The Great Escape Restaurant

The Great Escape Restaurant in Schiller Park occupies an 1889 roadhouse where Tom Mix filmed silent westerns and Al Capone conducted business at the bar during Prohibition. Staff still see a man in a dark suit vanish into a closet, hear 1920s music from the empty basement, and watch an antique radio with burned-out tubes turn itself on.

The antique radio in the back of the Great Escape Restaurant has no wires connected and the tubes inside are burned out. It turns on anyway. Owner Brian Great has heard it happen more than once while closing up alone.

The building at 9540 West Irving Park Road in Schiller Park dates to 1889, when it was the Iron Horse Saloon, a roadhouse with swinging doors and hitching posts on what was then a dirt road. Over the next century it was Fred Kolze's General Store, a milk depot, a post office, a gas station, a barber shop, a pool hall, and a brothel. Around 1900, silent film cowboy Tom Mix filmed westerns on the property, using the Des Plaines River as a stand-in for the Rio Grande and the saloon's bar for interior shots. That same hand-carved bar, built by the Chicago Bar Company, is still there. You can sit at it and order ribs.

During Prohibition, Al Capone sold the establishment bootleg liquor and was spotted at the bar conducting business. Witnesses described men seated on either side of him with shotguns watching the door. For the record, Capone is not believed to be among the building's ghosts. He's presumably too busy splitting his time between the dozen other Chicago establishments that claim him.

Al and Marie Great bought the place in 1958, renamed it the Drift Inn, and introduced what would become the family's signature: baby back ribs and broasted chicken. After Al and Marie retired in 1981, the building changed hands a few times before their family revived it as the Great Escape in the early 2000s. Brian Great runs it now, and he says he coexists peacefully with whatever else lives there.

The ghosts aren't subtle about it. Staff have watched a man in a dark suit carrying a clipboard walk calmly into a storage closet and vanish. He does this periodically. Nobody recognizes him. In dark hallways, employees walk through sudden pockets of freezing air. After hours, 1920s-era music drifts up from the basement, which is a problem because nobody is in the basement and there is no music source down there.

Paranormal investigator David Scott brought his IPRA research team to the Great Escape for an overnight investigation. The evening bartender handed them a photograph taken by a customer who'd seen a shadow figure outside the women's restroom. When Scott examined the image, he found what appeared to be a young girl in old-fashioned clothing. During the investigation, Scott and his team used a spirit box to try communicating with the building's occupants. Employees had previously heard the voice of a little boy laughing and another voice telling them they "should leave." The investigators also encountered what they believed was the spirit of a man whose hands had been cut off for stealing, a story rooted in the building's rougher years.

Brian Great has seen enough that he doesn't question it anymore. He just asks for peaceful coexistence. The building has been standing for over 135 years and has housed more human activity, legal and otherwise, than most city blocks. If anything earned the right to be haunted, it is the Iron Horse Saloon.