“The film footage discovered by Mr. Jeff Nichols is the single most important discovery from research over the past 100 years for those who are interested in the history of the Eastland Disaster,” Ted Wachholz, Executive Director and Chief Historian of EDHS said in a news release. That changed Saturday morning, when the founder of the Eastland Disaster Historical Society woke up to links on the group's Facebook page to footage posted by a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Jeff Nichols, a graduate student in history at UIC, was doing online research about World War I, when the 1915 newsreel he was viewing displayed a headline, and then video, from the S.S. Eastland disaster in Chicago. While looking through archived footage at the EYE Film Institute in the Netherlands, he came across clips of the SS Eastland on the Chicago River pancaked between clips of ceremonies and marching soldiers. Grad student finds footage of 1915 ship disaster A graduate student has found the first-known film clips of the SS Eastland ship disaster that left 844 people dead in 1915. One showed the work of the first responders, the second showed efforts to raise the sunken ship a week later. Wachholz said this discovery has special significance, not just because of the anniversary this year, but also because Marion Eichholz, the last known living survivor of the Eastland disaster, just passed away last November. All of us at EDHS and many more who follow us have gotten chills upon viewing this incredible footage, and we know that thousands more will experience the same.” 
 
 Surviving passenger Libby Hruby was just 10 years old when the disaster happened.
– Ted Wachholz couldn't believe his eyes: He opened Facebook and saw film footage of the SS Eastland disaster, which claimed 844 lives on the Chicago River in 1915, the Chicago Tribune reports. "I'm reasonably confident that this is the first opportunity that the public has had" to see footage of the disaster, says Wachholz, who heads the Eastland Disaster Historical Society. One clip (here, starting at the 1:10 minute mark) shows firefighters, volunteers, and police officers walking on the capsized ship, which was about to go to Indiana for a Western Electric employee picnic when it tipped over while tied to a dock, CBS Chicago reports. "It was a free-for-all early on," says Wachholz. "Anyone who was able to help out and contribute was jumping to the scene." A second clip (here, starting at 9:10) shows the righted ship a week later. Wachholz figures the footage was taken by a professional (considering how expensive cameras were back then) from a small boat or raft floating nearby. What's more mysterious is how the footage cropped up: A US doctoral candidate found the footage, which is housed at a Netherlands film institute, while doing online research for his dissertation on Chicago during the First World War. The clips were spliced between footage of marching soldiers and ceremonies, and it's not clear how it got there. "That's part of the intrigue, part of the mystery behind even having this footage available," says Wachholz. The student then posted his find on the historical society's Facebook page. The footage itself gives him "chills" and "goose bumps," Wachholz tells MyFox Chicago. "I don't think I've ever had an experience quite like that before." (Secrets of a 1629 mutiny and massacre were recently unearthed.)