Wrigley Field

Wrigley Field at 1060 West Addison in Chicago is famous for being cursed. The quieter story is the dead men who never left it.

One of them is in the ground itself. Charlie Grimm played for the Cubs through the 1920s and managed them across three stints before he died in 1983, at 85. His wife Marion scattered his ashes over the field, the way he'd asked. After that, security guards began telling the same things: the bullpen phones ringing with no one on the line, and their own names called across an empty park. The ghost stories belong to ground crews and night staff, not investigators. No dated sighting, no recording. Just men working an empty building who say Jolly Cholly stuck around.

Then there's Harry Caray, who broadcast Cubs games for 16 seasons and leaned out of the booth every seventh inning to lead the crowd in "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." He collapsed on Valentine's Day, 1998, and died four days later. People in the press box and the bleachers describe a presence after that — nothing you can see, just the sense that the man who ran the stretch is still up there for it.

And Steve Goodman, the folksinger who wrote "Go, Cubs, Go," who died of leukemia in 1984 at 36, days before he was set to sing at a playoff game. Friends scattered some of his ashes here. People say they've seen him in the seats behind home plate.

None of this is the curse. The curse is the loud part. In 1945, a tavern owner named William Sianis bought two box seats to the World Series, one for himself and one for his pet goat Murphy, and when the goat was thrown out for the smell, he hexed the team on his way out. The Cubs lost that series and didn't win another for 71 years. The hex finally broke on a November night in 2016, after every gimmick anyone tried — holy water, severed goat heads mailed to the owner, the original goat's bell rung during the game.

But the men who stayed never needed lifting. They came back on their own, and as the staff tell it, they're still here for the game.