Illinois, land of the weird
June 5, 2005
BY TERESA BUDASI Staff Reporter
The Superdawg weenies -- their glowing red eyes a beacon for anyone with a hankering for a late-night Whoopskidawg -- stand tall in Chicago's cultural landscape.
For outsiders, however -- travelers perhaps -- the weenies are weird.
For author Troy Taylor, who grew up downstate, Superdawg Drive-In is a favorite city haunt.
"I just ate there a week ago," Taylor says via telephone, calling to chat about his new book, Weird Illinois: Your Travel Guide to Illinois' Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets (Barnes & Noble Books, $19.95).
Taylor has put together a colorful little tome in Weird Illinois. Consider some of the entries: Devil Baby of Hull House, The Demon Butcher of Palos Park, Perplexing Petroglyphs in Fountain Bluff, The Norway Nosedive, The Legend of the Devil's Bake Oven, The Freaky Farmer City Monster, The Mad Gasser of Mattoon.
Wherever you hail from, there's bound to be a story to which you can relate. Say, for instance, you grew up in northwest suburban Crystal Lake, where nighttime excitement was often hard to come by. You and your friends would scare yourselves silly, driving around nearby Bull Valley at night looking for the "devil worshippers' house" -- only you never found it, which was part of the fun.
Well, there it is on Page 124: The House With No Square Corners, an English-style country house built by George and Sylvia Stickney in the mid-1800s.
"As devout practitioners of spiritualism, the Stickneys insisted that the architect design no square corners in the house, since, as they explained it, spirits have a tendency to get stuck in these corners, which could have dire results," the book tells us.
Apparently one corner of a room ended up with a 90-degree angle, which supposedly drove the Stickneys out after seven of their children died within a short period of time.
The "devil worshippers" most likely referred to a group of hippies who lived in the house in the '60s, painted the rooms dark colors, had wild parties and built open fires on the floors.
Today, the house serves as the Bull Valley Village Hall.
Several other ghost stories, mysteries, legends and unexplained phenomena can be found in Taylor's book -- and who better to tell these tales than a guy who has written more than 30 books about ghosts and hauntings in Illinois and beyond?
"One of the things people always ask me is do I ever get scared," Taylor says. "Of course I do!"
Sometimes in the name of research.
"I went to an abandoned sanitarium with a friend and we were walking down a hallway, and about 25 feet away someone walked across the hall into a room. We knew no one was supposed to be in the building so we went to check it out. The room had no exit door or window -- and it was empty. We got out of there."
Obviously Taylor believes in ghosts, but there are degrees.
"I don't believe every story I hear," he says. "There's great folklore and great legends all over the place, and I've been around enough very strange stuff to know there's something to it, but some of it is just legend."
In paging through Weird Illinois, it might strike you that the people are weirder than any place or roadside object. There's the story of the late Robert Wadlow, the Gentle Giant from Alton, who has gained lasting fame as the tallest man in history, as well as entries on Chicago villains H.H. Holmes and John Wayne Gacy. But the most peculiar is a guy named Steve Jenne from Springfield, whose opening sentence in his self-written entry says it all: "I have become an involuntary collector of partially eaten sandwiches that were bitten into by celebrities."
The sandwiches are not on display for all to see, however, which normally would preclude it from a mention in a travel guide. (Taylor is reasonably sure that if you tracked down Jenne and asked to see the collection, he would oblige.)
But then Weird Illinois is not your average travel guide. It's really more coffee table book than anything. With its non-standard shape (square) and eye-catching cover, it's a book most browsers would immediately pick up and and give a look. Go ahead and bring it with you if you're taking a road trip and want to check out something in it, but don't look to it for directions or maps -- there aren't any.
"My goal is not to encourage people to trespass on private property or to go into a situation that might be dangerous," Taylor writes in the book's introduction. "That being said, for sites that are accessible to visitors, you need to get out there and see them before they disappear."
Here are a few things you can check out on your own during your next road trip -- or right in your own neighborhood.
Seven Gates of Hell: Along the backroads east of Collinsville, there are a series of bridges and tunnels. One of many legends states that if you drive through all the gates, you will be swept into the depths of hell.
Perplexing Petroglyphs in Fountain Bluff: More than 400 feet above the town of Gorham, these authentic petroglyphs (rock carvings) are not easily accessible (and can be hazardous), but if you make it up there, you'll find carvings believed to be symbols of a shaman's religious experience: handprints, animals, encircled crosses, moons, stars, etc.
The Circus Train Tragedy of Showmen's Rest: In 1918, en route to Hammond, Ind., the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus trains were slammed from behind by a speeding troop train. There were 80-plus deaths, and since no official records were ever kept in the traveling circus, identifying the dead was almost impossible. Many circus folks were drifters and only known to others as "4 Horse Driver" or "Baldy" -- and so it is reflected on their headstones in Forest Park's Woodlawn Cemetery.
Jubilee Rock Garden: Nestled a few miles outside Brimfield in central Illinois, a dairy farmer began creating a rock garden in the 1930s and finished it in the '60s when his wife died. The farmer welcomed visitors, but these days the current owners request that visitors view the white and rose quartz archway and garden from the highway.
Leaning Tower of Niles: Like the Superdawg weenies, this Touhy Avenue sight may not seem weird to Chicagoans, but you know what? It is weird. It's a half-scale replica of Italy's Leaning Tower of Pisa, with a park built around the base and a European-style phone booth.
