Everyone’s got a good ghost story. They come from our hometown, our school, from the road trip we took, the library we worked in, something that our best friend’s brother’s boyfriend’s tennis partner swears actually happened the night she was alone in the house. Why do these stories stick around – and more to the point, why do we keep seeking them out? We have a fascination with the supernatural, and in this series, we’re digging in to explore that fascination.
It’s the first time Becca and I have talked on the phone since high school, but our ten-year reunion is coming up and all the back-and-forth Facebooking has brought out the nostalgia monster in both of us. She’s married by now, she has two kids and runs her own shop back in our hometown. I’m living thousands of miles away and eating peanut butter from the jar for dinner more frequently than I actually want to cop to in print. When we make plans for a catch-up phone date, I’m half-delighted and half-paralyzed with fear that we won’t have anything to say to each other.
Turns out there’s nothing to worry about, because we both still speak a common language: Grew-Up-In-The-Same-Townglish. We remember the same people, the same places, the same stories – and the same local legends.
“Nate and I went to dinner at the Country House,” she tells me. “Remember how obsessed you and I used to be with that place?”
The Country House is nestled in a thicket of pine trees and looks like a weather-beaten barn from the outside. Nothing about it screams “restaurant” unless you’re sharp-eyed enough to catch the sign out front, and you could be forgiven for missing it, because it’s not very big. The property was built in 1922, when the original owner ran a small grocery store and a bar where nobody was too concerned about enforcing Prohibition. It changed hands several times, closed briefly in the sixties and reopened in the seventies, then did well enough to open two more locations.
But the Country House on 55th Street is the original, and that’s where my dad took me for dinner one night in seventh grade.
We’d just moved to Hinsdale from the city, and like any angsty pre-teen who’d thrown a fit about changing houses and schools and life as she knew it, I swung back and forth between punishing my parents with icy silence and making snotty comments about our new town. They hated the icy silence more, but I was better at snotty comments, so it was a little hard to settle on a consistent game plan.
A few nights after we’d moved in, Dad and I were driving around trying to find someplace to eat when we passed the Country House.
“How about there?” he asked, and I scowled at him.
“That place looks like it’s haunted,” I snapped, and either he was sick of my attitude or just that hungry, because the next thing I knew, he’d swung a U-turn and we were pulling into the parking lot.
Inside, it was warm and friendly and the burgers were delicious, all things that made my hatred for the stupid restaurant grow exponentially. “Now don’t you feel a little silly for thinking this place was haunted?” Dad couldn’t resist baiting me.
And that’s when the waiter passing by our table became my personal hero. “So somebody’s heard our ghost story, huh?” she asked me with a smile.
The look on my dad’s face at that moment strongly implied that if she kept talking, there would be another ghost in this restaurant before the evening was out, but I sat up straighter in my chair. I forgot to be smug. I forgot about being an angsty adolescent.
There was a haunted restaurant in this town. That became the first thing I loved about it.
Back when we lived in Chicago, three friends and I had formed the creatively-named Ghost Club. On sticky-hot summer nights, we’d ride our bikes to the school playground and hang out under a weeping willow. One of us always brought a flashlight, even though we’d never be out late enough to use it; we all knew that if we weren’t home exactly five minutes after the street lights came on, that was the end of Ghost Club and every ounce of summertime freedom. You don’t want to test the patience of South-Side Catholic parents.
We’d watch the fireflies come out and then talk about séances and poltergeists and that time we all watched The Craft at my house when my babysitter thought we were playing board games. We’d play Light As A Feather, Stiff As A Board at slumber parties and every time we tried to play Bloody Mary in the bathroom, one of us always ended up crying.
I was in charge of telling the ghost stories. I plagiarized pretty heavily from Bruce Coville’s Nina Tanleven books, but none of my friends read as much as I did, so there was very little risk of getting caught involved. As far as they were concerned, I totally had a friend who’d helped free the Woman In White from the local performing arts center.
We were Catholic school kids, which was probably part of the appeal of dipping a toe into the supernatural pool. There was only one afterlife we were supposed to believe in, and this sure as hell wasn’t it. My dad didn’t mind if I was interested in this stuff, but the other kids’ parents did.
The rest of the appeal was the part nobody talked about. Of the four of us, I was the only one who knew someone who’d died. I think we all hoped that if we believed hard enough, I’d get a chance to talk to my mom again.
I couldn’t deal with zombies or slasher movies or aliens, but ghosts made me comfortable. Ghosts felt like the safe kind of creepy. If I’d just moved to a town that had a resident haunting, it made me feel like there was finally something here I understood.
