In the company of author Troy Taylor, pull off the trick of coming back alive from some of Chicago's most infamous one-way rides." Meet the deadly womanizer Johann Hoch, who would propose to a woman within twenty minutes of meeting her and then poison her within a week. Follow "Terrible" Tommy O'Conner as he eluded the gallows for more than fifty years, until the city finally grew "tired of waiting" and dismantled them for the final time. Learn how even flower shops and cathedrals weren't safe from gangland violence, and relive the tragic fire at the Iroquois Theatre, where a "fireproof" curtain was made of cotton and did little to stop the blaze that killed more people than the Great Fire of 1871."

Troy Taylor is an occultist, supernatural historian and the author of seventy-five books on ghosts, hauntings, history, crime and the unexplained in America. He is also the founder of the American Ghost Society and the owner of the Illinois and American Hauntings Tour companies. Taylor shares a birthday with one of his favorite authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald, but instead of living in New York and Paris like Fitzgerald, Taylor grew up in Illinois. Raised on the prairies of the state, he developed an interest in things that go bump in the night"? at an early age. As a young man, he channeled that interest into developing ghost tours and writing about haunts in Chicago and Central Illinois. Troy and his wife, Haven, currently reside in Chicago's West Loop neighborhood."