they covered the surface of the river. The screaming was the most horrible of all.” As survivors made it to the dock, Repa enacted her own form of triage by sending those less injured home. “I would simply go out into the street, stop the first automobile that came along, load it up with people, and tell the owner or driver where to take them, and not one driver said no.”
By 8 a.m., almost all of the survivors had been pulled from the river. Then came the gruesome task of locating and removing bodies. Nurse Repa recalled, “After that time all the bodies that came up seemed to be women and children..The results of the Eastland’s somersault could be phrased in two words—living or dead.”
There were simply not enough ambulances to carry away the bodies. So American Express Company trucks were pressed into service to transport the dead. The bodies were taken to various temporary morgues established in the area for identification; by afternoon, the remaining unidentified bodies were consolidated in the Armory of the 2nd Regiment. Corpses were placed in rows of 85 as the identification process began. At midnight, frantic Chicagoans were admitted in groups of 20 to look for missing family members. Sadly, the crowds included the morbidly curious, pickpockets and sneak thieves who stole jewelry from the bodies.
The disaster was particularly hard on the close-knit Polish, Czech, and Hungarian immigrant communities from nearby Cicero. For weeks after the disaster, house after house from Brookfield Zoo to Chinatown were draped in black mourning cloth. An estimated 500,000 people arrived to view the disaster scene, crowding onto bridges and at the river’s edge. Enterprising boat owners charged 10 or 15 cents to ferry the curious throngs past the wreck site. 52 gravediggers, working 12 hours a day, couldn’t keep up with the demand. Nearly 150 graves had to be dug at the Bohemian National Cemetery alone.
In the aftermath, the Western Electric Company provided $100,000 to relief and recovery efforts of family members of the victims of the disaster. The Eastland was raised on August 14, 1915. She was sold to the Illinois Naval Reserve and recommissioned as the USS Wilmette. Ted Wachholz, president of the Eastland Disaster Historical Society, has a theory on why the Eastland looms so much smaller in the American memory than the Titanic or the Lusitania: “There wasn’t anyone rich or famous onboard. It was all hardworking, salt-of-the-earth immigrant families.”
However, the story does not end there. The sinking of the Eastland has become one of the Windy City’s most famous ghost stories involving perhaps its most famous TV personality: Oprah Winfrey. In 1986, Winfrey founded Harpo Productions Inc., making her the first woman in history to own and produce her own talk show. She had the 4-building 3 1/2 acre space renovated into studio space. Contrary to what many believe, the studio is not named after Oprah’s character Sophia’s husband in The Color Purple film, but rather it is her first name spelled backward.
The original armory building which served as the makeshift morgue for the disaster victims, became Harpo Studios, home to the Oprah Winfrey Show from 1990 until 2011. Employees of the building and members of the production crew believe the building is haunted by ghosts of the Eastland. According to Dale Kaczmarek, longtime Facebook friend and perhaps the best-known ghost hunter in Chicago, one common apparition is the Lady in Gray. She appears as a shadowy figure in a long, flowing dress and ornate hat who is most often seen drifting through the halls. Her image has even been captured on the building’s security monitors. Additionally, studio employees and security guards have reported hearing the sounds of crying and the laughter of children accompanied by old-time music. The constant footsteps of crowds of invisible people have been heard going up and down the lobby staircase, augmented by the opening and slamming of doors.
Internet accounts and web pages are full of encounter stories with the ghosts of Harpo Studios. Several witnesses claim there is an angry male spirit upstairs and that one restroom was always kept locked because so many people heard disembodied crying behind its door. Some stories say Oprah knew her building was haunted and loved the ghosts, while others claim she wouldn’t go into the building alone, especially after dark.
The building, once located at 1058 W. Washington, was the spot where police armed themselves in the 1880s to confront the Haymarket riot protestors a few blocks away. It was a roller rink in the 1940s before being turned into a film studio in the 1950s. After Oprah’s show vacated the studio for California in 2011, Rosie O’Donnell used the studio for her show. In July of 2016, the site was razed to make way for McDonald’s corporate headquarters. Whether the ghosts are still there cavorting with the French Fry Gobblins and the Hamburglar is unknown.
And what happened to the USS Wilmette a.k.a. the SS Eastland? On April 9, 1945, she was returned to full commission for a brief interval, three days later her most famous passenger, Franklin D. Roosevelt suffered a stroke and died in Warm Springs, Georgia. Wilmette was decommissioned on November 28, 1945; her name deleted from the Navy list on December 19, 1945. In 1946, Wilmette was offered for sale. Finding no takers, on Halloween of 1946, she was sold for scrap. Five days after the very first Irvington Halloween Festival.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
