The Weird Tour Chicago – A Cautionary Tale

As the name implies, if you take this tour, you should expect it to be weird, right? I guess everyone’s definition of “weird” is different. The description of the tour makes it sound like it will be cool – or at least so lame it might be cool – “Ghosts, Gangsters, and Ghouls of the Windy City”. As it turns out, I feel ripped off that I spent three hours of my life on this. If you read this, you’ll get to feel ripped off that you spent a few minutes of your time reading about this waste of my afternoon. You’re welcome!

The tour left from the Hard Rock Café in downtown Chicago at 3PM. This was probably our first mistake – doing this tour during the day. It might have sucked less at night…drunk…maybe… We arrive and find that our transportation is a black “short bus” with no air conditioning. It’s a 90+ degree day, but we bought some water and were still determined to have a good time. All six of us pile into the back of the bus and wait for the torture…er…”tour” to begin.

Our “tour guide”, for lack of a better title, is a self-proclaimed Professional Ghost Hunter though she’s never been paid. I bite my tongue and do not ask her if she understands what “professional” means. As the volunteer ghost hunting business isn’t very lucrative (go figure) Erica is also a sports reporter/production company owner. She claims that she did production work on The Dark Knight, but I’m guessing she’s also an occasional resident of one of the local Chicago asylums.

Generally on a tour, you travel about a city seeing sights and learning interesting facts about said sights. Our first stop was promising – the site of the Eastland disaster where hundreds of people died when the boat tipped over due to shoddy engineering. Whoops. We listened to her tales about ghosts supposedly seen and heard there with polite interest. One of the girls I was travelling with had to point out to Erica that we happened to be there on the anniversary of the disaster. Seems to be something an informed tour guide would have been prepared for, doesn’t it? We should have left the tour right then, but no, we gave her the benefit of the doubt and climbed back onto the bus.

Our next stop - the last semi-legitimate stop - was the Congress Hotel. Most tours probably would’ve concentrated on the beautiful, ornate Tiffany glass mosaics covering large swaths of the ceiling. Not our tour! No, we go to a wall with framed pictures of ballrooms to hear about the ghosts that stalk their dance floors. Do we go upstairs to visit the ballrooms? NO! We just look at the pictures and listen to her rambling stories. For 45 minutes. Standing. Awesome. Once again, we foolishly climb back onto the bus.

We stop at a red light and two guys on the tour hop off the bus and don’t look back. We come to envy them.

The next three stops are in front of alleys where she claims buildings used to be but clearly aren’t there anymore. She doesn’t even have pictures of this stuff, so we’re pretty sure she made it all up. We would’ve seen a fourth thing that wasn’t there anymore but our brilliant guide didn’t realize that a huge section of the city was blocked off for a festival. So while we’re driving to the next location she tells us about what we would have seen if we’d gone there. Considering that what we were supposed to visit wasn’t there anymore, she had a lot to say. Think about that for a minute.

At this point, 3 hours into the tour, we turn down yet another alley. This time one of my friends, a local, leans over and says, ‘This is a very bad part of town.”. I took a look around and realized that she was right. Even my naïve eyes could see we were driving between the buildings of a very prosperous chop shop. Erica, ever-savvy of her surroundings, begins talking loudly about how this is clearly a “very legitimate car repair business” and we notice the workers quit what they’re doing and come to the doors to watch us. Yes, that’s right – since it’s so hot the windows are open. At this point I get a text from across the bus.

Meredith: Is this tour ever going to be over?

Me: We’re going to die here. We’re never getting off this tour.

I found out later that Meredith had sent a text to her husband with the name of the tour and told him to call 911 if he didn’t hear from her in the next hour.

Erica has us all get off the bus in the scary alley to see if we “feel any paranormal activity” and to take pictures since “we might catch a shadow figure or a ghost”. All that was there to take pictures of, without considering the chop shop which we were all smart enough to try not to look at, was part of a fence and a bunch of trash including some scary looking needles. My guess is a homeless drug addict was living there. Fantastic. To the credit of the workers, they just watched us and didn’t attack. We were able to get back on the bus.

As soon as we reached a safer section of town, we asked them to pull over so we could get off the bus. Erica actually had the nerve to ask us for a tip for the driver! It’s bad enough they took $30 from each of us for this travesty of a tour, but asking for a tip seemed a bit over the top. We were happy to be alive though, so we tipped him anyway.

We assume, since we don’t have any evidence to the contrary, that the other 7 people remaining on the bus were taken somewhere and murdered so that Erica can tell stories about seeing their ghosts to her next tour. We hope their souls find peace wherever they roam now.

Which reminds me about one of the best parts of Erica’s story. Do you know of the TV show “Ghost Hunters”? She claims that they approached her to be on that show but when she read the contract one of the provisions was that she sign up for falsifying evidence and she had too much integrity for that. Seriously, that’s what she said.

Anyway, if you actually read this far, I am sorry that my first post is so bad. :-) Hopefully I’ll do better on the next one!