A 90-minute boat ride through downtown Chicago is turning the city's darker history into after-dark entertainment this fall. First Lady's Creepy Cruise sails the Chicago River, with mobsters and eerie haunts among its themes, against a backdrop of lit-up skyscrapers.
The seasonal tour has been featured by Time Out Chicago. The cruise sails along the Chicago River.
A Building With a Grim Past on the Route
Among the landmarks pointed out during the cruise is the Reid Murdoch Building, which was used as a morgue after Chicago's worst maritime disaster in 1915, the Time Out report notes. That disaster was the SS Eastland, which rolled onto its side as it moved away from the dock between Clark and LaSalle streets on July 24, 1915, killing 844 passengers and crew in one of the worst maritime disasters in American history, according to Britannica. The tragedy claimed more lives in Chicago than the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and struck Western Electric employees who were heading to a company picnic.
The Reid Murdoch Building, at 325 N. LaSalle Street, was among the makeshift morgues used after the disaster, as reported by CBS News. On the Eastland disaster's 100th anniversary in July 2015, paranormal investigators reportedly deployed recording equipment into the river near the Clark Street Bridge and the Reid Murdoch Building, claiming to capture audio of voices answering questions underwater, the same CBS report states.
Serial Killers and Gangsters Round Out the Tale
The cruise's storytelling also draws on one of the city's most notorious criminal figures: H.H. Holmes, who built a three-story hotel at 63rd and Wallace Streets in Englewood. Newspapers spread sensationalized and even fictionalized rumors about a “murder castle”; Holmes killed multiple victims around the time of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition before he was arrested and hanged in 1896, according to WTTW.
The cruise also touches on the city's gangster history.
The Company Behind the Boat
The cruise is operated by Chicago's First Lady Cruises, a fourth-generation, family-owned business that has run boat tours on the Chicago River and Lake Michigan for 90 years, according to Choose Chicago. The company operates nine vessels across its fleet, which can accommodate group sizes ranging from small private charters up to 250 passengers. Unlike First Lady's standard sightseeing, night and fireworks cruises, the Creepy Cruise stays entirely within the three branches of the Chicago River and does not pass through the Chicago Harbor Lock System into Lake Michigan, per the operator's own cruise listings.
First Lady runs its fleet on B20 biodiesel fuel and partners with Sustainable Travel International to offset 100% of its carbon emissions, per Choose Chicago's listing. The company is also the only Chicago River tour operator partnered with the non-profit Chicago Architecture Center, which offers architecture river cruises. Separately, First Lady hosts a seasonal Howl-O-Ween Canine Cruise during October weekends, a 90-minute pet-friendly tour with water bowls onboard and narrated city history.
