Mysterious Chicago


Book Description

From Chicago historian Adam Selzer, expert on all of the Windy City’s quirks and oddities, comes a compelling heavily researched anthology of the stories behind its most fascinating unsolved mysteries. To create this unique volume, Selzer has collected forty unsolved mysteries from the 1800s to modern day. He has poured through all newspaper, magazine, and book references to them, and consulted expert historians. Topics covered include who really started the great Chicago fire, who was the first “automobile murderer,” and even if there was actually a vampire slaying at Rose Hill cemetery. The result is both a colorful read to get lost in, a window to a world of curiosity and wonder, as well as a volume that separates fact from fiction—true crime from urban legend. Complementing the gripping stories Selzer presents are original images of the crime and its suspects as developed by its original investigators. Readers will marvel at how each character and crime were presented, and happily journey with Selzer as he presents all facts and theories presented at the time of the “crime” and uses modern hindsight to assemble the pieces.




Graveyards of Chicago


Book Description

Cemeteries are in the metropolitan Chicago area.




The Peculiar Incident on Shady Street


Book Description

When lights start flickering and temperatures suddenly drop, twelve-year-old Tessa Woodward, sensing her new house may be haunted, recruits some new friends to help her unravel the mystery of who or what is trying to communicate with her and why.




Chicago Gardens


Book Description

Once maligned as a swampy outpost, the fledgling city of Chicago brazenly adopted the motto Urbs in Horto or City in a Garden, in 1837. Chicago Gardens shows how this upstart town earned its sobriquet over the next century, from the first vegetable plots at Fort Dearborn to innovative garden designs at the 1933 World’s Fair. Cathy Jean Maloney has spent decades researching the city’s horticultural heritage, and here she reveals the unusual history of Chicago’s first gardens. Challenged by the region’s clay soil, harsh winters, and fierce winds, Chicago’s pioneering horticulturalists, Maloney demonstrates, found imaginative uses for hardy prairie plants. This same creative spirit thrived in the city’s local fruit and vegetable markets, encouraging the growth of what would become the nation’s produce hub. The vast plains that surrounded Chicago, meanwhile, inspired early landscape architects, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jens Jensen, and O.C. Simonds, to new heights of grandeur. Maloney does not forget the backyard gardeners: immigrants who cultivated treasured seeds and pioneers who planted native wildflowers. Maloney’s vibrant depictions of Chicagoans like “Bouquet Mary,” a flower peddler who built a greenhouse empire, add charming anecdotal evidence to her argument–that Chicago’s garden history rivals that of New York or London and ensures its status as a world-class capital of horticultural innovation. With exquisite archival photographs, prints, and postcards, as well as field guide descriptions of living legacy gardens for today’s visitors, Chicago Gardens will delight green-thumbs from all parts of the world.




Where They're Buried


Book Description

This volume invites readers to get up close and personal with one of the most respected and beloved writers of the last four decades. Carolyn J. Sharp has transcribed numerous table conversations between Walter Brueggemann and his colleagues and former students, in addition to several of his addresses and sermons from both academic and congregational settings. The result is the essential Brueggemann: readers will learn about his views on scholarship, faith, and the church; get insights into his "contagious charisma," grace, and charity; and appreciate the candid reflections on the fears, uncertainties, and difficulties he faced over the course of his career. Anyone interested in Brueggemann's work and thoughts will be gifted with thought-provoking, inspirational reading from within these pages.




