Chicago Hauntings: The Lyric Opera House and the tragic story of tycoon Samuel Insull

CHICAGO (CBS) -- The Lyric Opera House—formerly and sometimes still called the Civic Opera House—is an imposing and majestic structure, standing like a giant throne overlooking the South Branch of the Chicago River on its west side, while showcasing a grand French Renaissance Revival-style exterior on the east facing North Wacker Drive.

Inside, the opera house, at 20 N. Wacker Dr. (Market Street when it was completed) boasts more space in its auditorium than any other such space in North America except the New York Metropolitan Opera. And on the historical front, while there are older opera houses, the Lyric Opera House has the Met Opera in New York beat—the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center didn't open until 1966, while the Lyric Opera Center dates back 95 years to 1929.

The Lyric Opera House is also known for its intricate interior architecture and artwork. The mural on the fire curtain, designed by Chicago artist Jules Guérin, depicts the parade scene from Giuseppe Verde's tragic opera "Aida"—which also happens to have been the first opera ever performed at the venue. The mural has appeared on everything from massive wall posters to Gucci scarves over the years.

On the stage behind that fire curtain, the Lyric Opera House stage has seen a lengthy roster of stars—from Rudolf Nureyev in his American opera debut in "Prince Igor" in 1962 to dozens of performances by Luciano Pavarotti over the years, and Robert Altman directing a production of "McTeague" for the 1992-1993 season. And of course, this just barely scratches the surface of the grand tradition of opera and also musical theatre at the Lyric Opera House.

Meanwhile, as you may have guessed, the Lyric Opera House is also known for ghosts—well, the ghost of one specific person. That person is Samuel Insull, the populist entrepreneur who had the opera house built, and whose life story Tony Szabelski of Chicago Hauntings Tours calls "one of the saddest stories in American entrepreneurial history."

Samuel Insull: From rags to riches to rags

Born Nov. 11, 1859, Insull grew up in a poor family in London. He was the second of five children who survived into adulthood, and his father, according to the American Business History Center, was "more interested in crusading for religion and temperance than he was in making a living."

But after Insull's father became a paid secretary in the temperance movement in Oxfordshire, England, there was enough money for the Insulls to send Samuel and his brothers to private school—where they were tutored by Oxford students, according to the center.

The American Business History Center biography called Insull a "sponge for knowledge," who shined in particular in mathematics and enjoyed history, political economy, and the classics.

After Insull's father lost his job and the family returned to London, Insull—then all of 14—found a job as an office boy at a real estate auction firm, according to the center. At first, given that the job paid less than the cost of daily railway fare and lunch, he walked to work and didn't have lunch, according to the center.

But soon enough, Insull was taking on additional jobs—working as a stenographer, and taking dictation for "Vanity Fair" magazine editor Thomas Bowles. While he gave his all and then some to work, Insull also read voraciously—and found enough time for cycling, a literary society, and visits to theatre and opera performances, according to the American Business History Center.

In 1879, Insull—only 19—became the secretary to Col. George Gouraud, an American banker who just so happened to be Thomas Edison's London representative. Insull dug in and researched all there was to learn about Edison—and when Edison's own top engineer, Edward Johnson, came to London on business, Johnson found out that Insull knew more about Edison's European interests than Edison himself did, according to the business history center.

Insull began ingratiating himself with Johnson and Edison's engineers, and got a post as the first operator for Edison's new London telephone exchange, according to the business history center. Meanwhile, Insull turned down a job to go to New York and work for the investment firm Drexel Morgan—only being interested in working for Edison, the center reported.

In 1881 at the age of 21, Insull made it to New York City—where he impressed Edison with his business acumen and became Edison's secretary.

"What the dreamy Edison lacked in the way of business acumen, the aggressive Insull supplied," read an Oct. 22, 1932, article by the Vancouver Sun and Newspaper Enterprise Association. "It was a perfect team."

Insull served as Edison's business manager for a dozen years, and began organizing companies himself to make and market Edison's inventions, the article noted. He became vice president of Edison General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York, in 1889.

In 1892, when the president of the Chicago Edison Company died, Insull appointed himself to take over—and went on to build the world's largest power plant In the world on Harrison Street with a $250,000 loan from merchandising tycoon Marshall Field. 1907, Insull consolidated what had been multiple Chicago electric utility companies into the Commonwealth Edison Co.—and also unified isolated power operations in rural areas around Chicago.

Insull became the captain of a vast utility empire worth billions. He also purchased or acquired control of several Chicago local or intraurban railroad lines and helped modernize the system that later became the Chicago Transit Authority.

Insull's great love of opera inspired him to fund the construction of an opera house in Chicago. He became president of the Chicago Civic Opera when it was reorganized from the Chicago Opera Association in 1922. Seven years later, the 45-story Civic Opera House was completed—with its 22-story wings and vast office space.

A legend surrounding the construction of the opera house is that Insull's wife or mistress was a singer of questionable talent who couldn't get a position singing opera anywhere—so he built her an opera house all himself. This mirrors a plot point in Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz's classic film "Citizen Kane"—in which publishing magnate Charles Foster Kane promises his bride, Susan Alexander, a special opera house in Chicago where she can perform after promising to make her an opera star despite her lack of talent.

This story of a real-life "Citizen Kane" plot point involving Insull and the opera house is not true, multiple accounts point out. As theatre professor Paul Kuritz writes, Insull's wife, Gladys (née Wallis), was a stage actress whom Insull met was she was appearing in "The Squire of Dames" in Chicago with a cast that also included a young Ethel Barrymore—great aunt of Drew Barrymore. But Ms. Insull was not an opera singer.

