The Ridge Historical Society
The Paranormal Ridge: Part 11 – A Psychic’s Visit to the Castle
By Carol Flynn
The Givins Beverly Castle has been owned and operated since the early 1940s by the Beverly Unitarian Church (BUC). In the early 1970s, the BUC brought attention to the stories of ghosts at the Castle through a series of events and newspaper articles.
In 1995, the Chicago Tribune ran an article by Jerry Thomas calling attention to one of these events from the 1970s. The article stated that in 1973, a psychic named Carol Broman visited the Castle and reported that she experienced two spirits there – one a young girl – and there was bantering between them.
In preparation for last year’s “Folklore and Phantoms” program, this visit was researched – and proved to be most interesting.
This psychic, Carol Broman, was called in by the police in 1978 to help in the investigation of serial killer John Wayne Gacy. At that point, they were still treating the situation as a missing person case for one young man who had disappeared from his job at a drug store. He had told his mother he was going to talk to someone about a construction job. The police knew that Gacy and many others had been in the pharmacy that day, but no connections had been made yet. They still hoped to find the young man alive.
Broman told the police the boy was dead, he had been murdered, they would find multiple victims at the killer’s house, that it had to do with the construction business, and that the killer used trickery and torture on his victims. She also said the young man did not realize he was dead yet and his spirit was wandering.
Broman turned out to be correct in what she told the police they would find. The police never went public at the time that they used a psychic. The police inspector, Joseph Kozenczak, and his wife later wrote two books, and he was interviewed for an episode of Psychic Investigators, which can be found on YouTube. Kozenczak said he was chilled to the bone by Broman’s revelations. Although the use of psychics in policework is very controversial, Broman did a lot of work with the police as a psychic investigator. Broman and Kozenczak are deceased now. Gacy was executed in 1994 for 33 murders.
[As an aside, Gacy did construction work in the Beverly/Morgan Park area, and people here knew him. One RHS officer who worked for the city met Gacy through city contract work. She said everyone considered him a nice guy. It was an unimaginable horror when the bodies were found in the crawlspace under his house.]
Five years before she was involved in the Gacy investigation, Carol Broman, the psychic, accompanied by a Chicago Sun-Times reporter, was invited to visit the Castle to investigate paranormal activity. Their visit was covered in a Sun-Times article, and later covered in two books about ghosts, based on the Sun-Times article. The information in this post is based on the material in those books, so it is now third- or fourth-hand reporting. Of course, as this gets farther away from the original sources, the possibility of misinterpretation increases – this is often how folklore begins. Readers are cautioned that this incident at the Castle has not been verified – the original Sun-Times article has not been reviewed because the Sun-Times archives are not easily accessible to the public. In fact, there does not seem to be an archive for this time period – the 1970s.
According to the books, Broman started her tour in the basement, where she sensed fire in the Castle. She stated that there had been fires, and there would be another. The Castle does not have a history of any serious fires.
Broman said that In the living room/sanctuary of the Castle, she encountered two entities having a discussion. One was a young girl with the usual Irish brogue. The other was a tall man who was very angry, talking about infidelity, and wanting to burn the Castle down. He had been accused of murder but had never been tried for the crime, and he said although he had committed the murder, he was the one who had been treated very unfairly.
He was trying to plead his case to Broman, but she said she didn’t believe him. He had been a cruel and controlling husband. She felt the girl was the niece of the wife. The room was filled with white camellias which had been the wife’s favorite flower.
Unfortunately, there were no details given about who this man was or who he had killed, or where, when or how the murder had taken place, or what, if any, connection there was to the Castle. No known incidents like this have been associated with the Castle. Robert C. Givins, who built the Castle, had one son, Robert S. Givins, and there was a scandal when the son’s wife ran off with another man. But there was no known murder associated with this incident. The young girl continues the usual theme of the ghosts at the Castle. This story remains a complete mystery.
The next post will cover some experiences people have reported more recently.