The Irish Legend

There's a stain on the second-floor wood at The Irish Legend in Willow Springs, Illinois, and it won't stay gone. Staff have sanded it out at least five times. It keeps coming back.

The Irish Legend is an Irish pub now, open for lunch and dinner at 8933 South Archer Avenue. The building has been a lot of things. Going back to around 1915 it ran as a Prohibition roadhouse: a speakeasy on the main floor, gambling in the basement and the attic, and, by the lore, small rooms upstairs working as a brothel. One ghost-tour history puts it plainly — "prostitutes entertained the menfolk in the smaller bedrooms on the second floor."

The stain comes from that second floor. A woman was beaten to death up there, the tour history carries it, wrapped in carpet and left in the corner of the dining room, and her blood soaked down into the timber. "The mysterious stain still appears to this day," that account says.

There's a second death in the basement. A bartender, the story goes, had an affair with one of the women upstairs. The man who ran the place found out and killed him on the basement stairs, though accounts disagree on whether his skull was caved in or he was pushed. Then the woman was killed too. The lore never gives any of them a name or a date.

What people report now sits on top of that. Staff and visitors say they hear babies crying in the kitchen and the closet beside it, and men fighting on the back stairs. A man in an overcoat is said to climb the basement staircase and vanish.

A medium named Edward Shanahan ran séances in the building. He spent time near the basement boiler during one investigation and came away convinced it had been used as a torture device. Afterward, by his own account, he was laid up in bed for three days.

The pub sits on Archer Avenue — the same road Resurrection Mary is said to walk.