Diane Gurgens Urbanckas alerted me to a story today in the Journal-Register about a Discovery Channel program running tonight (Dec 9) on "The Lake Club Horror." It may appear at other times in other regions, so check the Discovery Channel site.
The Lake Club, located at 2840 Fox Bridge Road in southeast Springfield, was one of the town's few night clubs from the 1940s through the 1960s. It served late, presented big-name entertainers, and paid for them with gambling receipts from a guarded back room.
Closed in 1968, it reopened in the 1970s as a rock/disco club, and at that time the owners began to notice "ghostly" incidents, allegedly set off by a bar tender who had committed suicide there. The club burned to the ground in 1992 but the story lives on in tonight's TV presentation. We had our 10th reunion there in 1968, and here's the class photo to prove it.
Picture from the archives of the Springfield Journal-Register.
8 comments:
Holy Moley, you really did some digging! I found my copy and finally figured out where I was(!). Behind me to the right is my first husband, Rich Taylor. The third one may be Dale Jeffers, the fourth one looks like Bob Barnosky. Tomorrow night I will be having dinner with Bob Barnosky, Gordon Jones, and Janet Frederick from our class, along with my brother Chuck and Jim Doyle (class of '55) and we'll see if we can identify a few more of those youngsters. Will bring a magnifier to help! Great article, Will. Thanks!
Addendum: My stepson, Tom, (age 46) mentioned that he remembered that there was a house adjacent to and owned by the Lake Club with a tunnel connecting the two buildings. The Club was located at the end of Stanton Street, and any traffic could be seen approaching at a distance. Whenever there was a "game" going on, lookouts would be posted to watch for "da cops." The lookouts would give warning and the "gamers" would quickly exit the club via the tunnel and hide out in the house until the coast was clear. Exciting? You bet!
Boy, you sure bring back memories with this blog. Maybe the ghost is my aunt who died last year. She met her second husband at the Lake Club during WWII when she was working at the munitions plant in Illiopolis and all the Rosie the Riveters went clubbing on Friday nights. Wonder if she knew about the gambling in the back room? On the other hand, maybe the ghost is her husband looking for her!
Barbara Edmiston Mitchell
Hi Barbara,
According to the SJR and the Discovery show, the ghost was a bar tender who blew his head off with a shotgun in a back room. A nasty episode like that tends to make folks wary of going into that space, to the point of hearing strange noises and seeing weird sights. A few drinks and acid tabs help to promote such fears. (Sorry to sound like a ghost-buster!)
The TV show was disappointing because its "re-created" Lake Club was a large brick building in a urban setting, probably in California. (I saw palm trees in the background once). They added a few shots of downtown Springfield, featuring the Capitol building.
One thing I've learned is that the legendary Lake Club was not ON the lake, but only near it, on a country road by some cornfields. The SJR picture shows a house with some large attached buildings. It had the style of a 1940s roadhouse, located beyond town lines and regulations, until the county and state cops shut them down!
Will
Oh boy, Diane is so right about the tunnel. I remember it well as I drove a Coca-Cola truck in 1962 and that was one of my stops. The tunnel was very dark with a few string lights but the actual dirt was shoulder height. I had to go down into that tunnel once a week to service the bar equipment and I never failed to see multiple large, very large rats. They would come up at shoulder level and just look at me and for some reason I always seemed to get out of there as quickly as possible. When I went back to college, I had to break in 4 different people as a replacement as the first 3 quit after they encountered the Lake Club for the first time.
Sorry I missed the show, but I always remember that the Lake club had a real mystique about it and thought we were in "high cotton" when we had our 10th reunion there. I remember being our there at Cy young Little League in that back corner of Bunn Park (where Mark Evans and John Stuckey were stars), and that big old Lake Club was across the street. Never knew until now that old buddy Tom Brosch was running down the tunnel with the rats. ;-)
Thanks Will.
Tom Downs
I had my 13th birthday party at the Lake Club. A group of girls from my 8th grade class joined me while being entertained by Julius LaRosa. I do have that picture also. Fun to remember those times.
I forgot to sign my name to last message. It was party for my birthday. We then had dinner at Grays? on So Grand Ave behind Georgian.
Robbi Gibbons
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