Description of Place: 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: Over the years, more and more details have been discovered about the store and neighborhood. It was built in 1899 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 ties with him when they realized his strange hobbies and collections. Storeowners found massacred animals in the dumpsters and noticed cloaked figures entering the store after hours. It was enough to worry the other patrons.

Between the 1880s to 1959 when Vendredi acquired the store, the street was low-income housing for immigrants arriving through Chicago, but by the turn of the century, it was a series of businesses and apartments. Underworld crime figures ran a secret tavern in the antique store during Prohibition which explains the secret tunnels under the street from the basement once used for moving illicit alcohol. Prostitutes once lived upstairs. The debauchery going on upstairs is another facet that entranced Vendredi to the location. By time he had purchased the building, it had been empty for eleven years and used to store medical supplies.

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 and broke some of the windows, opening it up completely. Vendredi was found lying dead in the storeroom after an object reportedly struck him in the head. The rumor soon 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 and paranormal investigators with suspected objects have mailed in and delivered objects from locations abroad, such as Amityville, New York, Forest Green, Connecticut, Springwood, Illinois and Silent Hill, West Virginia. Some of the objects have been studied by noted paranormal historian John Zaffis, who contains a similar occult object museum in the basement of his Connecticut home. 

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 psychopaths and degenerates such as Charles Manson, Robert Ramirez, Freddie Krueger, Norman Bates, Adolf Hitler, Ed Gein, Angela Franklin 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 the paranormal and ghost stories, later speculated that the store might have been located on a spiritual nexus into the spirit realm and that Vendredi know about it. He possibly used it to experience 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 13^th” (1980-1993)
• Springwood, Illinois and Freddie Krueger from “Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984-1991)
• Norman Bates from “Psycho” (1960-1990)