Holy Name Cathedral

Bullet holes from Hymie Weiss's 1926 assassination on the cornerstone of Chicago's Catholic cathedral refuse to stay repaired. Visitors hear phantom gunfire matching the ambush, a man in a 1920s fedora vanishes from the back pews, and staff hear a woman crying in the empty church.

The bullet holes in the cornerstone won't stay repaired. The cathedral has tried multiple times over the past century to patch them, but the repair material either doesn't set or falls away. The holes are still visible at the corner of the building, right where Hymie Weiss was gunned down on October 11, 1926.

Holy Name Cathedral sits at 735 North State Street in Chicago's Near North Side, the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese. Directly across the street, at 738 North State, there used to be a flower shop. Schofield's Flowers. In 1922, Dean O'Banion bought into the business, which was convenient because the rooms above the shop served as headquarters for the North Side Gang. O'Banion had been an altar boy at Holy Name as a kid. Now he ran bootlegging operations from its shadow.

On November 10, 1924, three men walked into Schofield's while O'Banion was clipping chrysanthemums in the back room. One of them, believed to be Frankie Yale, grabbed O'Banion's hand in a tight shake. The other two, John Scalise and Alberto Anselmi, shot him six times in the head, neck, and chest. O'Banion died in his own flower shop, across the street from the church where he'd once served at the altar. The church refused to bury him.

Hymie Weiss took over the North Side Gang and made it his mission to kill Al Capone in retaliation. He failed. On October 11, 1926, Weiss and four associates were crossing Superior Street near the cathedral, heading toward the flower shop. Gunmen opened fire from a second-floor window above a nearby boarding house. Weiss took ten bullets and fell in the street. Several rounds hit the cathedral's cornerstone, tearing away parts of the carved inscription. Those bullet marks have outlasted every attempt to erase them.

Visitors near the cathedral's entrance on the Superior Street side report hearing phantom gunfire, a rapid succession of shots matching the tempo of the Weiss ambush. The sounds come in the early evening, around the time the original shooting happened. People describe a wave of dread that accompanies the noise, then nothing.

A man in a 1920s suit and fedora has been seen standing near the entrance or sitting in the back pews. Witnesses describe him as solid and lifelike, dressed in expensive clothing from the Prohibition era. He vanishes when anyone approaches or acknowledges him. The common assumption is Weiss, but it could be any of the men who died violently in the cathedral's orbit during those years.

Inside the empty cathedral, staff have heard a woman crying. A few have seen a translucent figure kneeling in one of the pews, her shoulders shaking. The theory is residual grief: an echo of the women who came to Holy Name during Prohibition to pray for husbands, sons, and brothers caught up in the gang wars. Over 700 gangland killings happened in Chicago during Prohibition, and this was the most prominent Catholic church in the city. The pews would have been full of mourners.

The entrance facing the street where Weiss died gets cold. Not the whole building, just that section. Visitors describe the temperature dropping suddenly and a feeling of being watched or pressed on, strong enough that some have walked out.

The cathedral was rebuilt in 1875 after the Great Fire of 1871 destroyed the original, and it underwent a major renovation in 1968-69. The bullet holes predating all of that survived through every reconstruction. The flower shop is gone. The boarding house where the shooters hid is gone. But the holes in the stone are still there, still refusing to be filled.