Oak Forest HS Students Visit Haunted Grounds

Many people say that if you get shivers when walking through an unexpectedly cold spot in an eerie room, that you have walked through a person’s remnant spirit hanging on too long to this world. This remnant spirit gives off an energy that some people try to measure through scientific means. This is just what students in Oak Forest High School English teacher Laurie Genardo’s Speculative Literature classes had the opportunity to discover when they had the opportunity to explore some haunted grounds in Lincoln Park in Chicago on a ghost tour with Chicago Hauntings, a ghost tour group own and operated by local paranormal author and expert Ursula Bielski. Tour guide and paranormal expert Tony Szabelski introduced students to various haunted areas in the Lincoln Park area. In addition, students were also allowed to actively “ghost hunt” using various paranormal equipment including digital EMF readers, EVP recorders, and copper dowsing rods, such as the ones that OFHS Senior Lydia Howard is seen holding. The dowsing rods would cross if asked a question and an “otherworldly” presence was there to answer the question. Lydia Howard said that Mrs. Genardo “wanted to get us to interact with what we were learning about and to engage with it.” In class, the students were reading Richard Mattheson’s, I Am Legend, the story of the last surviving man on earth. The rest of the population of the world has fallen to a pandemic that resembles vampirism and are working on rebuilding a new version of society, a society in which this last “normal” man no longer fits. Quite a few students experienced interesting readings, including voice feedback on the EVP recorder! Kane Burke said, “I believe [we did experience the supernatural]--we had instruments!” Lydia Howery said that there was a large reading on the EMF (electro magnetic field) detector. “We did get a reading on the EMF. The needle read past the max just as we were walking through somewhere!” Brianna Towery explained that the dowsing rods seemed to work. “Everytime you would ask them a question, they would cross,” she said. “At the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre site, we asked ‘Were they killed here?’ and they indicated two crosses [of the dowsing rods] for yes and one cross for no. You had to hold them a certain way so they weren’t faked.” Amongst the places that students visited were Chicago’s City Cemetary, built in 1837 where over 14,000 bodies were interred from the famous Chicago cholera outbreak, the famous Cafe Brauer - once a speakeasy for Al Capone and his Southside gang, the Couch Mausoleum, and the original site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Aside from learning some fascinating Chicago history, students had the opportunity to explore the paranormal world of Chicago--one their tour guides explained includes many unexplained supernatural phenomena. Kane Burke said it was neat to see what areas of Chicago were haunted. “They were places like the Oriental Theatre and the cemetery by McCormick Place.”