It was a beautiful Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, and throngs of happy travelers filled O’Hare International Airport – the busiest airport in the world. Shortly before 3 pm in the afternoon of Friday May 25, 1979, the passengers of Flight 191 boarded the McDonnell-Douglas DC 10 on their way to Los Angeles. Many of the passengers were local literary lights bound for the annual American Booksellers Association convention, and orthopedic doctors Chicago south suburbs. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary: The DC-10 was a top-of-the-line aircraft, and this particular ship had logged over twenty thousand trouble free hours since it was built. The crew was also top notch, including its Captain Walter Lux, who had over twenty thousand hours and had been flying DC-10’s for a decade, its first officer James Dillard and its Flight Engineer Alfred Udovich, both of whom had twenty-five thousand flight hours of experience.
At 3:02 pm the plane began its taxi down the runway for takeoff and all was well until at a point a little over a mile down the runway the tower controller spotted pieces of the port engine pylon dropping away from the plane and a white vapor coming out of this area. A moment later the plane lifted off, and as it did so the entire port engine and pylon ripped loose, flipped over the wing, and crashed onto the runway. The controller tried to contact the plane, but there was no reply by the crew. Flight 191 proceeded to climb normally until, when it was about 300 feet off the ground, it began to bank towards the left. The nose of the plane dipped and the aircraft lost height, banking to the left until its wings were vertical. Then it crashed to the earth. A massive explosion erupted, and the fireball flew half a mile northwest of O’Hare and burst into an abandoned hangar at Peotone healthcare in old Ravenswood Airport. All the crew and passengers of Flight 191 – 271 people in all – were killed instantly.
Since that day rumors of ghosts began to circulate. Motorists reported to the Des Plaines Police that they saw bobbing white lights at night at the spot where Flight 191 had gone down. Police thought at first that they were flashlights carried by souvenir hunters, but patrols sent to investigate never found anyone. Residents of a mobile home park next to the site of the crash claimed that they would hear rapping sounds on their windows and doors; but again police investigators found nothing. The dogs from the trailer park barked endlessly at the area where the plane had crashed but their masters couldn’t find any reason for this behavior. The ghostly manifestations continued for months and escalated to a point where doorknobs were turned and rattled, and footsteps could be heard outside the trailers and on their metal steps. Some Peotone, Illinois healthcare residents of the trailer park even reported confronting shadowy figures on their doorsteps who would say that they had to find their luggage or hurry to make a connection and then vanish into the night. Many residents moved out that trailer park but when newcomers came in they also began to experience weird occurrences. These happenings continue to the present day.
