Chicago Hauntings: Historical ghosts at the massive nightclub that one housed the Chicago Historical Society

CHICAGO (CBS) — The old Chicago Historical Society building at 632 N. Dearborn St. in River North is a bracing edifice—with its granite cladding and architectural features that might suggest a fortress or an armory.

Since 2018, the building has been home to the Chicago location of Tao Asian Bistro & Nightclub—which features four private dining rooms, a large bar, a custom staircase with Chinese daybed-influenced sofas, and a 20-foot statue standing of the Chinese Buddhist goddess Kwan Yin over a koi pond—inspired by similar décor at the original Tao location in the Chelsea section of Manhattan in New York City.

Before that, the granite citadel was known to generations as the home of Excalibur—the nightclub that occupied the building for 23 years, attracted A-list celebrities, and where stars of the Chicago Bulls hosted parties after NBA Championship wins in the 1990s.

And as a plaque right on the exterior wall notes, the building started out as the Chicago Historical Society—now called the Chicago History Museum—before that institution moved to its current location at 1601 N. Clark St. at the south edge of Lincoln Park.

So that majestic old Chicago Historical Society building is quite a famous place—and a historic landmark too. But it happens that the building known for something else too.

You guessed it. Ghosts. But first, a little history.

A fireproof building for the Chicago Historical Society

Construction for the building at 632 N. Dearborn St. began in 1892, and it opened as the Chicago Historical Society in 1896. The building was designed by architect Henry Ives Cobb, who arrived in Chicago in 1882 and was famous for stately and imposing buildings in the Victorian Gothic and Richardson Romanesque styles.

Cobb also designed the Newberry Library, the Chicago Varnish Company building where Harry Caray’s Italian Steakhouse is located, and the University of Chicago Main Quad along with 18 buildings surrounding it, including Cobb Hall—though the lecture hall is not named after the architect; it is named for a university benefactor named Silas Cobb who was of no relation. Numerous other prominent buildings in Chicago and around the country—including the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin and Liberty Tower in Lower Manhattan.

In the case of the Dearborn Street building, Cobb’s mission was to design a fireproof headquarters for the Chicago Historical Society. The original and purportedly fireproof Historical Society building at the very same site burned to the ground during the Great Chicago Fire in 1871—destroying all its historical artifacts and possessions and all its records. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation manuscript was among the items at the Historical Society that were lost in the Great Chicago Fire.

The Historical Society had accumulated a new collection in the years immediately after the Great Chicago Fire. They were housed in a building called the Scammon Building on the present-day site of the Auditorium Building. This building, and the new collection, were destroyed in another massive, but lesser-known fire on July 13, 1874, that ravaged several blocks in what we would now call the South Loop.

In 1877, a new and fairly small brick building was built for the Historical Society back at its pre-Great Fire site at Dearborn and Ontario streets, according to an archive Chicago Tribune report. This building was described in reports from its opening as “temporary,” and was already being dismissed as “old and shabby” by the time plans for the new building designed by Henry Ives Cobb were announced in 1892.

Cobb’s new Historical Society building was constructed in the Romanesque style—with a large gable in front to make the location of the society’s Gilpin Library stand out. Rock-faced red granite from Wisconsin was used for the exterior of the building, steel for the interior, the Chicago Tribune reported in 1896.

Inside, this new building featured a grand staircase featuring medallions showing the heads of explorers and indigenous people who lived in in Illinois, and bas reliefs showing Père Jacques Marquette’s explorations along the Fox, Wisconsin, and Mississippi rivers, according to archive news reports.

A relief of Père Marquette and fur trader Louis Joliet on their expedition still graces the entryway to the building.  

Meanwhile, a giant fireplace at the Historical Society was made in part from stones from the Nixon Building, which had stood at LaSalle and Monroe streets downtown and had survived the Great Chicago Fire, but later ended up getting torn down, according to archive news reports.

