Hunter's on Halsted

The house

This Halsted room has been the Tonic Room, the Golden Dagger, and Hunter’s. Before the bar, rumor says a nineteenth-century secret society used the basement; pentagrams were plastered on the walls, and a knife was later found in the building. A bouncer reported going rigid on the spot where a star had been. The basement connects, in the telling, to older Chicago tunnels. Time Out still lists it among the city’s haunted rooms. You come as a customer. You do not excavate.

A drink upstairs. If the basement is open to guests, walk it once. Lincoln Park’s cemetery-under-the-park energy does not stop at the park fence.

The Ghostly Gourmet