The story
The former Chicago Historical Society Building stands at Dearborn and Ontario in River North, a Richardsonian Romanesque fortress of rough granite completed in 1892 to house the society's collections after fire twice destroyed its predecessors — the site's history reaches back through the Great Fire of 1871, which consumed the earlier building and, in the neighbourhood's darker telling, left its mark on the ground. After the society moved on, the landmark cycled through publishing offices, a recording school and decades of famous nightlife — the Limelight and then Excalibur among Chicago's best-known clubs — and it is in those years that its haunted reputation flowered: staff and patrons described glasses sliding and shattering, figures on the grand staircase and galleries, a woman in white, cold spots and voices after closing, and the building became a fixture of the city's ghost tours, which layer in lore about fire victims and older uses of the block. Identifications are folklore rather than record. The building continues in commercial use today, so access depends on its current tenants. These accounts should be presented as club-era staff telling and tour lore around a genuinely storied landmark.