Ghost stories?
Mysterious happenings seem to haunt Blue Island City Hall, mayor says
Something strange happened one late-summer afternoon four years ago at Blue Island City Hall. As Mayor Domingo F. Vargas stood talking with Marisol Barr era, his administrative assistant, a heavy wooden door opened on its own into a hallway leading to their offices on the second floor.
Oddly, the door made no sound, though wind chimes were fastened to the top of the door and brass bells hung froma ribbon tied to the doorknob.
“That’s the Mexican alarm system,” joked Vargas, who is of Mexican descent. “We didn’t hear anything.”
The door, according to their more recent accounts, also opened quickly, though swelling of the building’s wooden floors in warm weather would have caused the door to rub the carpet. Over time, that rubbing has left a pronounced groove.
As Barrera recalls, she sawthe door open on a security monitor and replayed the video for themayor. Themayor recalls seeing the door open from the hallway before viewing the video replay.
Either way, Blue Island police and other staff at City Hall, 13051 Greenwood Ave., took a keen interest. “They checked to see if it could be a draft, did somebody have a window open? Nothing,” said Vargas.
“I’ve worked here seven years,” Barrera said. “In all that time, nothing like that ever happened.”
Vargas recalled seeing on the video “a shadowy oval figure that looked like static and butterflies” coming up the stairs near the second-story door just before it opened, then moving toward another doorway leading to the third-floor attic of city hall.
As curiosity mounted, Vargas decided to check things out in the attic. “I’m thinking, I’m the mayor, right? So, I’ve got to suck it up. I asked three police officers to come with me but only one would go.”
What they found was not so different fromother times themayor had climbed the narrow stairs to the lofty attic space.
After taking office May 14, 2013, Vargas and other city employees cleared the attic of old boxes and castoff items so that maintenance tasks relating to the building’s roof and ventilation systems could be accomplished more
safely.
The space in 2016 would have looked much as it does these days, with florescent lights casting sharp shadows on dark wooden roof beams that slant steeply to dizzying heights.
Wooden floor planks would have creaked and groaned beneath their feet, patched in several places with plywood and other materials. On the west side of the space, as now, newer wooden boards covered two vertical window spaces that once accommodated steep, narrow dormers.
Despite the attic being an unused space, the stairs leading to it are heavily worn. Time also has carved a path to a dark paneled room on the attic’s east side. Some say the room may have been used by Al Capone, but a connection has never been proved.
The door incident wasn’t the only strange occurrence.
“When I first came here, I heard lots of stories from city employees and veteran employees about strange things happening,” Vargas said. “But none of them had ever seen things, it was just noises.”
Mark Rashid, owner of Southland TV, visited the City Hall attic at the mayor’s invitation while shooting an online video segment for a series about mayors from local suburbs.
Did Rashid experience anything unusual up there?
“Oh, hell yes!” he said. “Our camera shut off. That’s never happened before. Five minutes in, I noticed it wasn’t recording, which was unusual because shutting it off is a two-step process.”
He also said it was extremely cold in the room, despite it being the middle of summer.
“Afterward, I felt like99% ofmy energy was drained and I didn’t even work out that day,” he said.
Rashid also said he left the building as soon as possible.
“I’m 52, I’m not going to be making up stupid stuff,” he said.
Rashid is not the only one to get spooked.
A finance employee, who decided to catch up on paperwork one weekend, asked her teenage son to take a bag of trash to the recycle bin. He came back shaken after a refrigerator in the break room opened on its own, according to Vargas.
Vargas also said employees told him that at various times an old adding machine printed a repeated set of the same numbers on its own, using up entire spools of paper.
As a newly elected mayor in 2013, Vargas spent a couple of evenings, painting a wall outside of his office, located in an addition adjoining the old City Hall. A music lover and guitar player, he turned on a television in a nearby conference room to listen to a WTTW evening broadcast of an old concert featuring bluesmen Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughn.
Preparing to leave, Vargas turned off the TV, but then ascended a ladder one last time to check his work. Oddly, he noticed the TV still glowing different colors in a mottled reflection on a door in his office. “But when I went into the conference room to turn the TV off, itwas already off,” he said. “I felt like a rush, like ants on my body and I get a chill … I said to myself, ‘It’s time to go home.’ ”
The next day, he told Barrera, and she shared the story with a visitor waiting for a meeting with Vargas. As she finished relating the incident, a large painting in the mayor’s office fell sideways, denting the wall and startling her and the visitor.
Vargas also claimed to see flashes of light passing in a doorway while staying late to install a keyboard rack beneath Barrera’s desk.
In another spooky incident, Vargas posed in front of City Hall for photos with a niece who was visiting from out of town and her friends. One image revealed the vague outline of a face in one of the upper story windows. “No one would have been there,” Vargas said.
When a group of students from Eisenhower High School and their parents came to the building for a City Council meeting and tour, a woman who claimed psychic gifts related a vision of “a big man, order someone dressed in blue to ‘Get that expletive out of here,’ ” Vargas said.
On a different occasion, a different visitor told Vargas a portion of the building held “a dark energy” and recommended Vargas put a crucifix inside the doorway to his office and relocate a mirror to face the entry.
Vargas, whois Catholic and had once considered becoming a priest, repositioned the mirror and hung a small crucifix.
A graduate of Quigley Preparatory Seminary South, he earned his undergraduate and law degrees from Loyola University Chicago.
The crucifix might not surprise others who have worked at Blue Island City Hall. “I’ve found holy cards taped beneath desks,” Vargas said. He also found votive candles.
Whether as a precaution or just for good measure, Vargas invited a priest from St. Benedict Catholic Parish in Blue Island to bless the building, which houses old jail cells that are no longer used.
Overall, Vargas seems more intrigued than rattled by the strange phenomena. He likens it to hearing a favorite song on the radio that reminds him of a deceased friend. Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” causes him to recall a cherished colleague, Nicholas DeJohn, who mentored him as a defense attorney, a profession he maintains along with duties as mayor.
“It’s my belief — my culture — to acknowledge and celebrate those who have passed on,” he said, pointing to a memento in his office, an elaborately decorated skull mask used for Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations. For the holiday, Vargas and his relatives invite spirits of departed family members into their homes for feasting and celebration.
On some level, the same might be said for Edmund R. Krause, the architect of the Blue Island City Hall. Krause was among a group of German-schooled architects largely responsible for giving Chicago its regal mansions and luxury apartment buildings, as well as ornate structures like the Majestic Theater, 18 W. Monroe St., now known as CIBC Theatre.
He designed the Blue Island City Hall early in his career. He also fashioned a Chicago home for himself at 425 W. Saint James Place with a similar steep roof and distinctive pointed dormers.
For the construction of the City Hall building in 1891, Blue Island paid Christian Krueger Jr., a trustee and board chair in Blue Island’s early village government. Krueger also established Krueger Funeral Home. The mortuary, which changed addresses, is now located directly across from City Hall at 13050 S. Greenwood.
Just as Krueger must have been comfortable helping families deal with mortality, and just as Vargas celebrates Day of the Dead, the architect of City Hall, Krause, seemedto appreciate the eve of All Saints Day which also pays homage to departed souls.
Krause, who spent much of his life in Evanston, chose Halloween as the wedding day for his second marriage, according to an article published by the Evanston Historical Society.