The Golden Dagger

A bar at 2447 North Lincoln Avenue in Chicago has cycled through identities since 1894, from Prohibition speakeasy to occult shop to music venue, but the basement where a Golden Dawn chapter practiced rituals in the 1930s has stayed strange: a bouncer was paralyzed on the spot where a pentagram was painted, and staff still see a young woman's ghost wandering down there.

A skull-handled ceremonial dagger sits in a glass case above the bar at 2447 North Lincoln Avenue. Nobody put it there as decoration. Workers found it buried in a basement window well, along with a pentagram painted on the floor and Egyptian hieroglyphs on the ceiling.

The building dates to 1894, when it opened as a bar and brothel. By the 1920s, the North Side Gang, Dean O'Banion's mostly Irish crew who controlled bootlegging from North Chicago, used the place as a regular hangout. They sat at the bar planning jobs over freshly smuggled whiskey, with Al Capone's South Side crew as the competition. That rivalry ended on February 14, 1929, when four South Siders lined up five North Siders and two associates against a wall on North Clark Street.

Then it got weirder. Around 1930, a local chapter of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn moved their rituals into the basement. The Golden Dawn was a British occult society founded in 1887 by three London Freemasons, mixing ceremonial magic with ancient Egyptian practices. The Chicago chapter painted the pentagram and the symbols. That is where the dagger came from, and that is where the bar got its current name when guitarist Donnie Biggins reopened it in April 2021 after years as the Tonic Room (2003), Jub Jub Club (1989), and El-Sabarum occult shop (1969 to 1974, owned by Frederic De'Arechaga).

The basement connects to old Chicago tunnels, and it is the part of the building that scares people most. One older Chicago woman told investigators that as a child, her father brought her to a meeting in the building where she witnessed members of a secretive order kill a woman in what she described as a ritual sacrifice. A young woman's ghost has been seen in the basement since, wandering with a distant stare. Staff see her more than customers do, because customers almost never go down there.

In the early 2010s, during renovations, a bouncer went into the basement alone. He felt suddenly paralyzed, collapsed to the floor, and could not move or speak. He was rushed to the hospital, where doctors found nothing physically wrong. When he came back and described exactly where he'd fallen, other staff told him that spot had been marked with the pentagram.

Upstairs, bartenders closing up after hours have seen the shapes of several men in Jazz Age suits sitting at the bar. The figures are there, then they aren't. The building sits in Lincoln Park across from the Biograph Theater, where FBI agents shot John Dillinger in 1934. Lincoln Park was built over a 19th-century cemetery. The whole neighborhood carries weight.

The Golden Dagger closed in late 2023 when the lease ended. A dog-friendly bar called Hunters took over the space. Whether the spirits care about the new tenants is an open question, but the dagger is still there, and the pentagram is still under the floor.