Red Lion Pub

History

The Red Lion’s founder forged papers for the Great Escape. Born in London, John Cordwell flew with the Royal Air Force in World War II until his plane was shot down. He then spent more than three years as a prisoner at Stalag Luft III, a German prison camp. In 1944, 76 prisoners broke out of the camp through a tunnel. The breakout, known as the Great Escape, was later made into a film of the same name. Cordwell was one of the forgers behind it: some of the men who got out carried papers he had made. After the war, he settled in Chicago. He served as the city’s planning commissioner under Mayor Martin Kennelly and was one of the chief architects of Carl Sandburg Village, a North Side development built in the 1960s. “My father was an architect, but he always wanted to be a publican,” his son Colin told the neighborhood news site DNAinfo in 2014.

John Cordwell found his pub over a cup of coffee. From a French bakery next door to the Biograph Theater on Lincoln Avenue, he saw a building with a bar for sale across the street. The bar was Dirty Dan’s Western Saloon, which the Red Lion’s own history page calls “smoke-ridden, rat infested, filthy, grimy.” The building dated from 1882. Cordwell bought it in 1984, and the Red Lion opened there on November 16 that year. From then on, he could be found at the end of the bar with his Royal Air Force mustache. Colin Cordwell, who had helped his father run the bar, knocked the old building down in 2008. By then, Colin said, it was being held up by “termites holding hands.” He rebuilt from the ground up on the same lot, and the new Red Lion opened in July 2014.

Hauntings & Lore

John Cordwell died in 1999. Four years later, an English woman showed Colin a photograph taken inside the pub. Colin told DNAinfo it clearly shows his father’s face and hat.

The Woman Upstairs

According to Colin Cordwell, the old building’s main ghost is thought to be a woman who died on her 20th birthday in an upstairs apartment. The Chicago Bar Project, an online guide to the city’s bars, wrote up the old Red Lion while it was still open. The guide says much of the haunting seemed to start after the second floor was turned from apartments into a second bar. Among the ghosts on its list is a woman of 20 “known for wearing too much lavender perfume,” who “can now be detected by that same smell.”

US Ghost Adventures, which runs ghost tours, calls one of the pub’s ghosts the Lavender Lady. The company says the air turns still and cold around her and smells strongly of lavender. In its telling, she keeps to the upstairs near the ladies’ room and has been known to lock the bathroom door. The bar guide gives that trick to a different ghost: Sharon, a dark-haired woman in 1920s-era clothes who “likes to hold the ladies restroom door shut on the second floor.”

The upstairs where these stories began is gone. It came down with the rest of the old building in 2008. The new pub has 22-foot ceilings and a balcony in place of a full second floor. Colin Cordwell said in 2014, while the new pub was still being built, that the ghosts hadn’t left. A few weeks earlier, he said, two heavy rolls of construction material had fallen off the wall in front of him while he was showing a friend a back room.