Red Lion Pub

Chicago's Red Lion Pub at 2446 North Lincoln Avenue has reported at least seven ghosts, including the Lavender Woman (who locks herself in the second-floor bathroom to shriek and sob) and the vengeful spirit of former saloon owner Dirty Dan Danforth. The original 1882 building was demolished in 2008 and rebuilt on the same site, but it still sits on ground that was once a cemetery for cholera victims and Confederate prisoners.

The second floor bathroom locks itself from the inside whenever a woman starts crying in there. Staff can hear the sobbing through the door, but they can't open it. When the crying stops, the lock releases. Nobody is ever inside.

That's been happening at 2446 North Lincoln Avenue since the 1980s, back when John Cordwell first opened the Red Lion Pub. Cordwell was a London-born architect who'd spent three years as a POW in Stalag Luft III during World War II. His graphic skills were put to work forging passports for the mass escape later immortalized in the 1963 film The Great Escape. Of the 76 men who made it out of the tunnel, some carried documents Cordwell had drawn. After the war, he came to Chicago, became the city's Director of Planning, and built a forty-year architecture career. In late 1983, he decided to do something different. He spotted a building with a bar for sale while having coffee near the Biograph Theater. The sign read "Dirty Dan's Western Saloon."

The building dated to 1882. Before Dirty Dan's, it had been a grocery store and an illegal gambling parlor. The land underneath it had been a cemetery for cholera victims and Confederate prisoners in the 1800s. Many of those graves were relocated as Chicago expanded north, but "relocated" is generous. Not all the bodies were accounted for. Across Lincoln Avenue, the Biograph Theater stands where John Dillinger was shot dead by FBI agents in July 1934.

Dan Danforth, the saloon's previous owner, knew the building was haunted. He used to invite local businessmen over to experience the ghosts. Nobody recorded what Dirty Dan thought of the situation, but the nickname tells you enough about the man. He was described by one account as "an old, alcohol-saddened, toothless gem, without one redeeming defect."

Cordwell's renovation from saloon to English pub made things worse. Tools went missing overnight. Work that had been completed was found ruined the next morning. Screws backed themselves out of walls. One day, Cordwell was shoved down the stairs by something he couldn't see. He blamed Dirty Dan's ghost, figuring the old saloon keeper didn't appreciate the remodel.

The pub opened November 16, 1984, and the hauntings didn't stop. Staff and regulars have counted at least seven distinct ghosts over the years. The Lavender Woman is the most active. Her name was Sharon Paul, a twenty-year-old with an intellectual disability who died in the building's upstairs loft in the 1950s. She was known for the lavender perfume she wore, and guests on the second floor sometimes catch that scent drifting through the hallway with no source. Sharon is playful. She knocks plates out of servers' hands. She rearranges furniture. One morning, staff arrived to find every barstool and chair pushed to the center of the room.

The second floor has a cold spot that never warms up. According to Colin Cordwell, John's son and the pub's current proprietor, "the cold patch of the room was where she died." Colin has lived with the ghosts his whole adult life. Chairs pull themselves out from tables while he watches.

Over the main stairway, John Cordwell installed a stained glass window with a memorial plaque honoring his father, who had been buried in England without a headstone. After the installation, Cordwell began sensing his father's presence at that exact spot. Other visitors have described the same feeling near the window without knowing its history.

Two other ghosts round out the regulars: a pair of men, one dark-haired and bearded, the other blond, connected to a gambling debt that ended in murder. The blond man killed the bearded man, and now both of them appear together. A scruffy cowboy in Western clothes is thought to be Dirty Dan, haunting the pub that replaced his saloon.

The original 1882 building was demolished in 2008 and rebuilt on the same site. The pub reopened around 2014 with Colin at the helm. Tearing down a haunted building and putting up a new one on the same ground doesn't erase what happened there. The land was a burial ground before it was anything else. A new foundation doesn't fix that.