The Ghosts of Peotone Flight 191

It was a beautiful Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, and throngs of happy travelers packed O’Hare International Airport, the world’s busiest airport. Shortly before 3 p.m. on Friday, May 25, 1979, passengers from Flight 191 boarded McDonnell-Douglas DC 10 bound for Los Angeles. Many of the passengers were local literary lights en route to the annual convention of the American Association of Booksellers and Orthopedic Physicians from Chicago’s southern suburbs. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary: the DC-10 was a top-of-the-line aircraft, and this particular boat had logged over twenty thousand trouble-free hours since it was built. The crew was also top-notch, including her captain Walter Lux, who had over twenty thousand hours and had been flying DC-10s for a decade, her first officer James Dillard, and her flight engineer Alfred Udovich, who had twenty-five thousand hours. . hours of flight experience.

At 3:02 p.m., the aircraft began taxiing down the runway for takeoff and all was going well until at one point a little over a mile down the runway, the tower controller saw pieces of the port engine pylon falling from the plane and a white vapor. leaving this area. A moment later, the plane took off, and as it did so, the entire port engine and pylon came loose, flipping the wing over and crashing onto the runway. The controller tried to contact the plane, but there was no response from the crew. Flight 191 proceeded to climb normally until, when about 300 feet from the ground, it began to bank to the left. The plane’s nose dipped and the aircraft lost height, banking to the left until its wings were vertical. It then crashed to earth. A massive explosion erupted and the fireball flew half a mile northwest of O’Hare and blew up in an abandoned hangar at the Peotone health care facility at the old Ravenswood airport. The entire crew and passengers of Flight 191, 271 people in all, were killed instantly.

From that day on, rumors of ghosts began to circulate. Motorists reported to Des Plaines police that they saw flickering white lights at night where Flight 191 had crashed. At first, police thought they were flashlights carried by souvenir hunters, but patrols sent to investigating never found anyone. Residents of a mobile home park next to the crash site claimed they would hear banging on their windows and doors; but again police investigators found nothing. Dogs from the trailer park were barking non-stop in the area where the plane had crashed, but their owners could see no reason for this behavior. The ghostly demonstrations continued for months and escalated to the point where doorknobs were turning and rattling, and footsteps could be heard outside trailers and on metal steps. Some health care residents of the Peotone, Illinois trailer park even reported being confronted with shadowy figures at their doors saying they had to find their luggage or rush to make a connection and then disappear into the night. Many residents moved out of that trailer park, but when the newcomers arrived, they too began to experience strange occurrences. These events continue to this day.