The untold ghost stories
Incomplete archives don't tell the full version of events.
“So… did you ever see any ghosts?” I occasionally get this question when someone learns I grew up in an old house. If any ghosts lived at 110 Akenside, we never became acquainted.
I still feared what might be lurking in the shadows. At night, I’d tuck my covers tight like a burrito. No gaps in the covers meant ghosts couldn’t grab me. I thought I did a pretty good job because nothing ever did.1
Looking back, I was wise to steel myself against spirits. I now know a prominent attorney and politician lived and died in the house. The Chicago Tribune reported George Hunt’s unexpected death in 1901.
Attorney Geo. Hunt Dies
Active Lawyer Passes Away at Riverside Home.
Served State as Attorney General and for Three Terms in the Upper House of the Legislature—Council in Trial of Anarchists, Illinois Central and Lake Front Fight, and Many Cases—Illness of Brief Duration, Lasts Less than Ten Days
Headline from Chicago Tribune, March 18, 1901
George Hunt’s death was news because he was a three-term state senator who went on to become the Illinois Attorney General. When his widow Mrs. Eugenia Jones Hunt died years later at age 101, half of her short death announcement was about him. The other half is this amazing detail that she wrote a book at the age of 99.
Mrs. Hunt Winnetka Authoress of Winnetka Dies at 101
Funeral services were held today for Mrs. Eugenia Jones Hunt 101-year-old authoress of Winnetka.
Mrs. Hunt, who wrote her first book at the age of 99, was working on a second volume at the time of her death.
She was the widow of George Hunt, Illinois attorney general from 1885 to 1893. Her father, John Albert Jones, was a friend of Abraham Lincoln and was State Department statistics superintendent during his administration.
Journal Gazette (Mattoon, Illinois), November 3, 1947
My small collection of articles about previous residents of the house came from searching the address on ancestry.com. They exist in the public record. While these snippets are certainly interesting, they also make me wonder who wasn’t written about.
I’ve done a lot of research about 110 Akenside. I’ve found some good stuff. But often, the research is frustrating. Pieces are missing. Some documents were likely lost to time and will never be recovered.
Some documents were never written at all. These shadow records are part of the ghost archive.2
Many people have lived in that house. What about their forgotten and unrecorded stories? Unless you’re deemed newsworthy, you don’t get written about in newspapers like George and Eugenia Hunt did.
I seek more information about my family’s time there. Facts and stories and documents that might help me understand the full picture of everything that happened.
A couple of years ago, I took a Riverside walking tour. I didn’t mention I grew up there. I just wanted to listen.
The tour stopped in front of my childhood home, where the guide told the group the former owner (my father) had been obsessed with paint. That this guy spent hours removing paint or putting on new paint. The guide didn’t say anything about my parents’ commitment to a historically appropriate paint palette, or any of the other contributions they made to restoring the home.
It felt like since those two decades since we left, all that was left was that one watered-down sentence: The guy that used to live there really liked paint.
It didn’t feel appropriate to speak up because I hadn’t disclosed who I was. So I just continued with the tour. Part of me was also relieved the tour guide didn’t have more to say about us. I suspect he could have painted a much different picture.
I recently started keeping a dream journal. In one dream, I was sitting in a classroom at a wooden desk. Someone placed two notebooks in front of me. They were the same tall black ledger notebook, similar to this one, as my Dad’s restoration notebook. I did not open the notebooks, fearing the pages would be blank.
A blank page is an invitation. As I get deeper into the Akenside Project, I think about the parts of the story I’m scared to tell. Those are the ghost stories I have yet to write.
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Decades later, jump-out-and-scare-you horror movies still legitimately frighten me, even if it is SUPER obvious the baddy is about to appear.
I learned about ghost archives from Christell Victoria Roach, whose lecture at the Kenyon Writers Review Workshop I recently attended. Every archive contains these erased or unwritten stories.