Hollywood Remains to Be Seen


Book Description

Hollywood Remains to Be Seen is a fascinating, gossipy guide to the fourteen most significant Hollywood-era cemeteries and the final resting places of the movie stars who are buried in them. Arranged as an easy-to-follow tours of the properties, the fourteen chapters-one for each cemetery-include histories of the cemeteries, directions for finding them, and a detailed listing of exactly where more than three hundred stars, and a detailed listing of exactly where more than three hundred stars are buried.Strange as it may seem, cemeteries are becoming one of the most popular destinations for tourists to Hollywood and for film fans who want to pay their respects to the rich and famous and passed-on. Every year, millions of people from all over the world visit the graves of the legendary film stars buried in Hollywood, and the interest in these places grows from year to year.Hollywood Remains to Be Seen highlights the legend and lore of celebrity graves, from Rudolph Valentino's mysterious "Lady In Black" to the regular delivery of one red rose to Marilyn Monroe's grave, to the strange journeys made by the body of John Barry more immediately after his death in 1942- and again thirty-eight years later. Also included are information and images of Hollywood's most lavish and majestic graves, from the huge mausoleum of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., complete with Roman pillars and giant reflecting pool; to Liberace's flamboyant tomb, with a musical score set on white marble; to the spectacular domed monument of Al Jolson, featuring a life-sized statue of the entertainer atop a 120-foot cascadin waterfall.Heavily illustrated with nearly one hundred photographs, Hollywood Remains to Be Seen includes photographs of the celebrities as well as photographs of the cemeteries, mausoleums, and graves, maps of the burial grounds and gravesites, and a final section fitly titled "Exit Lines" made up of celebrities' last words.




H. H. Holmes


Book Description

America's first and most notorious serial killer and his diabolical killing spree during the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, now updated with a new afterword discussing Holmes' exhumation on American Ripper. H. H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil is the first truly comprehensive book examining the life and career of a murderer who has become one of America’s great supervillains. It reveals not only the true story but how the legend evolved, taking advantage of hundreds of primary sources that have never been examined before, including legal documents, letters, articles, and records that have been buried in archives for more than a century. Though Holmes has become just as famous now as he was in 1895, a deep analysis of contemporary materials makes very clear how much of the story as we know came from reporters who were nowhere near the action, a dangerously unqualified new police chief, and, not least, lies invented by Holmes himself. Selzer has unearthed tons of stunning new data about Holmes, weaving together turn-of-the-century America, the killer’s background, and the wild cast of characters who circulated in and about the famous “castle” building. This book will be the first truly accurate account of what really happened in Holmes’s castle of horror, and now includes an afterword detailing the author's participation in Holmes' exhumation on the TV series, American Ripper. Exhaustively researched and painstakingly brought to life, H. H. Holmes will be an invaluable companion to the upcoming Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio movie about Holmes’s murder spree based on Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City.




Girl in Disguise


Book Description

From the USA Today Bestselling author of The Magician's Lie "Macallister is becoming a leading voice in strong, female-driven historical fiction. Exciting, frightening, and unspeakably moving..."—Erika Robuck, bestselling author of Hemingways's Girl For the first daring female Pinkerton detective, respect is hard to come by, but danger and spies are everywhere. In the tumultuous years of the Civil War, the streets of Chicago offer a woman mostly danger and ruin—unless that woman is Kate Warne. As an undercover Pinkerton detective, Kate is able to infiltrate the seedy side of the city in disguises that her fellow spies just can't manage. She's a seductress, an exotic foreign medium, a rich train passenger—all depending on the day and the robber, thief, or murderer she's been assigned to nab. But is it only her detective work that makes her a daring spy and a clever liar? Or is the real disguise the good girl she always thought she was? As the Civil War marches closer, Kate takes on her most pressing job ever. The nation's future is at risk, and she's no longer sure where her disguise ends and the very real danger begins. With magnificent historical detail, Girl in Disguise brings the adventures of one turn-of-the-century woman to tense, page-turning life. Also by Greer Macallister: The Magician's Lie Woman 99




Shadow on the Hill


Book Description

It was the most brutal murder in the history of Coffey County, Kansas. On May 30, 1925, Florence Knoblock, a farmer's wife and the mother of a young boy, was found slaughtered on her kitchen floor. Several innocent men were taken into custody before the victim's husband, John, was accused of the crime. He would endure two sensational trials before being acquitted. Eighty years later, local historian Diana Staresinic-Deane studied the investigation, which was doomed by destroyed evidence, inexperienced lawmen, disappearing witnesses, and a community more desperate for an arrest than justice. She would also discover a witness who may have seen the murderer that fateful morning.