Chicago Hauntings: A hair-raising ghost tour of the Greenhouse Theater Center in Lincoln Park

The building now known as the Greenhouse Theater Center has been a mainstay of off-Loop nonprofit stage theater in Chicago in one form or another for nearly 60 years, and to this day, it serves as an incubator for a variety of small to mid-sized theater companies.

The Greenhouse remains a popular place to enjoy a play, like "A Midsummer Night's Scream" on stage until Nov. 1, and involves a rustic lake cabin, a brand of moonshine called The Purple Pansy, and something sinister in the woods. 

But patrons, renters and staffers alike are quick to point out that you might come across a lot of spooky experiences, and run into what they believe are more than a few ghosts, without even having to take in a performance.

In fact, the Greenhouse is holding a ghost hunt on Oct. 6. General manager Hannah Loessberg invited paranormal investigator and researcher Tony Szabelski of Chicago Hauntings Tours, producer Blake Tyson, and myself to the building for a tour of haunted rooms, stairways and other spaces.

What do we know about the Greenhouse Theater building?

The Greenhouse Theater Center is located at 2257-61 N. Lincoln Ave., just southeast of the six-way intersection with Orchard Street and Belden Avenue in a fashionable area of Lincoln Park known for nightlife and festivity.

Zillow reports the two-story building was constructed in 1921, and numerous published reports going back to the 1970s say it once housed the U.S. Slicing Machine Company. Loessberg said the numbers stenciled on the exposed brick walls of the lobby were once workstations for meat processing.

A newspaper archive search doesn't turn up anything about the U.S. Slicing Machine Company, but there are references as far back as the early 1950s to the Monte Carlo Bowling Alley that held court upstairs.

A Chicago Reader article also refers to the "erstwhile Artful Dodger Pub" having once been in the building, but the only Artful Dodger Pub we know of was originally on Milwaukee Avenue in Wicker Park and then on Wabansia Avenue at Wood Street in Bucktown until it closed in 2005.

The Lincoln Avenue building became a stage theater center in 1969, when the Rev. Jim Shifflett founded the Body Politic Theatre. The Chicago Tribune's Rick Kogan wrote that Shifflett was a Presbyterian minister who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. against segregation in Georgia and went on to found the nonprofit Community Arts Foundation in the Lincoln Avenue building.

The Community Arts Foundation was involved with a variety of endeavors, including settlement houses, schools, hospitals, and ethnic and youth groups, according to the Chicago Public Library. The Body Politic Theatre started out as a division of the foundation and provided space for several theater companies and its own alternative theater group, the Dream Theater, the library said.

Kogan provided an overview of some of the early shows staged at the Body Politic: "Ovid's Metamorphoses" by The Second City founding artistic director Paul Sills and his Story Theater company, the sci-fi play trilogy "Warp!" by Stuart Gordon's Organic Theatre Company, David Mamet's first production in Chicago, "Duck Variations," and folk musician Stephen Wade's "Banjo Dancing."

Yellow Press Poets, the Chicago Mural Group, and renowned dancer and choreographer Maggie Kast's Chicago Contemporary Dance Theater also had space in the building, the library noted. The Chicago Reader reported that the space was home to "painters, puppeteers, dancers, poets, muralists," and the radical group Rising Up Angry, founded by Michael James, an activist who served as a national officer for the Students for a Democratic Society veteran and cofounded the famed and now-gone Heartland Café in Rogers Park.

The Body Politic began producing its own shows in 1976 and started its own resident theater company, the Body Politic Theatre Laboratory, the library noted. The company also offered workshops and classes, and the theater brought in national touring companies while also launching a subscription series.

But the Body Politic ran into troubles. A 1985 Chicago Tribune report said not long after it opened, the Body Politic successfully defeated a plan by the city to tear down everything in the 2200 block of North Lincoln Avenue. In 1974, an electrical fire broke out on the second floor, causing serious damage and nearly putting the Body Politic out of business, the newspaper reported. The Body Politic also almost went under in 1979 due to a lack of funds, and was put up for sale the following year, the Trib reported.

But managing director Sharon Phillips and artistic director James O'Reilly, who took over after Shifflett's departure, turned things around. A production of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" was nominated for four Jeff Awards and drew an audience.

