The Great Escape Restaurant

At the Great Escape in Schiller Park, Illinois, about a mile east of O'Hare, there's an antique radio that plays when no one is touching it. The staff didn't take that on faith. They opened it up. There are no wires hooked to it, and the old tubes inside are burned out. It switches on by itself anyway, after the restaurant closes for the night.

The radio is the cleanest of the stories here, but it isn't the only one. Staff say a man in a black suit, carrying a clipboard, walks calmly into a storage closet and doesn't come back out. They report 1920s music drifting up from the basement after hours, with no music playing down there and no one standing in it. Cold pockets sit in the dark hallways. A former bartender said a man with his face hidden under a wide-brimmed hat appeared at the bar and vanished, leaving a chill and the smell of cigar smoke.

The building is old enough to have collected all of it. It went up in 1889 and has been a general store, a saloon, a post office, a gas station, a barber shop, a pool hall. The bar inside is original, hand-carved by the Chicago Bar Company. As the legend goes, Al Capone bought bootleg liquor here in the 1920s, with armed men seated on either side of him watching the door — though local lore is firm that Capone, for all his ties to the place, is not among its ghosts.

In 2014, a paranormal investigator named David Scott brought a team in. The evening bartender handed them a photograph a customer had taken near the women's restroom, after seeing a shadow. Scott looked at it and said it showed "an undeniable image of a young girl dressed in old fashioned clothing." No record of a child dying here has ever turned up. He read the photo as a girl anyway.

Brian Great, who opened the place in 1992, says he just asks for peaceful coexistence with whatever else lives there.