The Lincoln Watermelon Monument: The only city ever named for Abraham Lincoln constructed the monument -- not Lincoln's likeness but a slice of watermelon -- after the future 16th president poured out the juice from a watermelon to christen the ground in 1853.
Double-deck Outhouse: The Gays, Ill., oddity dates back to 1869 and still stands proudly for tourists to ponder: Who would ever use the first floor of such a thing?
Ghost Hollow Road: Just south of Quincy, this secluded drive winds through woods and bluffs, and passes near an abandoned rail line. Along the road supposedly sits an eerie, walled-off graveyard, though Weird Illinois could not find it. Also nearby are ancient Native American burial grounds, where some say they've heard different languages being chanted in the wind.
Eternal Silence: The eerie monument built for Chicago hotelier Dexter Graves is more commonly known as the Statue of Death, and sits in Graceland Cemetery, final resting place of many historic names of Chicago. It is said that if you look directly at the partially cloaked face, you will get a glimpse of your own death.
Vishnu Springs: Taylor's favorite spot in Weird Illinois sits hidden away in a valley along the La Moine River in McDonough County. Considered a place of peace and healing, the grounds became a health resort, complete with hotel, stores, a restaurant, a livery stable, blacksmith and photo gallery. One summer night in 1903, when the carousel's supervisor became tangled in the gears, children's cries of delight turned into screams of terror. It never ran again, and a series of other unfortunate events led to the demise of Vishnu Springs. By the 1920s, it was a ghost town. After several attempts to revitalize the property, it remains abandoned and the land's status a mystery. To find it, be prepared to walk a couple of miles through dense forest.
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It gets weirder when the dress comes off
BY TERESA BUDASI Staff Reporter
Vanna Whitewall didn't make the book, to author Troy Taylor's great disappointment, but she made this story.
"There was this great Uniroyal gal. She had a detachable dress; a miniskirt," said Taylor, speaking of a giant statue at a nondescript tire joint in downtown Peoria. "In the summer they take off her dress and she's wearing a bikini underneath."
That gal is Vanna Whitewall and I think I found her -- by accident, which, if you've been paying attention, is the whole point behind Taylor's "travel guide," Weird Illinois.
My 12-hour road trip, starting in downtown Chicago, began with a specific objective. The story of the Woodland Palace, which merits four pages in Weird Illinois, fascinated me to the point that I wanted to check it out for myself.
"The house is not at all what you expect," Taylor told me before my trip. "It's called Woodland Palace, you know? You expect some huge, grand thing and it's just this little house. It was so far ahead of its time. It really is the neatest place."
He wasn't kidding. Built on the outskirts of Kewanee in the late 1800s by an eccentric named Fred Francis, the house is a modern marvel in terms of engineering and technology.
The kindly caretaker, Cliff Furnald, a retired Kewanee cop, gave me my own private tour.
"Fred was an artist, a poet, inventor, builder, musician, engineer, vegetarian, physical culturist and nudist," Furnald explained.
The practice of physical culture steered Francis to such eccentricities as taking a hot bath once every winter, then going outside and rolling around on the ground so that the earth's minerals could be absorbed by his body. The only mode of transportation for Francis and his wife, Jeanie, was a bicycle, which you can see, and even touch, during the tour.
Furnald not only explained Francis' engineering wonders in great detail -- the fresh air cooling system, water purification system, ventilation system, the shower and sauna -- but also points out the small details. There are pieces of loose trim all over the house that when pulled out reveal little drawer-like hiding places. Etchings in the tin ceilings, cuttings in the limestone, delicately carved furniture and paintings on display all were the work of this onetime mechanical engineer for the Elgin Watch Company.
Weird Illinois does a good job of explaining the story of Fred Francis, but the live experience is worth the drive and worth loads more than the $2 admission fee.
When I asked Furnald to point me toward Peoria, he sent me through deep farm country, where there are no road signs.
"Go left, then right, across the road and past the railroad tracks. Then turn left and keep going until you run into the windmill farms," he said. "Now there's something weird for you."
"Weird" isn't quite the word I would use. "Otherworldly" is more like it. These "windmills" are straight out of a sci-fi film. With no traveling companion, no cars going by, no farmers, no sign of life anywhere, I started to reconsider my status as the only living human who doesn't own a cell phone.
After zigzagging my way out of the space-age farmisphere, I made it to Peoria, where, truth be told, I only wanted to visit to get my hands on a half-gondola (sub sandwich) from Avanti's.
Gondola in hand, I was heading out of town toward Decatur when a detour sent me a couple of miles out of the way through a desolate, industrial part of downtown, whereupon the gargantuan Vanna Whitewall, sans miniskirt, appeared before me as if Troy Taylor telepathically steered me there himself.
Again, I found myself alone -- no employees, no cars, no passersby to find out if it was really her. Just a camera to document my accidental find.
A weird but happy accident, indeed.
TROY TAYLOR
Aside from Weird Illinois, Taylor has written nearly three dozen books about ghosts, hauntings and Illinois history. He is also the editor of the unsolved mysteries magazine Ghosts of the Prairie. His Web site,
http://www.prairieghosts.com, will direct you to these things, as well as provide a link to Taylor's Bump In the Night Tour Co., which sets up ghost tours all over the state.
BOOK SIGNINGS and DISCUSSION
# 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, Barnes & Noble at DePaul, 1 E. Jackson.
# Noon Saturday, Barnes & Noble, 1701 E. Empire, Bloomington.
# 7 p.m. Saturday, Barnes & Noble, 6685 E. State St., Rockford.
# 7 p.m. June 17, Barnes & Noble, 65 E. Market View Dr., Champaign.