The Victory Gardens Theater joined the Body Politic in the Lincoln Avenue building in 1981. It was was founded in 1974 by a group of eight theatrical artists, and was headquartered in the Northside Auditorium Building on Clark Street just north of Wrigley Field and the Jane Addams Hull House Center on Broadway. Today those venues are legendary concert hall the Metro and the Lakeview Athletic Club, respectively.

The Victory Gardens first used the downstairs space at the Lincoln Avenue building for an extended run of Jeffrey Sweet's play "Ties," the Chicago Public Library reported. For 14 years afterward, the Victory Gardens and the Body Politic were doubled up in the building, with the Victory Gardens downstairs and the Body Politic upstairs.

In 1995, the Body Politic Theatre went out of business, and Victory Gardens took over the whole building. The Victory Gardens drew crowds throughout the following decade for productions including Kristine Thatcher's "Emma's Child" and Jeffrey Sweet's "Flyovers."

In 2004, the Victory Gardens purchased the legendary Biograph Theater, which had previously been a movie venue known for its screenings of "Rocky Horror Picture Show," and to this day is most associated with historical lore — it was, of course, the site outside which FBI agents shot and killed serial robber John Dillinger after he saw a movie there in 1934.

After the Victory Gardens opened its new space at the Biograph in 2006, it went on using the 2257-61 N. Lincoln Ave. building as the Victory Gardens Greenhouse, playing host to renowned local theater companies such as Shattered Globe and Remy Bumppo. The Victory Gardens sold the building to William and Wendy Spatz in 2008, and the building has operated as the five-stage Greenhouse Theater Center ever since.

Unlike some sites highlighted in our Chicago Hauntings series, there are not necessarily any specific historical people whose ghosts are suspected by name to haunt the Greenhouse, nor are there any specific known nefarious or tragic events associated with the building from which ghosts might have stuck around.

But as the theater itself puts it, "The Greenhouse has a long history, and some believe not everyone who has walked through its doors has ever truly left."

Hannah Loessberg says she's had many an eerie experience within the walls of the old theater center, and she's not alone.

"I've run out of the building before"

When we went to the Greenhouse Theater Center in mid-September, we got a full tour of the old theater building — and experienced some spookiness ourselves.

Hannah first took us backstage behind the Down Main theater space, the largest in the building. Past a paint sink and a stack of shelves lined with cleaning supplies, Hannah highlighted the back dressing rooms — which she said have a vibe when the bright lights over the mirrors aren't shining,

"Usually when the lights are all off and stuff, it's very scary back here, and the energy kind of starts to shift for me a little bit through there," she said.

Then there's the basement. Accessing the stairs to the basement at the Greenhouse Theater Center involves climbing down a hole in the floor, which may be scary enough for some people even without ghosts. One of the stairs is also broken.

But Hannah said there is a presence in the basement so menacing that she doesn't like to go down there alone. So all four of us went.

The basement is dark and constricted, with much of the space taken up by storage for props, wood scraps, and other items that Hannah and the rest of the staff do occasionally need.

"It's really fun when you have to go search for something specific," she said.

Why might that be? Ghosts. 

"I was taking down some props with one of my other co-artistic directors. We were taking it down, and she had taken a step on this like third step here and was holding a big box, and [my colleague] heard something growl on I would say the third or fourth step — the broken one," Hannah recounted, "and she put on the box and said, 'OK, I'm done for the day, I'm not going to go down there anymore,' and we left the box there for about, I would say, like a month before we actually brought it all the way down."

Hannah said in most other parts of the building, she acknowledges the ghosts before she walks into a room with a reputation for hauntings. Not so for the basement. The phantom down there is just too menacing.

"This one, for some reason, I've heard stories that this one gets a little bit angry and aggressive, and I just don't want to deal with that at all," Hannah said. "So I don't acknowledge this one. I just mind my own business, and drop whatever I need to off down here, or pick whatever up, and get out of here as soon as possible."

Hannah said whatever spirit is lurking in the basement also haunts Down Main, the largest theater space in the building with 195 seats. When we visited, tech work was going on for the children's play "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie." Children's theater productions at the Greenhouse are matinees, so those involved with productions involving mischievous mice, Frog and Toad, or a pigeon enjoying holiday festivities don't tend to run into the resident ghosts.

But Hannah is around at night, and has had a different experience.

"I have to come in here to take out trash at like 11 p.m., so it's very scary," Hannah said.

Hannah also took us to the staircase that leads to the second floor of the Greenhouse building, right behind the box office. Some juvenile ghosts are known for causing mischief on that staircase.

