Founded by Chicago newspapermen in 1889, in the rear room of a Chicago saloon, the Whitechapel Club was a notorious press club named after the area of London where Jack the Ripper committed his nefarious deeds. The club lasted five years,but remains legendary for it's bizarre and disturbing doings.
The Whitechapel Club circa 1890
The Club HQ circa 1907
Inside, on the first floor, was a table in the shape of a shoe smithed for a mule's hind foot. At each place was a churchwarden's pipe and a tobacco-filled bowl that had once been the brain pan of a human skull. Dr. John C. Spray, a member who was superintendent of a hospital for the insane, had made a study of skulls to try to determine differences between skulls of normal persons and those of the mentally ill. He contributed his collection to the Whitechapel Club, and the club's chaplain, decorator, and all-round handyman, Chrysostom "Tombstone" Thompson, neatly sawed off the tops, implanted brightly colored glass in the eye holes and rigged the skulls as shades for the club's gas lighting fixtures. The flames flickered eerily against walls covered with the canary yellow paper matrices of type forms. A communal keg stood in the corner for members who wanted beer. At the bar were corked bottles for those who preferred something stronger. On nights when Whitechapelers entertained guests, they served a punch concocted by Wallace Rice. In some members' memories the favorite was a milk punch they called "wild cow's milk," but Rice said that was only a rumor, one of the many unfounded stories the club would inspire.
In a smaller room on the second floor, drinkers gathered around a coffin-shaped table studded with nails with big brass heads. The boys tilted their armchairs back against the wall, put their feet up on the table, and "kept time to their own dreadful singing by hammering with their beer mugs" on the top. They held board meetings at that table and dealt poker on it, though not for money. "Playing cards and dice for money was strictly forbidden," Rice remembered. Rolling the dice for drinks was about as far as they went.
In the center of the coffin table was another skull, its top still attached. It had been the head of an Indian girl and it was among the souvenirs Herald reporter Charlie Seymour had brought back from the West. At least two other Sioux Indian skulls were part of the macabre decorations, both donated to the club by a Captain Stuart. Serving as a cup for honored guests was the silver-lined skull of a woman said to be "a lady of notoriously easy virtue" called Waterford Jane, Queen of the Sands. The Sands, or Sand Lots, a red-light district just north of where the Chicago River empties into Lake Michigan, was a favorite stopping place for sailors off the schooners that once tied up at the city's docks.
The walls of the upstairs room were covered with Indian blankets (in legend they were deeply stained with blood) and so-called ghost shirts--shirts that had been blessed by medicine men to make their wearers impervious to the bullets of U.S. cavalrymen. Seymour had collected those, too. There were nooses that had hoisted badmen in the west; pistols and knives seized as murder weapons and donated to the club by law officers; portions of fire engines destroyed in the great Chicago fire of 1871; and Indian war bonnets, tomahawks and bows and arrows. Buffalo Bill Cody, in full costume, looked down from a handsome, autographed portrait hung on one wall. Cody had bestowed it on the Herald's Brand Whitlock after the reporter had trailed him through Chicago's saloons one afternoon interviewing him, and Whitlock had carted it to the clubhouse. A series of photographs showed Chinese pirates before and after beheading. The decorations served as symbols of the often-dark world the members covered and of the mocking posture they assumed toward it. The devices also served as totems of their fraternity.
From 'Defining Chicago's Newspapermen in the 1890s'
American Journalism, 15:1 (Winter, 1998), 83-102.
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