08/31/2026
In 1915, workers pulled a bizarre, rusted metal tube out of the Chicago River. When they opened it, they found a nightmare.
The Chicago River has always held dark secrets.
For over a century, people have thrown everything you can imagine into the murky, muddy water.
But what a salvage diver found at the bottom of the river in the winter of 1915 still haunts the city today.
A famous local diver named William "Frenchy" Deneau was exploring the freezing water near the Wells Street bridge. He was looking for sunken debris.
Suddenly, he bumped into a massive, heavy metal object buried deep in the river mud.
It wasn't a sunken boat. It wasn't a car.
It was a 40-foot-long, homemade submarine.
Frenchy used heavy cables and a giant crane to drag the rusted metal tube up to the surface. When it finally broke through the water, the workers on the dock were completely shocked.
Painted on the side of the strange, torpedo-shaped vessel was one single, creepy word:
"FOOLKILLER."
But the real horror was waiting inside.
The heavy metal hatch was rusted completely shut. The workers had to use tools to carefully pry it open.
When they finally looked down into the dark, wet belly of the submarine, they gasped.
According to the local newspapers, lying inside the submarine were the skeletal remains of a man and his dog.
The city was in absolute shock.
Who was this man? How long had he been trapped at the bottom of the river?
Historians and police tried to solve the mystery.
Some people thought the submarine was built by a crazy inventor in the 1890s who wanted to explore the bottom of Lake Michigan. Others thought it was a secret smuggling boat.
But nobody ever came forward to claim the bodies. The identity of the man and his dog remained a total ghost story.
Instead of putting the submarine in a museum, the diver dragged the heavy metal tube right onto State Street. He turned it into a morbid carnival attraction.
For a few years, people paid a dime to stare at the rusted "Foolkiller." Then, it completely vanished.
To this day, nobody knows what happened to the submarine or where it ended up.
