Biograph Theater

John Dillinger was shot dead by FBI agents outside the Biograph Theater on July 22, 1934, after watching Manhattan Melodrama. Since the 1970s, witnesses have described a blue figure running through the alley behind the theater, stumbling and collapsing before vanishing, retracing the last seconds of Dillinger's life.

FBI agent Melvin Purvis lit a cigar. That was the signal.

John Dillinger walked out of the Biograph Theater at 10:30 p.m. on July 22, 1934, flanked by his girlfriend Polly Hamilton and a woman named Ana Cumpanas, who had told the FBI exactly where he'd be. Dillinger had just watched Manhattan Melodrama, a gangster picture starring Clark Gable. He reached for his pistol. Three bullets hit him. The fatal one entered the back of his neck.

Hundreds of moviegoers poured into the street. Some dipped handkerchiefs in his blood as souvenirs. The Cook County morgue put his body on display behind glass, and thousands lined up to see it.

The Biograph had opened in 1915, designed by architect Samuel N. Crowen in a Classical Revival style with red pressed brick and white-glazed terra cotta. A regular neighborhood movie house on North Lincoln Avenue, nothing special until Dillinger's death turned it into a landmark.

For decades after the shooting, nothing unusual happened at the theater. The building kept showing movies. It became a hub for midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the 1970s and 80s. The alley where Dillinger fell was just an alley.

The ghost stories started in the 1970s, roughly forty years after the killing.

People walking through the passage at night described a blue figure running down the alley, stumbling, and collapsing before vanishing. The sequence matches the last seconds of Dillinger's life, or at least the popular version of it. Witnesses also reported sudden chills and a feeling of dread that hit without warning and lifted just as fast.

The alley picked up a name among longtime Lincoln Park residents: Dillinger's Alley.

During renovations after Victory Gardens Theater purchased the building in 2004, workers reported encounters inside the theater itself. An $11 million renovation by architect Daniel P. Coffey turned the space into a 299-seat main stage with a studio theater upstairs. The building was already on the National Register of Historic Places (listed May 17, 1984) and had been designated a Chicago Landmark in 2001.

Ana Cumpanas, the woman who set Dillinger up, got a raw deal for her trouble. She'd cooperated with the FBI hoping to avoid deportation to Romania. They deported her anyway, two years later.

Dillinger's confidante Mary Kinder asked the question that still follows the Biograph around: "Is it true? Is he dead?" A fringe theory has persisted for ninety years that the FBI shot the wrong man that night, that a small-time criminal named Jimmy Lawrence took the bullets meant for Dillinger. The theory has never held up under serious scrutiny, but it refuses to die, which is fitting for a story about a man whose ghost still runs down an alley on North Lincoln Avenue.