There is also sometimes reference to Insull having the opera house built not for his wife, but for a supposed mistress named Mary Garden, Kuritz wrote. Garden was a famous soprano and actress who became music director (or "la directra," as she preferred) for the Chicago Civic Opera under Insull and performed many roles with the company—but she was not Insull's mistress, and unlike the fictional Susan Alexander, she was an A-list opera talent.

What is undeniably true is that Insull's empire ended in bankruptcy and disgrace. Insull had built his empire on holding companies, and as noted in a 1997 American Heritage Magazine article, securities for those companies were rising at the rate of $7,000 a minute in the summer of 1929. But after the Great Crash of Oct. 24, 1929, the value of holding companies and their securities was wiped—and so were the life savings of 600,000 furious people who had bought into the companies.

Meanwhile the Civic Opera House and Insull's opera company also suffered, as people did not have the money to go to the opera or rent office space in the building during the Great Depression, Szabelski noted.

Insull himself tried to stem the losses to his holding companies—first taking out a multimillion-dollar loan from a New York bank, then selling his estate and turning in his life insurance policy, American Heritage magazine reported. But by April 1932, the entire Insull empire had gone into receivership.

This was not only an embarrassment and a financial ruin for Insull, but grounds for criminal prosecution for the handling of the financial crisis. Insull and his wife fled to Paris, and soon afterward, Insull was charged with multiple financial crimes—including embezzlement, larceny, mail fraud, and Bankruptcy Act violations, according to the American Business History Center. Insull decided not to return to Chicago until the "climate" got better—as he had also already ducked a bullet from a would-be assassin, the center reported.

Insull and his wife went on to Greece, but he was deported and extradited to the U.S. by Turkey and returned to Chicago under heavy guard in 1934. Back in Chicago, federal prosecutors alleged that Insull and his co-co-defendants had fraudulently schemed to persuade investors around the country to buy common stock for his holding company at inflated prices—while misleading investors as to the value of the stock, according to Encyclopedia.com.

Insull was acquitted in two federal trials and one Cook County criminal trial connected to his alleged financial misdeeds. Nonetheless, he fled to Paris again, where he died of a heart attack in the Metro train system in 1938 at the age of 79.

As American Heritage Magazine notes, Insull's body lay unidentified for hours after he died—and police only found 8 francs in his pocket. While this was widely described in contemporary news accounts as a once-proud titan of utilities and business dying penniless, American Heritage reported the truth was that on top of everything else, someone had stolen Insull's wallet after he died.

Insull's ghost lurking at the Lyric?

So… on to the ghosts. Szabelski says there are stories that Insull's spirit has come back to haunt what we now call the Lyric Opera House because of all the bad experiences he had.

Some say the "throne" that defines the shape of the building on the Chicago River side was a deliberate architectural choice on Insull's part. The claim was that Insull deliberately had the "throne" face west away from New York as a snub toward East Coast investors who had turned his back on him in the past. However, a 1971 Chicago Tribune article said the opera house design was developed with "economics and air circulation" in mind, and "Insull's Throne" originally referred not to the opera house, but to the Edison Building at Clark and Adams streets from which Insull ran his empire.

Nevertheless, there are claims that Insull has been spotted sitting on the "throne" lording over the Chicago River.

There are also claims that Insull's ghost has been spotted watching shows in the opera house, and his wife's spirit has also been seen, Szabelski said.

Szabelski does not know of any other ghosts associated with the Lyric Opera House, but he said that does not necessarily mean there aren't any.

"Being an opera—theaters tend to in general have a lot of energy associated with them. There are many theaters that are considered haunted. Opera productions—there's kind of a lot of energy that goes into them," Szabelski said. "There could be a lot of residual energy left from all the operas that have taken place in this building throughout the years. Operas tend to be very tragic in nature anyway."

Just last year, in fact, the Lyric Opera opened its season with Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman (Der fliegende Holländer)"—famously known as "opera's most thrilling ghost story:"

"Senta dreams of the Dutchman, who's cursed to wander the earth. He comes ashore every seven years, searching for a woman who will be faithful to him until death. When she meets him, Senta's fate is sealed."

"The Flying Dutchman" is not alone in haunting productions that have been staged over the years at the Lyric Opera. For just one more example, back in the fall of 1995, John Corigliano's contemporary opera "The Ghosts of Versailles" was staged there too.

This opera's plot involves the afterlife existence of the Versailles Court of King Louis XVI of France—including Marie Antoinette's ghost, who is not happy about having been beheaded, and the ghost of the playwright Pierre Beaumarchais, author of "The Barber of Seville" and "The Marriage of Figaro," who has fallen madly in love with Marie Antoinette's specter.

Meanwhile, a 2019 Chicago Reader article that the Lyric Opera itself promoted on social media documented the phenomenon of "ghost lights"—no, not light made by ghosts, but single light bulbs fitted in a cage on a tall stand, and placed on a stage just before a theater goes dark. The Reader's Matthew Gilson wrote that the ghost bulb acts as "bare-bones illumination. And just in case, to keep spirit mischief to a minimum."

Gilson quoted the Lyric Opera master electrician Mike Reynolds as saying: "If you don't put [a ghost light] out bad things start to happen around the Opera House. You're showing your appreciation for the ghost taking care of you, much like children putting out milk and cookies for Santa."

In November, Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro)," based on the play by the aforementioned Beaumarchais, will be the headliner at the Lyric Opera. This iconic opera does not involve any ghosts, but does feature the story a valet named Figaro and a maid named Susanna who are preparing to wed—only for Susanna to learn that the master of the house, Count Almaviva, plans to seduce her, and for Figaro to plot to outsmart the count.

"The Marriage of Figaro" will be onstage at the Lyric from Nov. 9 through Nov. 30.