CURIOUS GOODS
Location: Curious Goods is located at 666 Druid Street on the lower East Side of Chicago, Illinois on the corner of Daniel Street. Some references inaccurately give the address as 666 Daniel Street.
Description: Formerly Vendredi Antiques, the antique store is a three-story brick building with front windows in an ethnic neighborhood. The store is run on the first floor while living quarters for the staff exist upstairs. The entire edifice is riddled with secret compartments and a secret room behind a shelf sandwiched between the hardware store next door and the garage in back. Inside, the store has a high ceiling with a brass polished chandelier and a balcony which overlooks the store and its antiques.
Ghostly Manifestations: Lewis Vendredi died in 1987. For this fact, there is
nothing to indicate otherwise. On the other hand, many witnesses have sworn
they have seen him wandering out in front of his former store wringing his
hands over and over as if deeply perturbed or worried about his old business.
The store actually does well enough to get by. The new owners are well-liked
members of the community and respected by the other business owners. Local lore
claims Vendredi is upset because of errors, which he made in life. Rumor has it
he is forbidden to cross over because he made a pact with the devil for
immortality and after breaking the pact, he was condemned to eternal torture.
“That’s the story I’ve heard,” Michelle
Louise Foster inherited the store in absentia because no one else in her family
wanted it. A stunning beauty with striking red hair and angelic blue eyes, she
and her cousin, Ryan Jonathan Daillion, try to remain complacent as ghostly
phenomenon occur around them. Foster
just takes it in stride as she rolls her eyes with regal poise.
“I was raised…” Foster continues. “To believe
that there were no such things as ghosts. Ryan, however, soaks in all that
‘neat stuff.’” She makes quotation marks with her fingers as her boyish cousin
giggles with a snide cackle. Their mentor, Jack Abraham Marshak, peers up
rather Odin-like from a desk as he covers the invoices of the store as if he
were Merlin over a mystic tome. A wry knowing grin expresses from his white
whiskers as he continues adding features.
“We’ve actually have had some poltergeist
activity.” Daillion admits out loud. “I’ll be sweeping and something will
suddenly bounce off my back. I’ll look down and this…” He holds up the small
brass lid off an antique German mug. “Will be on the floor. No idea how it got
there. I’m here, the beer stein is over there were it always is. No idea what
happened.” He replies earnestly.
“Shadows drift through the store at night
when we’re closed, displays are altered, objects vanish…” Ryan looks to his
beautiful cousin as if they have a secret between them. “Sometimes a phone
rings in the middle of the night, but not the store phone. We’ll answer it, and
no one will be on the line, but somewhere a phone is still ringing.”
“I once thought we had a raven or something trapped
in the store.” Jack looks up with a knowing glare. “They like stealing shining
objects and they can mimic any sound they want. I searched the whole store to
drive it out and never did find it.”
The bottom story of the structure where the
actual store is has a high ceiling with a staircase along the outside wall to
the second story balcony overlooking the place. A second story staircase climbs
the third floor living quarters which Micki and Ryan share. During the days Vendredi lived here, he used
to sit at the desk which was then on the balcony as patrons entered the store
below him. The desk is now downstairs, but to this day customers enjoying the
antiques sometimes give nervous glances up to the balcony where Vendredi used
to sit. Both Mick and Ryan often give a glance to who or what is catching their
eye, but they’ve never seen anything.
In stories related to known frequent
customers and close friends, there is no doubt that some force or presence
inhabits and lurks through the old place.
Neither Foster nor Daillion care to report or add credence to the tales
that have already been repeated by others. Their policy is that the stories
have been altered over the years and that they now vaguely resemble the actual
events that once occurred. For example, several guests of a Halloween party
shortly after the store reopened claimed that the place came alive and nearly
caved in on itself. Foster herself was reportedly found dead in a distant part
of town, but as close friends came to offer condolences, they were stunned to
find her very much alive. Other merchants along the block have reported
cult-like individuals lurking around the place and unearthly specters trying to
get inside the antique store, but even Marshak chuckles at these goings on with
a sense of humor.
“I think that in today’s world…” He responds
with a sort of divine wisdom. “It’s a part of the human condition to want to
see incredible things. Life is very boring, and it takes an imagination to see
things that aren’t there.” As an example, he lists the stories a woman named
Gladys Kravitz sold about her neighbors to the tabloids from 1965 to 1979.
Despite her own opinion about the so-called
ghosts in the store, Foster admits to a few incidents. While polishing an old
mirror for sale in the store, she has seen the reflection of extra people in
the store when it was open. They weren’t any people she knew but merely the
scant fleeting glimpse of forlornly standing people that she knew could not
exist. Ryan has seen a strange woman in
old-fashioned dress puttering through the upstairs kitchen. His bedroom is
right off the kitchen and he has heard the odd noise of persons unknown on
several occasions. On one occasion in the middle of the night, he heard the
sounds of a man and a woman in conversation in the kitchen. Waking from a sound
sleep, he looked up and noticed the light on in the kitchen. Stirring himself
enough awake, he ambled into the kitchen thinking Jack and Micki were awake,
but instead found himself standing in a very dark and very empty kitchen.
“I’m still trying to figure that one out
today.” Ryan answers with a bit of boyish exuberance.
