Girls at sleepovers daring each other to repeat the name “Bloody Mary”, Southern mansions where they cover the looking glass as someone lies dying, myths of doom befalling those who stare too long at their own reflections …
Some of the oldest grim legends involve the allure and mystery of mirrors. Today’s tale of high strangeness continues that tradition with one chilling difference: It features no trace of the paranormal.
90s kids may remember the shocksploitation opus Candyman. Based on the Clive Barker short story of the same name, the oddly classy 1992 slasher starred a bogeyman who strikes anyone foolish enough to say his name five times in front of a mirror.
The magnificent Virginia Madsen plays a grad student writing a thesis on urban legends who thinks she’s found the myth’s true origin. While searching the Cabrini-Green apartment of an alleged Candyman victim, she makes a shocking discovery about the bathroom mirror.
Watch the clip:
“A clever cinematic conceit,” you might be saying after watching that scene. “A hole behind the medicine cabinet that lets intruders in from the adjacent apartment makes perfect urban legend fodder. And the idea that slumlords in a corrupt state like Illinois would leave such a glaring security breach is just believable enough for a movie.”
And you’d be right. But the shudder-worthy part is, the h0le behind the tenement mirror wasn’t just a clever bit of screenwriting. It’s real.
Related: A Ghost for the Offering
A claustrophobe in a closet might be more at ease than a paranoid like McCoy in an Abbott high rise; the buildings feature dark, malfunctioning elevators, pitch-black stairwells, and cocaine and PCP addicts on nearly every floor. Fiends really are lurking in the shadows here; in these towers, you’re crazy if you’re not always looking over your shoulder. McCoy lived at the end of a corridor on the 11th floor of the building at 1440 W. 13th St.
At a quarter to nine this April evening, Chicago police got a 911 call from McCoy. “I’m a resident at 1440 W. 13th St. and some people next door are totally tearing this down, you know—” the frantic voice began.
“What are they doing, ma’am?” asked the dispatcher. McCoy’s response is unintelligible on tape, but apparently the dispatcher caught her gist. “They want to break in?” he asked.
“Yeah, they throwed the cabinet down.”
Dispatcher: “From where?”
McCoy: “I’m in the projects, I’m on the other side. You can reach—can reach my bathroom, they want to come through the bathroom.”
Dispatcher: “All right ma’am, at what address?”
McCoy: “1440 W. 13th St.—apartment 1109. The elevator’s working.”
Dispatcher: “1109? All right. What’s your name, ma’am?”
McCoy: “Ruth McCoy.”
Dispatcher: “All right, I’ll send you the police.”
The dispatcher wasn’t certain what McCoy had been trying to report—what could she have meant by “they throwed the cabinet down” and “they want to come through the bathroom”? Nevertheless, he closed the phone call in order to send a beat car on its way.
What happened when the cops and property managers got involved should send chills down any building tenant’s spine.
Four officers apparently arrived at McCoy’s door around ten minutes after nine. They pounded on the door, announced their presence, called for McCoy. No answer. They asked the dispatcher to call McCoy on her phone. “We think somebody may be in there holding somebody,” an officer told the dispatcher over the radio. The officers listened to the phone ring and ring.
There were two more officers downstairs, and they drove over to the project office, a block away on Loomis, to get the key to 1109. But the key didn’t fit McCoy’s lock.
This left the officers wondering what to do—should they break into the apartment? Talking with neighbors didn’t help much: nobody answered across the hall, the apartment next door was vacant, and the neighbors in the apartment down the hall said no, they hadn’t heard or seen a thing. Other neighbors on the floor said an elderly woman lived in 1109. “They say that she always answers her door,” one of the officers told the dispatcher in a hesitant voice. “And there’s no answer … so—I don’t know if maybe she answered to the wrong person or what.”
The officers contacted the project office again, but the janitor there said he had no other key for 1109. And so, at 9:48 PM, the police left McCoy’s building and the project.
Related: It Was in the Sewer
The following evening, police got a call from Debra Lasley, an 11th-floor neighbor of McCoy’s. Lasley said McCoy normally stopped by her apartment on her way out of the building every morning and upon her return in the afternoon. But this day, she hadn’t stopped by at all. Lasley had seen police at McCoy’s door the night before, and was worried.
About a half dozen police officers and four or five CHA security guards arrived on the scene. Their knocks and calls for McCoy went unanswered. Most of the police officers thought they ought to break down the door, neighbors say, but the security guards discouraged them. One of them raised the possibility of the tenant suing if the police broke in. And if you bust down the door, the security guards told the police officers, you will have to get someone up here to secure it. The police officers shrugged and left.
The next day, Lasley notified the project office of her concerns. At about 1 PM, a project official arrived at McCoy’s door with a carpenter, who drilled through the lock. They found McCoy in the bedroom lying on her side in a pool of blood, a hand over her chest, one shoe on and one off. Papers, magazines, and coins were strewn around her on the floor. When police later turned McCoy slightly, the faint smell of rotting flesh rose through the apartment.
Who or what had killed Ruthie Mae McCoy in her slum apartment whose lock had to be drilled before her body was found? Was a bloodthirsty phantom the solution to this real-life locked room mystery?
It turns out that the answer was a threat far more common–and therefore more dangerous.
The Tribune did run a brief story on the McCoy murder on June 10, after a second suspect had been arrested and indicted. The killing apparently had been made newsworthy by a new fact: detectives had determined, and the Tribune reported in the story’s lead, that McCoy’s killers had entered her apartment through her medicine cabinet. They removed the cabinet in the adjacent apartment, broke through McCoy’s cabinet, and climbed through the wall into her apartment …
This time, a horror movie got one chilling detail 100 percent right: Builders of Chicago housing projects really did leave holes in the walls plugged only with flimsy medicine cabinets. Intruders could gain access to any apartment to prey on residents anytime they wanted. And sometimes they did.
And keep in mind, the Ruthie Mae McCoy killing happened in 1987. government corruption and anarcho-tyrrany have only gotten worse since then. Meanwhile, social trust is degrading, and violent crime is on its way to matching or exceeding 1990s highs. That’s a recipe for unmitigated horror.
If you’re still a city dweller, consider that it may be in your best interests to get out while you can.
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Dark fantasy minus the grim plus heroes you can root for battling overwhelming odds
