Most people like to learn about a city’s history via their museums, tours, and bronze plaques that dot its landscape. However, I do it through ghost tours.
When it comes to ghost stories, I’m a believer and a skeptic. I want to hear everyone’s stories, but I will look for ways to rationalize the activity.
Paranormal encounters are very personal. They’re more of a feeling rather than something you see or hear. So, when they say seeing is believing, it’s really more like feeling is believing.
The US Ghost Adventures’ Chicago Ghost Tour provides a wealth of historical information along with its paranormal history that really helps you to get a sense of the city and its past. And it’s here that I had my first paranormal experience on one of their tours.
Below is my review of the Windy City Ghost Tour. If you’re interested in taking the tour, be sure to use code LAURA at checkout when you buy your tickets, and you’ll get a discount on your ghostly walking tour.
The meet up
The meeting place for this tour was at the Tin Man Statue located on one corner of Oz Park at 601 West Webster Street in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. Lincoln Park is an urban yet family-friendly area lined with brownstone homes, restaurants, and stores. In fact, there’s a Target right across the street from the Tin Man statue where you can buy drinks, snacks, and use the restroom prior to your tour.
The entire park has a Wizard of Oz theme with statues of each of the four heroes (and Toto), posted on each corner with a castle-themed playground and a garden area named after the Emerald City. It was a very busy area when we first arrived, and it wasn’t yet dark when the tour began. But the trees in the park helped to dim the already setting sun, prompting the locals to clear out fast. In fact, people appeared to be nearly running out of each end of the park pulling their dogs on leashes and pushing their babies in strollers as they headed in for the night, as if they were afraid they’d be trapped inside if they didn’t leave before sundown.
Our tour guide’s name was Elliott, and he was a great storyteller and very knowledgeable about the area, which apparently wasn’t as safe and family friendly 40 + years ago. Our group was small to say the least. So, there were a lot of opportunities to ask questions and look at some additional buildings that Elliott has suspected of being haunted throughout his time as a tour guide.
Lincoln Park
Lincoln Park itself is a few blocks down from our meeting place, and I didn’t get a chance to head down there before the tour. However, I did drive past it a few days prior while catching an Uber back to my hotel after sightseeing. It just looked like a typical city park with walking trails and benches in between rows of spaced out trees.
In Oz Park, we learned that Lincoln Park was the location of the city’s original cemetery where over 35,000 people were buried until the corpses began to contaminate the city’s drinking water, and they hired just 10 men to attempt to exhume and relocate the bodies to Graceland Cemetery, which I had visited earlier in the day.
However, as was the case in Cincinnati, which I learned during my Cincinnati Ghost Tour, the project was left unfinished, and it is believed that approximately 12,000 bodies still remain beneath the grounds. As a result, those who live nearby have reported hearing sounds and seeing ghostly figures. The Lincoln Park Zoo is also said to be haunted by a Victorian woman and even by other animals.
A quick ghost story
As we trotted to our next location, Elliott regaled us with a story about helping his friend move into an apartment nearby which contained a noisy ghost who would haunt the courtyard each night. When his friend brought it up to the landlord after about a month, the landlord confirmed its presence and even offered to refund him and let him move out. If you want to know the rest of the story, leave a comment below, and I’ll finish the story for you.
The Bad Apple
The next stop was a few blocks down at The Bad Apple, located on West Belden Avenue. This bar has housed many different types of businesses, including a speakeasy disguised as a laundromat which was frequented by mobster John Dillinger. The Bad Apple does have a classic look to it with its red brick exterior, maroon awning, and dramatic circular lights that line the exterior windows which see straight into the bar area.
The building is located in a very populated area where a lot of college kids were hanging out, bar hopping and eating outside at the nearby restaurants. It was probably the most populated section of our tour.
The stories inside, though, have to do with the ghosts who used to utilize the mirrors that once lined the back wall of the bar. Now that the mirrors have been removed, the activity upstairs seems to have quieted. But they still tend to sneak up on the staff via the mirrors in the basement men’s room.
A rat problem
Between The Bad Apple and our next stop, Elliott pointed out The Apartments at Lincoln Common, the site of the former Children’s Memorial Hospital Campus on North Lincoln Avenue. This building was completely rat infested before it was demolished to make way for the nice, new tower that stands there today.
The demolition caused multitudes of rats to scatter and infiltrate the nearby buildings. To combat this problem, they brought coyotes to the construction sites, and now, there are urban coyotes that inhabit the Lincoln Park area. Luckily, I didn’t see any coyotes during the tour and only one dead rat, but a sighting of either likely would have scared me more than the ghost stories.
The Red Lion Pub
Further down North Lincoln Avenue, we stopped at the Red Lion Pub, another classic looking bar located in a brown brick building with a boldly painted black and red entrance and window-lined walls that allow you to see inside from the sidewalk. This bar was previously called Dirty Dan’s Western Saloon and went through an extensive remodel to become what it is today.
The stories in this building span from a lavender smell, a female patron who loves to get the attention of new bartenders and then disappear, and a cowboy ghost who at least one other tour guest had mentioned seeing through the window before that piece of information was ever relayed to them. The owner’s son currently runs the bar and has decorated it with World War II Memorabilia in honor of his father. He has said, though, that he believes that the former owner still haunts the place, particularly around the staircase area. So, I wonder if maybe those old war relics might carry some supernatural energy.
The second floor has since been closed off to anyone except staff, and it is mainly used for storage space only. The lights were on upstairs when we first arrived, but they turned off soon after we arrived across the street.
