Northwest Tower - The Coyote Building

1606 N Milwaukee Avenue (Wicker Park/Bucktown) Chicago, IL

I have yet to find this building on anyone's list of haunted locations.  Our team member, Matt, has an office in this building that he uses sometimes.  A few months ago we went up to see his office and check out the building, as Matt said that its a pretty creepy and old place...and he wasn't kidding.  There are random doors that are sealed shut, random shoots cut out in the walls, and other strange seemingly ad-hoc designs.

The office building was built around 1928 on the triangular shaped corner of North/Damen/Milwaukee.  The building is limestone clad (good conductor) and is shaped like a triangle, as well.  The building was randomly nicknamed the Coyote Building, as it is said that it resembles a howling coyote...I could see that... 

The first floor is adorned in beautiful marble, but the rest of the floors - which appear to not have been updated for at least 30-40 years, give it the feel of, well, an old office building.  It smells old, too.  When Matt brought us there a few months ago, he really wanted to show us the view from the roof - which is pretty amazing, being that this us one of the tallest buildings for at least a couple miles, the view of downtown at night was pretty awesome.

Now, being that Matt said that he thought this place was creepy, I instinctually brought my ghost box (P-SB7).  We wandered up the 12 floors via the stairs, which definitely had a creepy feel.  At the landing for each floor there was a fuse box - and most of them were wide open with some super old fuses - some even hanging half way out and some on the floor.  Kinda strange.  Sometimes the stairwell went completely black, due to burnt out bulbs - or no bulbs whatsoever.

We made it to the top, which is where is got even more weird.  I remember stepping into a very dark room where there was an aluminum ladder propped against a wall which led up to what appeared to be a little crawl space.  Then there is this other room you need to pass through in order to get outside to the roof, and this room is the building's voltage center.  There are a lot of signs posted that warn "DANGER: High Voltage," and it is very loud in there.  I'm pretty sensitive to EFs so I bolted through the room, but I think I remember that there wasn't a floor - just a narrow metal catwalk enclosed in some kind of mesh or fencing that separates you from all the high voltage lines and such.  Gosh, I hate that little room, but once you get past it, you pass through a door to the roof.

There is a little steeple like spot on the roof and its opening is sealed with some kind of mesh.  There is also one more little flight of stairs that lead you up to the highest point on the building - where a large metal lightning rod, or whatever it is, is sitting.  We sat up there on that little area, and admired the view.  As we sat we just ran the P-SB7 (ghost box) in the background.  Eerily, Matt and I both heard the word "ladder" come through that thing at least 20-30 times (we were up there for about an hour).

It was then that we decided that we need to plan out a full on investigation of this place - which just so happens to be tonight, 11-11-11!  We will post a full discussion and any evidence hopefully by Wednesday.

Here is  little history on the building taken from : CityofChicago.org "The best expression of the office towers in the Milwaukee Avenue District–and certainly one of the best neighborhood office building in Chicago–is the Northwest Tower at 1606 N. Milwaukee Ave. Built in 1928 at the northeast corner of Milwaukee and North Avenues, this speculative office tower was designed by the architecture firm of Perkins, Chatten, & Hammond. At 12-stories, the limestone-clad tower was built to the maximum height allowed by the zoning code, resulting in a contemporary headline on the completion of the tower that read “the skyscraper leaves the Loop.” Each office space had windows, and was served with water, electricity, gas, compressed air (for dental offices), and a central vacuum. Bronze, marble and mosaic finishes decorated the lobby. The Northwest Tower was marketed to physicians, dentists, and lawyers who were assured of easy access to transportation (located next to the Damen Avenue elevated train stop) and a large neighborhood population in need of professional services. The small rooftop tower and bronze lantern serve as a prominent visual landmark at the northern end of the district."