CHICAGO (CBS) — The history section of the website for the original restaurant chain Hooters has its characteristic sass, as it describes the first location in Clearwater, Florida, founded by six men with no restaurant experience in 1983:
‘What should we call the place? Simple: What else puts a gleam in the eyes of men everywhere besides beer and chicken wings and the occasional winning football season? Hence the name: Hooters. It is believed that they loved owls. Strange group.’
Owls, huh?
Of course, the business model at Hooters basically involves a sports bar with voluptuous women in tight clothing serving chicken wings, sandwiches and seafood. The concept was called a “breastaurant” in formal news texts, and it was once a success.
Ten years after its founding, Hooters made its way to Chicago, settling in 1993 at 660 N. Wells St. in River North.
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On its website, Hooters notes that the Wells Street location is and always has been the only one downtown, making it a long-time hit with tourists and locals alike. But it is also known for something else.
Ghosts.
According to Tony Szabelski of Chicago Hauntings Tours, paranormal activity in the Hooters building has been reported for about 20 years and has been written about in several books. But for years, the reasons why a Hooters, of all places, was haunted was a mystery.
Experts think they have discovered it by now.
About a mile north, the south end of Lincoln Park, near the Chicago History Museum and the Lincoln Park Zoo, was Chicago’s city cemetery in the 1840s and 1850s.the Couch Mausoleumthe only remaining reminder of the park’s days as a cemetery, has its own hauntings. At the time, grave robbing was rampant: so-called resurrection activists dug up freshly buried corpses and sold them to medical colleges, Szabelski explained.
Medical colleges needed the cadavers to train medical students — and no one donated their bodies to science at the time, Szabelski said. Instead, the insurgents showed up at the back door of the medical college and handed over the new bodies – no questions asked.
Is this sound made up? That’s not it. Even Smithsonian Magazine has reported on insurrectionists and the shady dealings of 19th century medical colleges – in a 2018 article, writer Antero Pietila wrote specifically about grave robbers in Baltimore:
“The looters began by shoveling at the head of a newly buried coffin, breaking the lid, placing a hook around the neck or armpit of the deceased and using a rope to remove the body from the grave. corpses were folded into barrels filled with whiskey to mask the smell. At the destination, a medical school took the remains for dissection.
As Adam Selzer wrote in Mysterious Chicago, the Chicago Tribune reported in 1875 that resurrections were suddenly down on their luck, as freshly exhumed bodies were turned over to Chicago medical colleges. Under new laws, the city had given medical colleges first refusal on bodies headed to Potter’s Field in Jefferson Park.
But the insurgents continued their gruesome trade, as there was still a market for stolen cadavers at medical colleges in Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin and other nearby states. Selzer wrote that Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Iowa City, Iowa were particularly important markets for carcasses from Chicago.
The location of the current Hooters building plays a role as a stopover between the cemeteries and out-of-state destinations.
“To preserve those bodies, they took them to a building that was here before the existence of the Hooters, and they put them – some were in this basement, some were in the alley behind the building – in pickle barrels, and the pickle barrels were labeled as ‘poultry’ until they could distribute them to the medical colleges,” Szabelski said recently as he stood in the basement of the Haunted Hooters.
There are some specific news stories related to this. Selzer wrote that in February 1875, the Tribune reported that body robbers were digging up graves, opening coffins and dragging out the corpses with hooks — then leading the bodies down an alley behind an ossuary at 167 N. Wells St. – which, before the street numbering system changed in 1909, would have been near Wells and Erie streets.
A suspected grave robber was arrested in connection with this scheme, but he was released on bail, Selzer wrote. Meanwhile, at least five barrels full of bodies were found in the area – two of them women about whom Selzer quoted a rather sensational description by the Tribune of the time:
“Stockings covered the feet and part of the shapely limbs, but the rest of her body was completely naked. The head was turned to one side in an attitude which would have been natural to inspire modesty, and which in the poor abused corpse , brought with it a pitying suggestion of feminine purity. Although the changes of death had somewhat altered the contours of her body, the spectator could not help being struck by the formality of her limbs and the general beauty of her person; but her split lips and staring eyeballs made a terrible abomination of the face which in life had been sweet and attractive.’
A man with a long beard and a boy who had both died of consumption, and an older man were also among those whose bodies were found, Selzer wrote.