A Nov. 13, 1896, Chicago Tribune article gave a vivid impression of the collections in the South Room on the second floor of the building:

“The original proclamation written in lead pencil and issued the morning after the great fire by the officials of the city hangs upon the wall. There are all sorts of bombs, pistols and knives, which the police gathered in at the time of the Haymarket Anarchist riots. There is the finest collection of war envelopes in existence. A chair given by George Washington to one of his step-children is placed invitingly just over the threshold of the room. In one corner are the bones supposed to be those of Jean La Lime, the Indian trader who was killed by [John] Kinzie in the early part of the century. The bones were found when an excavation was made near the Rush Street bridge and after considerable research Joseph Kirkland declared them to be those of the trader named. In one part of the room there is a section of a wooden water main, which was once part of the machinery of Chicago’s water supply. There are other curios and historic articles beyond number.”

That name, Jean Lalime, is going to come up again in this story. You can probably guess why.

The Chicago Historical Society left the building at Dearborn and Ontario streets behind in 1932, after only 36 years, and moved to a new Georgian colonial-style building designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White at the northeast corner of Clark Street and North Avenue. That building—along with a new modern limestone addition unveiled in 1972 and redone in red brick in 1988—has been home to the Chicago History Museum ever since.

The gothic-looking edifice back at 632 N. Dearborn St. still has “Chicago Historical Society” described in stone on its façade. Over the next several decades, it was put to various other uses.

It housed the Chicago office of the Works Progress Administration, the Loyal Order of the Moose fraternal organization—and from 1946 until 1956, the Institute of Design, founded By Bauhaus school master László Moholy-Nagy and currently part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. During the 1950s and 60s, the building housed Boulevard Recording Studios—which published reports said recorded “influential blues and rock acts,” though there is not a specific list online of which ones. The building also had a stint as home of Gallery Magazine, a skin magazine co-founded in 1969 by future O.J. Simpson defense attorney F. Lee Bailey.

An A-list Chicago nightspot for nearly 40 years

The old Chicago Historical Society building has been home to a succession of nightclubs since 1985. Archive Chicago Tribune reports note that there was actually a plan 16 years before that to turn the building into a nightclub called The Factory—which featured a board of directors that included Sammy Davis Jr., Paul Newman, and Peter Lawford—but for some reason, The Factory never ended up officially opening. The building sat vacant through the 70s and early 80s until club owner and party promoter Peter Gatien took over in 1985.

Gatien opened The Limelight in the old Historical Society building that year. The Canadian businessman and promoter already had a chain of Limelight clubs to his name—the first had opened in South Florida in the 70s, followed by a location in Atlanta, and in 1983, the most famous link in the Limelight chain, in a deconsecrated Episcopal church at Sixth Avenue and 20th Street in the Flatiron District, Manhattan, New York City. A London location also opened in 1985 in a deconsecrated church.

The Chicago Limelight opening was a local news headline on July 31, 1985. Jim Avila covered it for Channel 2 News.

“This is not the corner tavern that Chicago is famous for, or even a New York sports bar. This is a New York-style, large, expensive, trendy, even chic disco and party house,” Avila said in his report. “Its target clientele runs the gamut from artsy gay to yuppie straight—and hopefully the ultimately hip.”

Video from the interior showed an interior design very much in line with the era—pink, teal, and pastel blue walls and surfaces, furniture and aesthetics in line with the Memphis Design.

Andy Warhol was in attendance for the opening night of Limelight Chicago. A woman dressed as Rapunzel hung her artificial hair down from the second-floor balcony, and inside, clubgoers encountered a woman blowing bubbles as a hybrid of dressed as Jackie Onassis and a mermaid, another woman dressed as Marilyn Monroe watching time slip by, and the Beauty played by a man alongside the Beast played by a bearded woman.

According to archive Chicago Tribune reports, the Limelight played host to an array of colorful events in its years of existence—including Dead Debutantes and Escorts from Hell balls, “Leave It to Cleavage” parties, a birthday bash for Tina Turner, the first U.S. fashion show for Marithé + François Girbaud, and on the night of Easter Sunday 1987, a jam featuring Buddy Guy, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton, and Robert Cray.

These days, the Limelight brand is likely best known for something more sinister associated with the New York City club. Michael Alig—a party promoter at the New York club and a ringleader of the outrageously-costumed and drug-fueled “Club Kids”—pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the brutal 1996 murder of fellow Club Kid Andre “Angel” Melendez, whose dismembered body parts were thrown in the Hudson River. This saga surrounding the New York Limelight was dramatized in the 2003 movie “Party Monster,” in which Macaulay Culkin played Alig.