"I'll often be sitting in the box office and… I'll hear little footsteps that kind of sound like, it sounds like two pairs of footsteps and they're like playing kind of up and down," Hannah said. "I think these are like two kid ghosts, and they like to tease me."

These little prankster ghosts don't growl like the one in the basement, but it seems they sometimes like to make life difficult in trivial ways.

"One time, my computer mouse went missing, and I think I turned around and like refilled printer paper, turned back around, my computer mouse wasn't there. And I was like, I literally just turned around to refill paper, so I'm looking everywhere for it. I go upstairs — I'm like, 'I didn't even go upstairs' — I come back down, and the mouse is sitting exactly where I left it," Hannah said. "So yeah, I think the kids like to play with me, and that's really scary. Horrifying."

Hannah said she often hears two pairs of little footsteps tap-tap-tapping their way up and down the stairs. But there's nobody else around.

A spooky experience in the rehearsal room

We followed Hannah upstairs to the rehearsal room with its creaky door and lime green walls. The center of the room is clear and open, but a variety of props and other items that wouldn't belong together anywhere other than a stage theater line the walls — a love seat, an upright piano, a children's play kitchen set, a coffin.

At one point, Hannah recalled, it was just after 2 a.m., and auditions for a play had wrapped up for the night in the room. One coworker went to Hannah's office nearby to drop something off, while the other went to the restroom.

"At the same exact time, they feel something — a shift in energy, and a shift in temperature — but they feel it at the exact same time," Hannah said. "They reconvene. Both gather their things really quickly and then like don't talk about it until they get in the car, and they're like, 'Did you feel something when we like separated from each other?' And the other person was like, 'Oh my gosh, I wanted to say something, but I thought I was spooking myself out.'"

When Hannah was recounting this story in the rehearsal room, Blake was across the room shooting video, Tony was standing in front of a dry-erase board, and I was standing to Tony's right in front of a white door in the corner. Standing in front of the door, I noticed an eerie low-frequency hum. Tony moved in front of the door and heard it too.

Behind that door is a closet to which Hannah doesn't have the keys. She said it is used by a church that rents out space in the Greenhouse for services.

Now, realistically, that low hum could be made by HVAC or electrical equipment. But given why we were at the Greenhouse in the first place, it was just too spooky to dismiss.

"I just got chills," Hannah said when I pointed out the hum.

Hannah's office is located just opposite a high internal window from the rehearsal room, and she said sometimes she has the sense of being watched.

Hannah said the rehearsal room ghost might also haunt the theater library, an inviting space with a tin ceiling.

"I've had staff members in the library say that when they're organizing, they feel like something is watching them in here," she said.

Meanwhile, Hannah had a hair-raising experience at one point in the Up Studio dressing room, also on the second floor.

"I was understudying for Dracula in 'Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors….' I'm sitting right there in the dressing room, and I'm like, you know, crimping and making sure I look all cute for the show and everything," she said, "and on the other side of this wall, I hear — I'm the only one here, by the way — I hear three knocks."

Hannah said she ran downstairs when she heard those knocks and stayed there until showtime.

Technicians at the Greenhouse say another ghost likes to sit in the back of the tool room on the second floor, and there's a sense of something watching from a tech booth that's no longer in use.

Hannah took us into the old booth for the Up Main theater space while rehearsals were under way for "A Midsummer Night's Scream" — complete with a strobe light. But that was easy to explain, unlike an incident at one point involving a monitor that showed the front view of the stage so the stage manager could call the show.

"It was only showing black and white, and then one day I got a report that it showed in color," said Hannah, "and then I went to go check it, and it was only black and white."

The monitor is gone now, and the old booth is set to be turned into a costume closet. But that doesn't mean the ghost has gone anywhere.

All in all, the Greenhouse Theater Center is a sprawling old building with nooks and crannies everywhere and a lot of windowless rooms, and Hannah said it's just plain scary with the lights off.

"There have been times like I've felt like I felt something and that I've run out of the building before," she said. "I carry my rosary with me."

Want to experience it yourself?

On Tuesday, Oct. 6, you can join Tony Szabelski, Hannah Loessberg, and fellow ghost hunter AJTrueCrime for the first-ever Ghost Hunt at the Greenhouse Theater Center. Participants will tour all five theater spaces and dressing rooms, the library and the creepy hallways, and they'll even climb down that hole in the floor to the basement where something growls.

The event runs from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. Please be on time. 

If you dare.