But these stories of grave robbers, ethically challenged medical colleges, bodies dragged across state lines, and lurid descriptions of dead people whose once handsome faces had been transformed into “gorgon abominations”? They’re not the only base for ghosts in the Haunted Hooters.
A manager at the River North Hooters told Szabelski that there were some victims of the Oostland disaster were also taken to the basement of what is now the Hooters building. On July 24, 1915, the steamship Eastland was parked in the Chicago River with a crowd of people on board when it overturned, sending hundreds of people below the waterline. It’s not clear what happened, but when the ship overturned, 844 people died – including 22 entire families.
There are numerous locations associated with the Eastland disaster that are said to be haunted, including the Reid, Murdoch & Co. Building with its grand clock tower at 325 N. LaSalle St., and the Second Regiment Armory at 110 N. Carpenter St., which later became Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios and has since been demolished for McDonald’s headquarters. Both buildings were used as makeshift morgues, and legend has it that the current Hooters building was as well.
The use of the property at 660 N. Wells St. over the years before Hooters is not all documented online. Szabelski said a brothel had once operated at the current Hooters site, but nothing specific about a brothel at 660 N. Wells St. could be found during an Internet search. However, River North was not home to a notorious red-light district until the 1970s – with a brothel called Suzette’s with a client list of over 900 customers operating about a block north on Wells Street as of 1978.
The area around Clark and Hubbard streets – a short walk south and east of the Hooters building – was still known for prostitution just like ten years ago.
Meanwhile, archive reports from the Tribune note that from 1981 to 1987, the building at 660 N. Wells St. housed an Italian restaurant called Sogni Dorati – or “Golden Dreams” – which owner Silvio Pinto decorated as “a small Venetian doge’s palace, ‘ with busts of Roman emperors, prints of Italian architecture, and Empire-style furniture that he found himself while browsing Near North stores and the Kane County Flea Market. The restaurant closed for bankruptcy in November 1987, and Pinto died the following year of liver and pancreatic cancer — he was only 45, the Tribune reported.
As colorful as Sogni Dorati seems to have been, there is no mention of ghosts in any of the articles. But at the Hooters, it has been at 660 N. Wells St. for 31 years? Ghosts abound, say visitors and staff in numerous reports.
Stories of ghostly occurrences in the area date back at least to the 1950s. Selzer wrote that a Tribune article in that area about old and forgotten haunted houses identified a house on Erie Street that was used by a medical college that bought bodies from insurgents. The article, he wrote, said neighbors would hear mysterious hoofbeats and the sound of body robbers dragging coffins from their wagons.
In the relatively recent years since Hooters has been in the building, Szabelski says employees have reported shadowy figures, especially in the basement. A manager also told Szabelski about experiences she had going up and down the stairs between the basement and the main floor where she felt like someone was going up and down the stairs right behind her.
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Paranormal Study reports that staffers have also reported hearing voices as they descend the stairs to the basement, despite no one being around – only for those voices to go silent once the staffers reach the bottom of the stairs. Some operators have also reported feeling rough hands when gripping or touching, Paranormal Study reported.
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In the main Hooters area open to the public, people have been reporting strange problems with their electronic devices for years. Their devices turn on and off for no apparent reason, Szabelski said. Better Magazine reports that people feel like the building is somehow taking power from the appliances.
Szabelski also said people have seen apparitions in the alley behind Hooters – people dressed in 19th century attire who look like 19th century grave robbers. Paranormal Study also reported that people have reported sightings of two men and a woman in the Hooters dining room wearing “boring” 19th century clothing and having a blank look in their eyes, disappearing as quickly as they appear.
Meanwhile, there are reports of objects falling from shelves and tables without being touched or disturbed in any way, strange orbs and streaks of light buzzing around the basement in the dark, temperatures dropping in certain areas for no reason, the sound of footsteps where no one walks and the jukebox turns on randomly, as Better Magazine and Paranormal Study report.
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But do all ghosts—at least the ones people say they see—really walk around in “boring” 19th-century garb at a party place like Hooters? In a 2022 article for Chicago Magazine, Jackie Mantey wondered if one of the ghosts of the Haunted Hooters would wear “flattering orange shorts with tights” instead.
“We may never know,” Mantey writes. “Only hope.”