Alig himself died in 2020.

But by the time that all happened, the Chicago Limelight club was long gone—it only lasted three and a half years. After the Chicago Limelight closed on Dec. 31, 1988, Gatien sold it the building Fred Hoffmann—and Hoffmann opened Excalibur in October 1989.

As hospitality consultant Tim Borden wrote, Excalibur had something for everyone over the years. Mainstream dance music played first floor as tourists, conventioneers, bachelor and bachelorette party guests, and everyday Chicagoans alike got down. A piano bar, later supplanted by MCs performing “comedy you can dance to,” was also found on the first floor, Borden wrote.

But there was plenty more to explore throughout the club—techno and alternative dance, and fog machines and lasers, could be found up the grand staircase at “Club X,” according to the Chicago Bar Project. A plush lounge could be found behind the main bar on the first floor, and a trip downstairs would take visitors to billiards tables, video games, air hockey, and a photo booth, the Chicago Bar Project noted. A late-night bar food menu was also found downstairs.

There were several separate “sub-clubs” within Excalibur over the years. In the 90s, The Dome Room—reportedly in what had been the lecture hall and auditorium in the Historical Society days— hosted bondage nights, live bands, and hardcore industrial music. The Dome Room was later known as Aura, published reports note.

In the 2000s, a club within the Excalibur complex called Vision drew all the top international DJs—including Calvin Harris, Armin Van Buuren, Tiesto, Paul Oakenfold, and Paul Van Dyk, Borden wrote.

Excalibur also played host to a variety of private events, making it the city’s busiest non-hotel private event space, Borden wrote.

The club was also known in the 1990s for attracting A-list celebrities—including Chicago’s biggest celebrities of the era, the Bulls. In June 1996, Scottie and Pippen threw a party at Excalibur for the team’s fourth NBA title, and it so happens that the party ran live on CBS Chicago. Published reports also note that Toni Kukoc used to shoot pool at Excalibur before games.

Numerous top-tier bands played at Excalibur. Borden notes that in 1999, Prince played an unscheduled concert at the main Excalibur club—and yes, he did play the song “1999.” Excalibur also hosted interactive screenings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” among numerous other events and theme nights.

Excalibur closed in 2012 after 25 years. A new nightclub concept, The Castle, took over the space after a $3 million renovation and opened on Dec. 31, 2012, and closed in January 2015. Tao has occupied the building since September 2018.

A society of Chicago historical ghosts

George Washington’s chair. Mermaid Jackie Onassis blowing bubbles. Dennis Rodman. The Rocky Horror Picture Show. How could all that has gone on in the old Chicago Historical Society building on Dearborn Street be topped?

How about with ghosts?

Tony Szabelski of Chicago Hauntings Tours said stories of hauntings at the building were everywhere during the Limelight and Excalibur days.

One of the best-known legends involved a mischievous little girl, who was said to like to push people down the stairs or through the hallways and shove people’s drinks off the top-floor balcony. This little girl ghost also haunted a women’s restroom at the club, Szabelski said.

On a ghost tour one night, Szabelski and his tour group visited the old Chicago Historical Society building with a device called a ghost box that scans radio frequencies. Szabelski said someone in the tour group said, “You’re the little girl, and do you like pushing people?” and he recalled the box replied, “It was fun.

Szabelski also says a staff member said reported there were lit candles alongside the staircase leading from the Dome Room to the main area downstairs. Staff would extinguish all the candles at the end of the night, only to turn around and see them all mysteriously lit again, Szabelski said.

A lot of staffers also reported they would be tidying up certain areas after closing time, only to come back and find those areas all disorganized again, Szabelski said.

There are plenty of other stories where those came from. The Ghost Research Society says back in the Limelight Days, poltergeist activity was detected by the special events director on the third-floor landing of the Dome Room area. Glasses would also fall over and break—in line with Szabelski’s story about that little girl tipping them—and pool balls would move around the billiard tables as if some invisible Minnesota Fats were playing a game, the society said in a 1999 article. Staffers would also hear their names being called by voices they didn’t recognize when there was no one around, the society said.

