Neighborhood News: Haunting the halls at the Magnificent Mile’s historic Drake Hotel
On the Magnificent Mile, there’s no more storied place for weary travelers than the elegant, 125-year old Drake Hotel, 140 E. Walton Place, a property of Hilton Hotels since the 1980’s.
Though the Drake Hotel is notorious for being one of the most haunted hotels in the United States, its elegance, spectacular views of Lake Michigan, convenience, and historic landmark status continues to lure guests and dignitaries from around the world. As the Deep Cleaning Chicago blog site says, many guests come precisely because of its ghost stories, hoping to have a paranormal encounter.
Princess Diana stayed here and had afternoon tea at Palm Court. It’s said that baseball legend Joe DiMaggio and iconic screen star Marilyn Monroe carved their initials in the bar of the hotel’s Cape Cod Room (now closed) on their honeymoon.
With Halloween coming up next week, and Chicago being such a historic city, it probably comes as no surprise that the Drake Hotel is inhabited by ghosts, not unlike The Congress Hotel, its neighbor to the south.
Ghosts in the Darkness
As CBS Chicago wrote, you will not find the ghosts of Princess Diana, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, or even Walt Disney. But you just might run into the ghost of one of those 2,000 people who attended the Drake’s opening gala in 1920.
The Lady in Red
As Windy City Ghosts recalls, The Drake Hotel came about during an odd point in American history. Society was eager to forget the atrocities and turmoil of World War I. Everyone just wanted to have fun in the ‘Roaring 20’s!’ Brothers John and Tracy Drake financed the hotel in 1919, and the grand opening took place in their Grand Ballroom on New Year’s Eve, 1919.
The story goes, according to Windy City Ghosts, that an unnamed woman in a red dress was at the grand opening, enjoying the extravagance with her new fiancé. At some point in the night, the couple lost one another.
The clock was nearing midnight, and she was determined to be with her love to celebrate the new decade. She searched for her groom-to-be but could not find him anywhere.
She managed to find her way back to her room on the 10th floor, only to find it unlocked. Opening the door, she was shattered to see her fiancé in bed with another woman. With all hope lost and her heart in pieces, she flung herself out of the window to her death.
Since then, guests and staff alike have reportedly seen glimpses of a lady in a red dress all over the hotel, from the 10th-floor hallway to the Palm Court.
The Woman in Black
As Chicago Magazine retells it, one of Chicago’s weirdest unsolved mysteries occurred on January 19, 1944. “WOMAN SHOT AT THE DRAKE,” screamed the front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune the next morning. As documented by the archives of Chicago Tribune, and reported by CBS News Chicago, Adele Born Williams – the wife of U.S. State Department attaché Frank Starr Williams – was a guest at the hotel along with his adult daughter, Patricia Goodbody. In January 1944, Williams and Goodbody were coming back to the suite where Williams lived in the hotel – only to find the door unlocked and slightly ajar when they had left it shut.
All of a sudden, a woman wearing a black dress, a black fur coat, and a white wig stepped out of the bathroom and took out a tiny pistol. She fired two shots at Goodbody and missed, but then fired two shots at Williams and killed her.
Multiple witnesses saw the “woman in black” flee the scene on the eighth floor, but police never solved the case. To make things even weirder, the gun used in the crime was found several days later, at the bottom of a stairwell that police had searched thoroughly, and a spare key to Adele’s room that had gone missing turned back up at the front desk.
She’s said to haunt the eighth floor.
Bobby Frank’s Ghost
Perhaps the most poignant ghosts, according to Chicago Magazine and Choose Chicago, are those of the parents of Bobby Franks. Franks was kidnapped and murdered by his cousin Richard Loeb and his accomplice Nathan Leopold in 1924. The two said they did it “for the thrill of it.”
It was the “Murder of the Century,” at the time, and reports at the time noted that the Franks family left their home to avoid gawkers, moving to The Drake, where they spent the rest of their days. The father, Jacob M. Franks—retired president of the Rockford Watch Company and a millionaire—died of a heart attack in his suite in 1928, just four years after his son was beaten to death. The mother, Flora, also died in the hotel nine years later. Both are interred in the Franks family mausoleum, along with their son Bobby, at Rosehill Cemetery in Lincoln Square.
However, they remain at The Drake in the afterlife, and have been witnessed wandering the hotel, mourning their murdered son.
The Drake Hotel is among the many “Haunted Chicago “ Tours. For more information, click here.
Alison Moran-Powers and Dean’s Team Chicago
