In Brief
At the Red Lion Pub on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago, the staff know one ghost by her perfume. Lavender drifts across the empty second floor, and the staff trace it to a young woman who died up there before the pub was ever built.
The Full Story
At the Red Lion Pub on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago, the staff know one of the ghosts by her perfume. Lavender drifts across the empty second floor, and the staff trace it to a young woman who died up there in the old building, years before the pub was ever here.
She isn't a sad ghost. She knocks plates of food out of servers' hands. She rearranges the furniture. Once she pushed every bar stool and chair into the center of the room. Near where she's said to have died, there's a cold spot the staff swear stays cold no matter the season.
The man who opened the pub had survived worse than a haunting. John Cordwell was a Royal Air Force pilot, shot down in the war and held more than three years at Stalag Luft III, the German POW camp where his draftsman's hand forged the false papers that fed the breakout the world later called the Great Escape. He inspired the forger Donald Pleasence played in the 1963 film. After the war he came to Chicago, ran the city's planning department, and helped design Carl Sandburg Village.
In 1984 he bought a filthy Old West saloon called Dirty Dan's and turned it into an English pub. The renovation, the story goes, made something in the building furious. A Cordwell — sources split on whether it was John or his son Colin — was shoved down the staircase by nothing anyone could see. One account has him landing in the hospital.
A man who forged his way out of a Nazi camp, who helped tunnel men to freedom and then built a whole pub on the far side of an ocean, could not get the dead to leave his own staircase. He died in 1999. The building was torn down in 2008 and rebuilt on the same ground in 2014. New floor, new walls. The lavender still turns up on the second floor.
