It was a day before Halloween,

1928 when 50-year-old Chris Lewis headed in for an early start to work.

He was a janitor at the police station in the Village Hall of Lake Bluff, Illinois, and it was time to get started on

the chores for the day.

Now Chicago, which is only about 30 miles from Lake Bluff, where our janitor was about to get to work,

had begun to experience some serious Halloween lawless revelry in the 1920s.

This vandalism resulted in major proper damage, out of control fires, and even deaths.

And all perpetrated by the underage, those little bastards.

The Halloween debauchery reached a violent climax in 1925 when a riot broke out at the Ogden

Fieldhouse as a gang of drunken youths and children attempted to overthrow Halloween festivities organized there.

Chicago's adults had had enough, and by the following year, citywide events were planned for kids who pledged not to vandalize

by signing their names to good behavior contracts with the city.

And parents began organizing low-key Halloween parties in their homes, where they could keep an eye on their

little hooligans, and Halloween had been tamed in Illinois for the foreseeable future. So by 1928,

by 1928, thoughts of Halloween Frights were likely far from janitor Chris Lewis's thoughts,

as he descended the steps to the police station basement at 7.30 a.m. to replenish the fire in the furnace.

As he entered the dark of the basement and his eyes began to adjust to the shadows,

I wonder if for a split second he thought he'd been the victim of an early Halloween

prank.

At the bottom of the Halloween prank.

At the bottom of the stairs, he was met with an unexpected and horrifying figure.

A young naked woman was propped up against a pipe by the furnace and was the very specter of death.

...