In a 2004 Chicago Tribune report, then-Excalibur manager Phil Doerries reported wine line handles would be pushed open—leaving wine all over the floor—with the motion-sensitive alarms never going off. The club had to pull its wine lines because of this, Doerries told the newspaper.

Meanwhile, large crates and boxes were heard being dragged around a storage room downstairs, only for staffers to go down to that storage room and find nothing out of place, the Ghost Research Society said. In a women’s restroom—one of the locations Szabelski says is reputed to be haunted by a little girl—the society reported hearing cold spots, crying sounds, and sink faucets turning on all by themselves.

In a 1997 episode of the paranormal research show “Sightings,” psychic Jorianne De Frey was quoted as having heard a child’s voice saying, “Stop and watch me,” the society said. A waitress, Julia Rosenwinkel, was quoted as hearing a “really small voice crying” while washing her hands in a Dome Room restroom, while a bartender, John Karrer, saw a figure in a white tuxedo with reddish hair glowing behind the Dome Room bar.

The spirits of Chicago Fire victims and Chicago’s first murder victim?

So why do ghost hunters think the old Chicago Historical Society building is haunted?

Part of it has to do with the first Chicago Historical Society building on the same site—the one that was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The fire broke out on Oct. 8, 1871, in a barn on DeKoven Street—the present-day site of the Robert J. Quinn Fire Academy. Popular legend that generations of Chicagoans were taught in school alleges that a cow belonging to Mrs. Catherine O’Leary kicked over a lantern to start the fire—though a reporter for a now-defunct newspaper later admitted to making the story up.

The flames spread amid dry conditions and strong winds – eventually jumping the South Branch of the Chicago River and consuming the present-day Loop, and then jumping the Main Branch of the River and destroying the Near North Side and even part of the Lincoln Park neighborhood. The flames did not stop until they reached Fullerton Avenue.

In 1971, Chicago History Magazine—the journal of the Chicago History Museum—published an issue commemorating the centennial of the Great Chicago Fire, complete with some harrowing firsthand accounts. One such account was originally published in 1925 by Frank J. Loesch, a bookkeeper for Western Union at the time of the Great Fire and later a prominent Chicago attorney.

After seeing the flames completely consume what we now call Loop—taking down the Court House and City Hall as its bell rang—Loesch rushed across the Main Branch of the Chicago River and made it back to his boarding house on Dearborn Street near present-day Grand Avenue, only for the fire to jump the river soon afterward.

“The fire had crossed Kinzie Street, some four blocks south of Ohio Street where I was standing. The roar of the flames, the air alive with flying embers, the fierceness with which the wind and fire combined were whirling the flames into and circling and above the street fascinated me. No voice could make itself heard above the roar. Even in the house we had to shot into each others’ ears to make ourselves heard. As I came down the steps facing south, the three blocks south of Indiana Street [Grand Avenue], including the pavement and the sidewalks, caught fire with the suddenness of the explosion of a bomb and were a mass of flames in a moment. It was the first and only instance in which I saw an enveloping movement of the flames to that extent and especially the burning of the street pavement.”

The first Chicago Historical Society building was of course caught right in the middle of all this. The Great Chicago Fire historical website notes that this building, designed by architect Edward Burling and opened only three years before the fire, was purported to be fireproof. As written in the Feb. 9, 1865, edition of the Chicago Tribune, reproduced by Chicagology:

“The architecture of the building will be in the Roman style, the two fronts being of Athens marble. The substructure, or first story, will consist of boldly wrought ‘Rustic work.’ The superstructure, of smooth work with elaborate details peculiar to the style of architecture. The whole building to be fire-proof, having floors of iron beams, and brick arches, finished with marble tiling, and a metal roof with a framework of iron.”

But the building was no match for a windswept firestorm consuming everything in sight—including the pavement.

On Oct. 12, 1871, the Tribune documented all that was lost in the Great Fire. President Lincoln’s handwritten Emancipation Proclamation manuscript was perhaps the most priceless, but also lost were the Healy Gallery of 300 paintings—including Diehl’s Hamlet and Conture’s Prodigal Son, a complete set of Chicago battle flags, and sculptor Leonard Welles Volk’s bust of President Lincoln, the newspaper reported at the time. This bust was the only one for which Lincoln sat for the artist.

