Hooters River North

The basement at this River North Hooters was used to store stolen corpses in pickle barrels in the 1800s and may have held Eastland Disaster victims in 1915. Staff describe hands grabbing them, a presence following them on the stairs, and three figures in 19th-century clothing appearing in the dining room.

In the 19th century, the basement of the building at 660 North Wells Street was used to store stolen corpses. Grave robbers dug up bodies from local cemeteries, packed them into pickle barrels labeled "poultry," and stashed them in the basement and alley until they could be shipped to out-of-state medical colleges. Today the building is a Hooters. The bodies are gone. Something in the basement is not.

Staff have quit after going down those stairs. Waitresses hear their names called when nobody is around and feel a hand on their shoulder when they turn to find the hallway empty. Several employees have described rough hands grabbing them or touching their legs. The jukebox turns itself on. Objects fall off shelves with no one near them. A manager told Chicago Hauntings Tours guide Tony Szabelski that she'd feel someone right behind her going up and down the basement stairs, close enough that she could sense them moving, but there was never anyone there.

The building picked up another layer of tragedy on July 24, 1915, when the steamship Eastland capsized in the Chicago River with over 2,500 passengers on board. 844 people died, including 22 entire families. The disaster overwhelmed the city's morgue capacity, and nearby buildings were pressed into service as temporary storage for the dead. According to a manager at the Hooters location, victims of the Eastland were brought to this basement. The connection between the body-storage history and the current haunting is speculative, but it's hard to ignore a basement that was used to warehouse the dead on two separate occasions, a century apart.

The Ghost Research Society investigated on March 12, 2006, from 11:30 PM to 3 AM. A seven-person team led by Dale Kaczmarek brought night vision cameras, ion detectors, a Geiger counter, and digital recorders into the basement. Temperature gauges recorded drops from 65 to 55 degrees in under a minute, and from 62 to 49 near the generator room door. Investigator Roy Baggio's camera battery drained from full to dead in 30 minutes when it should have lasted two hours. Chris Fleming, a psychic on the team, identified a female presence in a closet and a male presence near the generator. The team captured two EVPs: "Shut it off" and "He seems to walk away."

Upstairs in the dining room, customers and staff have seen three figures dressed in 19th-century clothing, two men and a woman with vacant expressions, sitting in the dining area and disappearing when looked at directly. The descriptions are specific: drab period clothing, not the sort of detail someone invents to jazz up a Hooters story.

The Hooters opened at this address in 1993 and has been dealing with the activity for roughly two decades. The staff doesn't seem surprised by it anymore, which is either a sign that the stories are overblown or that you get used to anything if it happens often enough. The basement is still the worst part. New employees learn about it from the ones who've lasted, and the stairs keep producing that feeling of someone close behind you, just out of sight.