Chicago History Museum Uses Creepy Dolls To Share City's Ghost Stories

When the lights go out at the Chicago History Museum...dolls that have spent decades locked away in storage emerge from the shadows to play. Now...just in time for Halloween, the museum is shedding light on its assembly of creepy characters. Scattered and hidden within another exhibit, the "Haunted Dolls and History's Horrors" collection seeks to share with visitors ghost tales about the Windy City's past.

The new figures are hiding out inside the Chicago History Museum's "Crossroads of America" exhibit.

"There are 13 dolls that are lurking in areas that they do not belong.," said Charles Bethea, the Andrew W. Mellon Director of Curatorial Affairs at the museum.

Until recently, the chilling toys were just haunting museum storage. Now, visitors can stare into their vacant, glassy eyes and learn some scary secrets about the city's past.

"What we decided to do with these particular creepy dolls was link them to other aspects of Chicago history that don't necessarily always get talked about," Bethea said.

The museum's Andrew W. Mellon Director of Curatorial Affairs, Charles Bethea, said Chicago has plenty of ghost stories.

"Some real tragedies and disasters such as the Eastland disaster or the Iroquois Theater Fire ... to some of the more popularly known ghost tales like "the woman in gray," "the woman in red" ...who threw herself off, allegedly, from the Congress Hotel."

One doll has a specific tie to the Great Chicago Fire, the inferno that nearly destroyed the city on October 10, 1871.

For decades, another doll was stored in the museum's archives next to a gigantic, distorted mirror.

"Her face, over a period of time, has become disfigured. So you have to ask, what did she see in that reflection?" Bethea wonders.

Yet another doll, "Lullaby Lucy," was part of the store window display at Chicago's Marshall Field Department store before she was tossed into storage with the museum's other dolls.

Lucy has been spending her nights at the museum in a peaceful slumber...or has she?

"So we're wondering," Bethea ponders, "is she dreaming? What are her nightmares of?"

Visitors are provided clues about where to find the dolls, if they dare to search.

Says Bethea: "There's definitely some that would send some chills up and down visitors' spines."

Most of the dolls are more than a century old.

The museum offers two versions of the dolls' scavenger hunt: one for adults, and a less scary one for kids.

But like any nightmare, the dolls' visit is only temporary. Soon they'll find their way back to the museum's darkest corners, where they safeguard the city's deepest secrets.

The exhibit closes on November 6.