While staring over at the building after the lights had gone out, both Elliott and my sister claimed to have seen the profile of a man in the darkened upper right window. They were both standing to my right, and we could all make out the silhouette of a nearby tree branch in the glass, but they both insisted that this outline was separate from this tree branch. Whoever had turned off the lights could have been the shape they saw, but why were they lingering in a dark room without moving?
Because I did not see the shape in the window, this does not count as my paranormal experience. That was yet to come.
The Biograph Theater
Across the street and a few doors down from the Red Lion Pub, we stopped at the Biograph Theater, a 90-year old movie theater with both a historical and haunted history. The ghosts in this building love to play films, turn on the popcorn machines, and play loud jazz music in the lobby during shows. Ghostly patrons have been known to sit in the audience and walk through walls. And of course, they love appearing in the mirrors.
The lights were on inside the lobby during our visit. However, the exterior lights were off, giving off the energy that the building was shutting down for the night and creating a very mysterious atmosphere as to what was going on beyond that main hallway, as if the building was straddling two worlds.
Dillinger Alley
Directly to the right of the Biograph Theater was a wide, clean alley with a giant mural of John Dillinger’s mugshot painted on one wall. The alley was lit by a spotlight, making it feel very safe, but it was here that I had my first paranormal experience on a US Ghost Adventures Tour.
As Elliott was breaking down a very quick history of Dillinger’s life and this alley where he eventually met his end (or did he?), I began to feel dizzy, like the feeling you get when you get off a spinning ride at an amusement park. I had gotten this feeling earlier in the day at Graceland Cemetery but chalked it up to a long few days of sightseeing and a packed convention schedule with late nights and a less than stellar diet.
However, once I left the cemetery, that feeling went away, and I had been feeling fine the rest of the evening until now. That’s when Elliott happened to mention that people tend to get vertigo and motion sickness in this alleyway. Green beams of light, similar to a laser light show, have also been captured on film in this alley.
I wish I had said something sooner about the vertigo so that our group would know that I wasn’t making up this feeling as part of the power of suggestion. But it was undeniable that I was experiencing the same symptoms that multiple other guests have felt, including the skeptics who come on the tour certain that they won’t see or feel anything paranormal and end up getting sick in the alley.
My vertigo didn’t make me queasy, just dizzy. And of course, as we walked out of the alley in the opposite direction from which we had come, that feeling immediately went away.
Hunter’s on Halsted
Our next stop was the most sinister of our tour. Located on North Halsted Street, Hunter’s on Halsted is a bar that was once frequented by the North Side Gang when it was a speakeasy, and it served as a meeting place for a secret society known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
A fire destroyed the building in 2021, and it was rebuilt as Hunter’s on Halsted with apartments above, but its history of evil rituals and leftover artifacts from those rituals have created quite the reputation for it, and with it comes sightings of ghosts, and possibly even demons.
Many unexplained images have been captured on camera during the group tours, including one boy who captured the outline of a demonic figure in one window. Elliott himself recalled seeing a Victorian woman staring at the wall in the bar area before disappearing.
I don’t like to mess with the evil stuff. Dark, yes, but evil, no. So, I didn’t want to get any closer to this place than where we were standing across the street as the sky darkened and the streets cleared.
Additional ghost stories
On the way to our last stop, Elliott told us about the haunted house that he and his wife live in and the strange things that have happened to them, including at least two instances where his wife saw or heard him in the house when he wasn’t there. They also found a creepy doll collection in the attic that both unnerved and fascinated them.
We also passed by a street where a suspect in the Tylenol murders of the 80s had lived. So, we stopped briefly at a crosswalk to talk about that whole ordeal and the way that Chicago was truly haunted, this time by the living.
Elliott also pointed out a home which appears to be one of only seven original buildings that survived the Great Chicago Fire in Lincoln Park. The old Victorian was full of adornments and accents with a bay window that took up over half of the front exterior. The front yard was overgrown with trees and other wildly grown vegetation that overtook the black metal fence that surrounded the front of the property.
Only the front porch light was on as well as a sliver of dim light that could be seen through the closed shutters. Elliott pointed out that no one ever seems to come in and out, and no lights ever seem to come on and off whenever he passes by at night, though it’s clear that the house is inhabited, and the owners appear to delight in being the creepy house on the block.
Also, check out my post, Haunted Houses: How the Victorian Home Inspired Classic Ghost Stories, here!
Oz Park
We ended where we began back in Oz Park, this time near the Dorothy statue, one that features the young heroine with her dog, Toto. The author of The Wizard of Oz series, L. Frank Baum, lived just west of the park, and the area has a history of violent crime.
There, we learned about a jogger who was strangled in the park and is believed to haunt the grounds. The statues also tend to make noises or shift positions, and it is suspected that the jogger is responsible for this.
The park was so much darker and completely empty at this time of the night, despite the foot and vehicle traffic that surrounds the outside of it. It’s big enough that you can’t see to the other end of the park, even in daylight. So, it’s not an inviting area to venture into at night.
And that is where the tour came to a close, approximately an hour and 15 minutes after it began. I felt like we covered a ton of ground and saw a lot of interesting places. I liked that this tour wasn’t in the heart of the city, so it was easier to hear the stories, and there weren’t as many people to maneuver around. So, it gave it more of a personal, eerie feel.
And of course, I was excited to have had my first paranormal experience, even though I can’t back it up with any physical evidence. However, that just means you’ll have to take a tour and see what you experience yourself!
Take a tour!
Again, you can sign up for the US Ghost Adventures Windy City Chicago Tour here, and use code LAURA at checkout to receive a discount on your tickets!
Also, check out my reviews of US Ghost Adventures’ Pittsburgh and Cincinnati Tours and use the same discount code to get a discount on tickets for those tours!
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