The Eastland Disaster

On the morning of 24 July 1915 the excursion steamer Eastland lay tied to a dock in the Chicago River, loading Western Electric Company workers and their families for a company picnic. At about 7:28 a.m. the ship rolled onto its port side while still at the wall. Hundreds of passengers, many of them below decks, were trapped. The usual toll given is 844 dead, among them 22 entire families, though sources differ by a person or two. A grand jury later blamed instability from overloading, the handling of the ship’s water ballast and faulty construction. Company officers were indicted, but a court refused to extradite them and the case did not proceed.

The dead were taken to temporary morgues around the Loop. Bodies went first to the Reid, Murdoch & Co. building on the riverfront, and by afternoon the unidentified were gathered in the armory of the Second Regiment, where relatives came to look for the missing. Many of the workers were of Czech descent, and the loss fell hard on that community.

The ghost reports are much later than the tragedy. People who visit the river near the disaster site have told of seeing faces in the water or hearing cries for help, and tour guides say police have occasionally been called to the water for apparent drowning victims who were not there. The best known story involves the armory, which was later converted into a television studio that housed Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios. Winfrey and her staff are reported to have described unexplained sounds, a woman sobbing in a restroom, children’s voices and, on a security recording, a woman in a gray dress, whom Winfrey called the “gray lady.” These accounts come from tour guides and press retellings; the studio’s own people are not quoted in the sources opened for this entry.

The building was later demolished. In 2015, the centennial year, paranormal investigators placed recording gear near the water and reported that the recordings included Czech words, an interpretation that other listeners may not share. The disaster itself is thoroughly documented and is remembered by a historical marker on the river and a memorial at Bohemian National Cemetery; the ghost stories are best understood as one of the ways the city has remembered the dead.

Reported faces and voices at the river, phantom drowning calls, and, at the former armory, children’s voices, crying and a gray-dressed woman on a recording. All are secondhand.

The Chicago River downtown near the original dock between Clark and LaSalle Streets; the former temporary morgue sites, one of which later housed a television studio.

The Eastland has been a stop on Chicago ghost tours for years, and the disaster is the subject of books and the work of the Eastland Disaster Historical Society, founded in 1998 by granddaughters of a survivor. The 1999 television series So Weird also referred to it.