The Congress Plaza Hotel

In the spring of 1893, Chicago threw a party for the whole world.

The World’s Columbian Exposition, held to mark four hundred years since Columbus reached the Americas, transformed the city’s South Side into a gleaming “White City” of palaces, lagoons and electric lights. It introduced the world to the Ferris wheel. More than twenty-seven million visitors came over six months. They needed somewhere to stay.

One of the hotels built for them was a grand building on Michigan Avenue, facing the lake, just across from what is now Grant Park. Originally an annex to the famous Auditorium Hotel next door, connected by an underground marble passage that guests called “Peacock Alley,” it would later become the Congress Hotel, and then the Congress Plaza.

It’s still there. And it has a reputation as one of the most haunted hotels in Chicago.

Presidents and Gangsters

Over its first century, the Congress was one of the city’s great political hotels.

Presidents Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt all stayed there. The hotel was so popular with politicians during the national party conventions that it became known as the “Home of Presidents.” It was in the Congress, according to political legend, that the phrase “smoke-filled room” entered American politics — at the 1920 Republican convention, when party bosses gathered in a hotel suite to pick Warren G. Harding as their compromise candidate. (That suite was actually at the Blackstone Hotel, a few blocks away, but the Congress shared in the era’s backroom dealing.)

During Prohibition, Chicago was ruled by gangsters, and the Congress, like many downtown hotels, saw its share of them. According to local lore, Al Capone visited the hotel in the late 1920s. Some ghost tours claim his figure, in a fedora, still appears in the halls. There’s no real evidence for that, but it’s the kind of story Chicago loves.

The Man in the Lobby

There’s a darker story connected to the hotel’s earliest years.

In 1893, while millions of visitors flooded into Chicago for the fair, a man calling himself Dr. H.H. Holmes was running a building on the South Side that newspapers would later call his “Murder Castle.” Holmes, whose real name was Herman Webster Mudgett, was a con man, bigamist and serial killer who preyed on the fair’s visitors and on young women who came to the city looking for work. He was later convicted of murder and hanged in Philadelphia in 1896, after confessing to twenty-seven killings — some of which, it turned out, he hadn’t committed.

According to Congress Hotel lore, Holmes frequented the hotel’s lobby during the fair, looking for victims among the crowds of out-of-town visitors. There’s no direct evidence of this. But the fair was the backdrop to his crimes, and the Congress was one of the places that fair visitors gathered.

The Twelfth Floor

The saddest story associated with the hotel is true.

In 1939, a woman named Adele Langer was staying at the Congress with her two young sons. According to accounts of the case, she took the boys to the Lincoln Park Zoo one day, then returned to the hotel. From a window on the twelfth floor, she threw both of her children, then jumped herself. All three died.

What drove her to it has never been fully explained in the accounts I’ve found. It is one of the most heartbreaking things that has ever happened in a Chicago hotel.

Guests and staff have reported seeing a small boy wandering the hotel’s twelfth floor, especially near the room where the family stayed. Some believe it is the older son, Karl, who was six years old. Some guests report hearing a child crying or calling for his mother.

Peg Leg Johnny

One of the hotel’s ghosts has been given a nickname: Peg Leg Johnny.

Staff describe him as a man with one leg, who appears in the lobby, the dining room and the halls. He’s blamed for electronics turning on and off, doors opening and closing, and lights flickering. No one knows who he was. Some guides say he was a vagrant who was killed in or near the hotel. Others connect him to a circus performer with a wooden leg who was convicted of a murder in Chicago in the early twentieth century and later escaped prison.

The South Tower

Perhaps the most famous room in the hotel is on the fourth floor of the south tower. Sources disagree on its exact number — it’s given as 441 in many ghost stories, and as 411 in others.

Guests who have stayed there report seeing a woman standing by their bed in the night, or emerging from the bathroom. Some say the sheets have been pulled off them. Some have checked out in the middle of the night. According to hotel lore, staff stopped renting the room for long periods because of the complaints.

There’s also the story of a Spanish-American War veteran, Captain Louis Osteim, who reportedly took his own life in the hotel in 1900, the night before his wedding. Guests have reported a shadowy figure that seems to emerge from closets on the floor where he stayed.

The Long Strike

In June 2003, workers at the Congress Plaza went on strike to protest pay cuts. The strike lasted ten years — one of the longest strikes in American history — and for much of that time picket lines stood outside the hotel on Michigan Avenue. It finally ended in 2013.

I mention it because it’s part of the hotel’s story, and because I think it says something about how a building’s history accumulates. Every era leaves its mark: the fair, the presidents, the gangsters, the refugees, the workers. A hotel like the Congress has been home, for a night or a lifetime, to millions of people over more than a century. Some of them came for celebrations. Some came in despair. A few never left.