Since his untimely death earlier this week, a number of excellent obituaries have been written for Chicagoland ghost aficionado Richard T. Crowe. The best, I believe, was written by fellow traveler Ursula Bielski, herself a Chicago area author and tour guide. In a moving tribute on Facebook, she wrote:
Beloved Chicago ghost hunter Richard T. Crowe has passed on to the world he talked about for generations with an unmistakable voice and a storyteller’s gift… Despite fluctuating economies, the legendary Crowe never ceased to draw a crowd. An imposing figure, his voice matched his frame, and his talent for telling a tale sent his guests home generation after generation remembering his name—and his stories.
Indeed, the stories that Crowe told were the very first ghost stories ever collected in Chicago. For before he was a professional tour guide, Crowe was first a folklorist, with a Masters degree in English literature from Chicago’s DePaul University. As a folklorist his professional work was to collect the stories of the local people, something he’d been doing his whole life, and wonderfully. Richard’s ghost stories created the framework for what has evolved into one of the richest collections of ghostlore in the nation. And those stories remain the golden core of it all.
The Chicago Sun-Times and Chuck Goudie from ABC Channel 7 News have also chimed in. Their obituaries can be found at the links below:
Chicago’s ghost hunter, Richard Crowe, dead at 64
Famous Chicago ghost hunter enters netherworld
As for myself, I cannot say that I knew him personally, but a lecture he gave at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines when I was still in elementary school had a tremendous impact on my interest in visiting haunted places and writing about the legends and lore of Illinois. Alongside Ursula Bielski and Dale Kaczmarek, he was truly among the best of the older generation of paranormal enthusiasts in Chicago. I regret that I never got the chance to meet him again as a fellow author and storyteller. Maybe, someday, we will meet on a moonless night along Archer Avenue near the gates of Resurrection Cemetery. Something tells me he would enjoy that very much…
