The Ridge Historical Society
The Paranormal Ridge: Part 10 – Other Personal Experiences at the Castle
By Carol Flynn
The ghost stories from the Givins Beverly Castle show up in print often – in newspaper and magazine articles, websites, and books about Chicago ghost lore. Most of the stories that are printed are the usual ones that can be discounted as folklore, but one article led to new information in the quest to learn about the haunted happenings reported at the Castle.
In 1995, the Chicago Tribune ran an article on the Castle by staff writer Jerry Thomas. He repeated one of the usual stories that has the facts wrong on the history of the castle. He wrote that a girls’ boarding school was there in the 1930s and a girl died from influenza and haunts the Castle. This isn’t true – a physician owned the house in the 1930s and he and his family lived there. They did not run a boarding school, but the doctor did see patients at the house.
Although that story was not accurate, Thomas also wrote about two people who reported experiences there, a minister for the Beverly Unitarian Church (BUC) which has owned the Castle since the 1940s, and a psychic. Today’s post will cover the minister’s experiences and the next post will discuss the psychic.
Reverend Leonetta Bugleisi was minister at the BUC from 1993 to 2003. Now living in Michigan, she was interviewed last year by RHS for the “Folklore and Phantoms” program. She recounted four unusual experiences she had during her time at the Castle.
The first occurred in early 1994 at a welcoming event following the ceremony installing her as pastor. Her husband and she were on the second floor, in front of a stained glass window that is original to the house; she was facing her husband, talking to him, and he had his back to the window. Reverend Bugleisi saw a pair of very slender arms encircle her husband’s waist gently from the back. She assumed it was someone saying good-bye, but when she looked behind her husband, there was no one there. She asked him if he felt anything, and he said no. The arms vanished. She described the arms as looking like those of a young girl. Rev. Bugleisi has been consistent in relating this experience for 25 years. Last year, she humorously asked that it be reported that she had not been drinking at the event; she had not even had any sugar that day.
The second experience was an unnerving one. A custodian at the Castle was cleaning the floors in the school when he suddenly collapsed and died. He had had dental surgery and was on medication that apparently provoked this. Although not a paranormal event as such, it was unsettling to the BUC community.
About a month later, the third experience occurred. Reverend Bugleisi went to the library, a room on the second floor of the Castle, to get a book for a student. She noticed there was a copy of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s book “On Death and Dying” on one of the shelves. She took the other book to the student, then came back for the Kubler-Ross book and it was gone. No one else was found to have been in the library in that short amount of time. She looked all over for it but it was never found again. She felt there might be a connection between the custodian and the vanished book.
The back staircase to the third floor of the Castle was the setting for a fourth experience. After Reverend Bugleisi showed the apartment on the top floor to a woman, they left to descend the back staircase. Reverend Bugleisi saw movement out of the corner of her eye and looked back, and a shadow form was following her down the stairs. It was not the other woman, who was in front. The shadow faded away.
Reverned Bugleisi never heard other noises that people said they heard there, such as the piano playing by itself, voices, and the sounds of glassware tinkling. Other than the arms around her husband’s waist, she also never saw any girl, young woman or other ghosts.
In the early 1970s, a psychic visited the Castle, and that story will be in the next post.