There were also 17,500 bound volumes, 175,000 pamphlets, and the complete set of dies for Chicago’s newspapers of the time, the contemporary Tribune reported.

Neither this account nor any other readily-available historical retelling says anything about people being inside the first Historical Society building when it was consumed by the Great Chicago Fire. But Szabelski said ghost hunters believe people may have gathered inside the purportedly fireproof building—only to lose their lives inside.

Either way, some 300 people died in the Great Chicago Fire. Ghost hunters believe some of those souls may be lurking in the Henry Ives Cobb Chicago Historical Society building—while generations of the living have only ever experienced it as a nightclub. That little girl who is said to push people down the stairs and haunt the women’s restroom may be among them, Szabelski said.

Meanwhile, there is also one specific Chicago historical figure who is said to haunt the old Chicago Historical Society—someone who had already been dead for nearly 60 years by the time the Great Chicago Fire happened. That someone was French-Canadian fur trapper and trader Jean Lalime, who has gone down in history as Chicago’s first murder victim.

This one is a little complicated.

In 1800, Lalime purchased the property of Jean Baptiste Point DuSable—the first permanent non-Native settler in Chicago, who is now recognized as Chicago’s founder. Lalime made the purchase as an agent for trader William Burnett, and a copy of the sale agreement remains extant. DuSable, meanwhile, left Chicago for St. Charles, Missouri.

In 1804, fur trader John Kinzie had taken over the property. Whether he purchased the property from Lalime or forced him out in some other way is disputed depending on the source. The former DuSable estate became the Kinzie mansion—located on the north bank of the Chicago River in the present-day area of Tribune Tower and Pioneer Court.

Fast-forward to 1812. By this time, Lalime was working at Fort Dearborn—the U.S. military installation on the opposite side of the river at what is now about Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive—as an interpreter between Indigenous people and settlers. Meanwhile, Kinzie had taken over as the sutler for the fort—running something of a company store for soldiers with the freedom to charge as much as he wished.

Freelance writer Paul Dailing wrote the definitive story on Jean Lalime for the Chicago Reader back in 2018. As Dailing explained in the story, each U.S. military fort at the turn of the 19th century had a sutler, as well as a factor—who traded goods to Indigenous people in exchange for furs with the goal of maintaining an alliance with the Indigenous tribes of the area and keeping the valuable furs away from the British. The sutler and the factor each operated a separate trading post.

In 1809, Matthew Irwin was appointed factor for Fort Dearborn. He complained to the U.S. Department of war that there was nothing stopping the sutlers at the time—one of whom was the son of Fort Cmdr. William Whistler—from extorting soldiers who could be retaliated against for reporting being gouged, Dailing wrote. The sutlers lost their posts, and on Jan. 17, 1812, new Fort Dearborn Capt. Nathan Heald made Kinzie and partner Thomas Forsyth the exclusive sutlers for the fort, Dailing wrote.

Dailing noted that it certainly helped that Fort Dearborn Lt. Linai Helm was Kinzie’s son-in-law. Dailing further noted that Kinzie was rumored to be spying for the British.

Irwin soon began complaining to the War Department about Kinzie—accusing him, among other things, of buying his way into the sutler position and engaging in shady business dealings in which Capt. Heald was also allegedly involved. Irwin also went on to accuse Kinzie of trying to foment war between Indigenous tribes and the U.S.

Others at Fort Dearborn were also less than pleased with Kinzie—notably including surgeon’s mate Dr. Isaac Van Voorhis, and none other than Lalime, Dailing wrote.

Whether Lalime’s position in this controversy was the motive for what happened next, or whether it was something else, is unknown. But on June 17, 1812, Kinzie stabbed Lalime to death. Van Voorhis wrote that the stabbing was a “perfect assassination” related to a quarrel about Kinzie and his dealings as sutler, according to Dailing.

Kinzie went on to flee, and legend has it he ended up in Milwaukee. Meanwhile, the War of 1812 started the very day after Lalime was stabbed to death, On Aug. 15, 1812, Gen. William Hull ordered Capt. Heald to evacuate Fort Dearborn after Fort Mackinac fell to the British, and the troops leaving Fort Dearborn were attacked a mile and a half away by a group of Potawatomi, Dailing wrote. The tribe then burned down the fort.