“I’ve heard voices myself.” Marshak himself
reveals. “I sleep down in a basement room and I’ll often be reading quietly off
in to the late of night when suddenly I’ll be aware of whispering noises. It
often starts without me knowing it and it sounds as if several people are
talking and holding a conversation in hushed tones. Once, it even almost
sounded like chanting: the kind you might hear in an old religious monastery.
I’ve mostly passed it off as conversation coming down from out of the store,
but the last time I heard it, I was actually able to trace it to the a very
definable source by reading where it was faintest in the basement to where I could
hear it the best and very nearly even hear the breaths they were taking before
the start of each sentence. I then realized where it was coming from. I had
traced it to the vault.”
History: The store was built over the remains of a private residence that
collapsed in the 1871 fire that swept through Chicago. That house dated back to
1850. Rumor has it that as workmen cleared the rubble, they found a series of
support beams that had fallen in the shape into the shape of an inverted star,
a sign of the devil. There is no way to confirm that rumor, but it was enough
to interest Lewis Vendredi to buy the failed store in 1959. A former Vaudeville
actor with Jack Marshak, Vendredi became fascinated with life after death and
studied Marshak’s spell books. They broke off contact a while after Marshak
started selling him antiques purchased on his tours. Under unresolved
circumstances, Marshak reportedly started practicing the dark arts and secretly
became involved in Satanism. In public, he was a very private sauntering figure
who never trusted anyone, but even those who thought they knew him broke off
with him when they realized what he was into. Storeowners found massacred
animals in the dumpsters and noticed cloaked figures entering the store after
hours. It was enough to worry the other patrons.
In September of 1987, a series of storms hit
Chicago with hard frequency. One of the last ones swept tornado force gales
through the store that opened it up completely. Vendredi was found lying dead
in the storeroom after an object reportedly struck him in the head. The rumor
started he had wanted out of his pact with the devil and was punished for it.
A great-niece and a great nephew from
opposite ends of the family tree inherited the store. Michelle Foster and Ryan
Daillion had been friends as children, but grew up separately. She was born of
a wealthy affluent family that had shunned Vendredi, and he was born of a
struggling single mother of the side that had limited contact. In the
beginning, neither of them wanted the store or the responsibility, but Jack
Marshak apparently rekindled their friendship into getting them to appreciate
the business. Renamed Curious Goods, he was offered partial ownership after
Ryan stayed behind for a brief life in France. Ryan returned to the store a
year later.
In 1994, a reporter for the Independent News Service, a local tabloid, got wind of the legend of Lewis Vendredi and published it in the paper. He also claimed that the store was concealing a sub-basement full of “cursed objects” from when Vendredi owned the place. That part of the story later turned out to be true when a one-time employee of the store named Johnny Ventura revealed that Vendredi had left behind a collection of objects taken from legendary warlocks and haunted locations from across the world. As yet, the storeowners have no idea what to do with the objects, but several psychics recommend keeping them from the public and not moving them. Since the story broke out, visitors believing cursed objects have been haunting them have mailed in objects from Amityville, New York, Forest Green, Connecticut, Springwood, Illinois and abroad.
Identity of Ghosts: It is quite clear that one of the main ghosts is
that of Lewis Vendredi, Micki and Ryan’s great uncle, a man they never knew personally
but by reputation. Neither side of the family spoke of him much, but both
halves believe the man had made his fortune by questionable and unethical
means. At the time, it was believed Vendredi’s dealings involved shadowy
illegitimate businesses involving crooked business deals, probable drug and
alcohol trafficking and racist persecution. None of that was confirmed, but
when Foster and Daillion actually inherited the store, they found that their
distant relative had the largest collection of occult and death memorabilia
ever. Much of it consisted of books, talismans, totems and arcane carvings
related to the demonic arts. Some of it were even macabre mementos that had
belonged to psychos and degenerates such as Charles Manson, Robert Ramirez, Freddie
Krueger, Norman Bates, Adolf Hitler, Ed Gein and even Dr. Thomas Neal Cream, a
man who had claimed to be Jack the Ripper.
William Collins, a friend that Ryan knew from
interests on ghost stories, later speculated that the store might have been located
on a portal to the afterlife and that Vendredi know about it. He possibly used
it to divine messages he believed from the devil for the sake of his satanic
rituals and in doing so corrupted the positive energies in the store. Collins
further speculated that some of the ghosts seen and felt in the store were the
harmless spirits of people connected to the objects in the store.
A bit of a scholar in the paranormal and
white magic himself, Marshak keeps certain Oriental good luck charms in the
store to sway the positive energies inside and protect its inhabitants.
“It seems to work.” He insists with a confident grin. “Because no one has been hurt.”
Comments: Friday The Thirteenth: The Series (1987-1990), Hauntings loosely based the Smurl House in West Pittston, Pennsylvania as well as other assorted cases.
Gladys Kravitz from
“Bewitched,” (1964-1972)
The Independent News Service from “Kolchak,
The Night Stalker” (1974-1975)
Amityville, New York from “The Amityville
Horror” (1979)
Forest Green, Connecticut from “Friday the 13th”
(1980-1993)
Springwood, Illinois and Freddie Krueger from
“Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984-1991)
Norman Bates from “Psycho” (1960-1990)