Congress Plaza Hotel

Paranormal researcher Ursula Bielski has documented 47 distinctively haunted rooms at this 1893 Michigan Avenue hotel, where two Marines once fled their room in boxer shorts after a black figure rose from the closet. The Congress Plaza's ghost roster includes the Langer family (a mother who threw her two sons from the 13th floor while fleeing the Nazis in 1939), a sealed-over Room 666, and a self-playing piano in the Florentine Room.

Two Marines fled Room 441B at three in the morning in 1989, wearing nothing but boxer shorts. They told the front desk a towering black figure had risen from the closet. These were not civilians prone to jumpiness. They refused to go back for their clothes.

The Congress Plaza Hotel on Michigan Avenue was built in 1893 as the Auditorium Annex, designed to house visitors to the Columbian Exposition. It has hosted Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Al Capone, who played cards every Friday night in a meeting room overlooking Grant Park. Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik called Capone from the Congress before and after the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

Paranormal researcher Ursula Bielski has documented 47 distinctively haunted rooms and at least two haunted ballrooms over more than three dozen investigations since 1989. That's not a typo. Forty-seven rooms.

The Langer family is the hotel's most heartbreaking story. In August 1939, Adele Langer arrived from Nazi-occupied Prague with her two young sons, Karel and Jan. One afternoon, after taking the boys to the Lincoln Park Zoo, she returned to their room on the thirteenth floor, opened the window, and threw both children to the sidewalk below. Then she jumped. A young boy in knee breeches and high-button boots has been seen running through the South Tower hallways. Guests who spot him say he looks panicked.

Room 312 has its own history. Mining investor Morse Davis was found dead of cyanide poisoning there in the summer of 1916. His wife survived the same poison but later attempted suicide again.

Room 666 was sealed shut and drywalled over at some point. Depending on who you ask, furniture is still inside. The lintel above the old doorway remains visible in the hallway.

The Florentine Room produces piano music when nobody is at the keys. Staff hear organ notes and what sounds like wooden roller skate wheels rolling across the floor. A woman screams outside the staff entrance, but the hallway is always empty when someone checks.

In the Gold Room, photographs taken during events sometimes develop with people missing from the frame who were visibly present when the shutter clicked. Doors secured at night are found open in the morning.

The South Tower's fifth floor has a persistent moaning near the passenger elevator. Its third floor has a figure guests describe to the front desk as a one-legged man, possibly the ghost of a 1940s resident with a wooden leg who died of a heart attack.

Bielski herself has had experiences at the Congress. Showers blasting at full force while barely producing a trickle elsewhere in the bathroom. Sheets pulled off during sleep by hands she couldn't see. Three deliberate knocks on the door with nobody in the hall. And once, lying in bed, she heard two men whispering at the foot of the mattress: "Are they still awake?"

Captain Louis Ostheim of the First United States Artillery checked in alone on April 8, 1900, the night before his wedding. He shot himself in the head. No explanation was ever found. A dark figure that guests call the Shadow Man has been reported in the halls for over a century, and hotel staff think it's Ostheim.

Frederick Haye, a Rockford attorney, was found strangled with his own shirt in his room in May 1966, wrists and feet bound with socks. That case was never solved either.

The Congress keeps collecting stories because it keeps staying open. More than 130 years of suicides, murders, and ordinary deaths in a building that size produces a long list of candidates for who might still be walking the hallways at 3 a.m.