Fort Dearborn was rebuilt in 1816 after the War of 1812 was over, and Kinzie returned to Chicago at that point too. With nobody around anymore to offer a counternarrative, Kinzie’s own heirs went on to sanitize the story of his time in Chicago casting him as the hero.

In 1844—14 years after Kinzie died—his daughter-in-law, Juliette Kinzie, recast Lalime as an “insanely jealous” man who was envious of Kinzie’s success as a trader to the point of being homicidal. In Juliette Kinzie’s account—complete with dialogue—Kinzie began carrying a knife in case Lalime had the “folly to attack him,” and then was indeed stabbed by Lalime after crossing the river to the fort one night. Kinzie stabbed back and killed Lalime, and “the testimony given as to the threats Lalime had uttered resulted in an immediate verdict of justifiable homicide,” Juliette Kinzie wrote.

Other accounts have Kinzie being completely unarmed, and Lalime pulling a gun and shooting him—only for Kinzie to gain control of Lalime’s knife and stab him, Dailing wrote.

Other spin in Kinzie’s favor also made it into the Chicago history books. In her 1844 volume, Juliette Kinzie wrote that the owner of the onetime DuSable property from whom Kinzie obtained his land was not Lalime, but “Pierre Le Mai.” In the 1988 book “Streetwise Chicago,” which documents the sources of all of Chicago’s street names, the entry for Le Mai Avenue in the Edgebrook neighborhood identifies “Joseph Le Mai” as the man who bought DuSable’s cabin in 1796, lived there with his Indigenous wife for eight years, and then sold the property to Kinzie.

But as Dailing notes, records show it was Lalime who bought the property from DuSable. Some sources claimed that Lalime was just a misspelling of Le Mai—despite Lalime’s name being right there in Juliette Kinzie’s narrative later on. But Dailing notes that Lalime and Le Mai were indeed two different people—Le Mai was another trader in the area whose first name was not Pierre or Joseph, but François, and he had nothing to do with the DuSable property or its transfer to Kinzie. There are claims that the Kinzie family deliberately tried to write Lalime out of the story of that early property transfer.

Meanwhile, Juliette Kinzie also claims that some of Lalime’s friends thought it would be “suitable punishment to Mr. Kinzie to bury his victim directly in front of the Kinzie home, where he must necessarily behold the grave every time he passed out of his own gate.” But Kinzie, his daughter-in-law wrote, got even by taking great care of the grave—putting flowers on it and having his kids rake off dead leaves. Others who lived at the time were quoted as saying they never remembered Kinzie taking any such care.

Whatever the case, in April 1891—nearly 70 years after Lalime’s murder—crews digging for a cellar at Wabash Avenue and Illinois Street uncovered a “rude pine coffin” that spilled open and revealed skeletal remains, Dailing wrote. The remains were taken to the area police station, and ended up in the hands of historian Joseph Kirkland. A couple of months later, Dailing wrote, Kirkland gave a lecture in which he presented the bones to the Chicago Historical Society—concluding that the remains were Lalime’s based on the location where they were found and comments from elderly settlers about their childhood memories.

Whether the skeletal remains are really Lalime’s or not will probably never be known. But they did end up being presented as such in a display at the old Historical Society Building that became the Limelight, Excalibur, and Tao Chicago.

When the Historical Society moved to Clark Street and North Avenue, what are said to be Lalime’s remains came too. At one time, Dailing wrote, they were on display with some curiosities that sound more befitting of the Streets of Yesterday at House on the Rock in Wisconsin—the skin of the serpent from Eden, fleece from Little Bo Peep’s lamb. The Lalime bones were later taken off display and placed in storage, and in 2012, they were moved to an offsite storage space in the western suburbs, Dailing wrote.

But even though his bones have not been there in more than 90 years, and it’s not even certain that they really are his bones, the legend is that Lalime’s ghost still haunts the old Chicago Historical Society at Dearborn and Ontario streets.

Back when it was Excalibur, the club leaned into the stories of hauntings. Performer and playwright Neil Tobin even hosted the one-man theatrical show “Supernatural Chicago” at the club for several years. But Szabelski notes there have not been any new stories about hauntings since Tao took over.