“Cool,” I told the waiter. “I want to hear everything.”
The most agreed-upon version of the Country House story: once upon a time in the 1960s, a young blonde woman showed up at the restaurant with her baby in tow. She’d been having an affair with one of the bartenders, and her husband had finally found out about it. He’d thrown her and the child out of the house. With nowhere else to go, she’d driven to the restaurant where her lover worked.
They argued. She begged to leave her child at the bar for awhile. No one’s really sure why she needed to leave the baby behind – to make other living arrangements, maybe, or just so she could have a few moments to herself to think, to form a plan. Space to breathe and convince herself that everything was going to work out all right while somebody she trusted took care of her baby.
But her lover refused to watch the child, and when he wouldn’t help her, she ran back to the car with the baby, sped down 55th, and struck a tree a few miles down the road. Maybe a suicide. Maybe not.
Either way, she’s been haunting the upstairs offices of the restaurant since it happened.
“So we went to dinner there,” Becca says, “and they asked if we wanted to go upstairs and see if there was any activity. You know what a nerd I am for that kind of stuff, so we said sure. And it is really creepy. As soon as you get upstairs, it feels completely different from the actual restaurant.”
When they peeked into the dish-drying room, her husband saw a rack of glasses wobbling in the middle of the table, as though they’d just been slammed down incredibly hard. After he left, Becca says, she felt a hand on her shoulder, and she turned around, thinking it was the manager telling her to move on to the next room.
No one was there. She was alone, and she hustled out of there pretty quickly. We’re both delighted with the creepiness.
“Did the manager ever tell you the woman’s name?” I ask.
“No,” Becca says, after a moment. “I don’t think anybody remembers it.”
There were whispers of other strange occurrences that swirled through school, all of us convinced that we’d seen it ourselves – or might as well have, if we knew somebody who’d witnessed it. Whispers that everybody still seems to know about.
The sound of a baby crying late at night. Doors opening and closing when no one is there. Ghostly arguments at the bar, the smell of fresh flowers wafting down the staircase. A classmate’s older brother used to have a job bussing tables at the restaurant, but quit after he claimed someone he couldn’t see had started hurling silverware at him one night when he was putting dishes away.
Before the upstairs windows were tinted, you could see lights in the upstairs offices from the road. Once, another classmate saw a woman’s face at the window, hours after the restaurant had been closed. She looked lonely, he said.
Richard Crowe, a Chicago-area ghost hunter, even paid the restaurant a visit once, bringing with him two spiritual mediums who confirmed the presence of an otherworldly spirit. He claimed she’d died of abdominal injuries and couldn’t leave the restaurant, because she was looking for something she lost.
“Like her life?” I joke to Becca, and we laugh, but it’s sad. It’s a cool, creepy ghost story, it’s a fun local legend, it’s a little bit of color.
It’s sad, too, in a way that never struck us when we were younger. We used to obsess over the otherworldly, supernatural factor, but there’s something raw and darker underneath it.
Maybe her husband was awful. Maybe staying with him would have been a worse, slower death. But now she’s stuck somewhere she can’t leave, frozen with – what, exactly? Guilt over the affair? Guilt over the death of her baby? Or is her rage and betrayal over the bartender refusing to help her when she needed it most big enough to keep her rooted there? She was good enough to have an affair with, sure, but the moment the kid looks like it’s going to be part of the picture, tough luck, lady, you’re on your own. And now no one even remembers her name.
If that’s the case, who could really begrudge her for throwing a couple forks at a hapless busboy? Or blocking the door to the bathroom? I’d have some rage about that. I have rage about things far more minor than that on a daily basis. If my secret lover had told me to screw off the one time I’d asked him to babysit my kid, I’d absolutely want to scream and throw things and freak people out.
She’s haunting the restaurant because she’s haunted, too.
“If this were an episode of Buffy, we’d go look up all the car crashes from the 1960s on microfiche when I come home for the reunion,” I tell Becca.
“Is microfiche still a thing?” she wonders.
“Microfiche was a thing on Buffy, it’s fine,” I say. “We’d go look it up and learn her name and prove that it really happened, then sneak in after the Country House closed and light some sage or something and try to set her free.”
We think about this for a moment. I’m pretty sure I proposed this exact plan our sophomore year of high school, at the cast party for the fall play. We did The Crucible that year, so the Country House Ghost felt relevant. It was one of the things Becca and I bonded over, back when we were teenagers.
“We’re probably not going to do that, are we?” Becca says, a little wistfully.
Growing up, we agree, is really lame.
“Hey,” I say. “Tell me the part about the hand on your shoulder again.”
I like the story better when it’s creepy.
