The Ghost of Rudy Cranor: The Haunting of the Sober Duck
Long after the music stopped and the last patrons went home, something seemed to remain inside Springfield’s Sober Duck Disco and Rock Club. Employees reported unexplained chills, phantom footsteps, glasses sailing through the air, and the eerie sound of instruments played by no visible hands. Then a waitress claimed that the ghost of a former bartender appeared before her with a chilling warning: “An owner is going to die.” Weeks later, one of the building’s owners was dead. For years afterward, the question remained: Was the Sober Duck truly haunted by a restless soul—or had something darker taken up residence within its walls?
The Ghost at the Sober Duck
In 1979, three Catholic priests were summoned to Springfield, Illinois, to bless the Sober Duck Disco and Rock Club. The reason was unsettling: employees and patrons believed the establishment was haunted by the ghost of a bartender who had died there more than a decade earlier.
The 60-year-old bartender was Albert Rudolph “Rudy” Cranor, who had taken his own life at the club on June 27, 1968. He was admitted with a gunshot wound to the left chest. When he arrived at St. John’s Hospital, Cranor was still conscious and told a doctor in the presence of a deputy that he shot himself with an automatic rifle. He had been thinking of doing this for several weeks. The bullet exited his shoulder and became lodged in a west wall of the office six feet from floor level.
Ileen Wicks and another woman told police they noticed Rudy coming to the club at 8 p.m. and walking peculiarly. They heard what sounded like someone falling through glass. They found Cranor slumped in a chair with the gun on the floor. They called the police.
Strangely, his home address was given as that of the Lake Club. Was he living there?
According to owner Tom Blasko, Rudy’s spirit had never truly left. He claimed that the haunting began with a feeling that someone—or something—was watching.
“You just had the feeling you were being watched,” he recalled. Even when temperatures outside the club climbed to 90 or 95 degrees, people sometimes experienced sudden, unnatural chills that seemed to pass straight through them in certain parts of the club.
Other manifestations were even harder to dismiss.
According to Blasko, Rudy’s ghost sometimes played a piano kept in the back of the club. At other times, the sound of an invisible trumpet seemed to drift through the building. Glasses allegedly flew across rooms without anyone touching them, while certain areas of the club became unnaturally cold.
Then came the warning.
One night, waitress Barbara Lard reportedly encountered something far more disturbing than a sudden chill. In 1977, while standing in an unused portion of the club, she claimed to see Rudy’s transparent head floating before her.
Then she heard an inhuman voice.
“An owner is going to die.”
This led Blasko to ask two priests from his high school graduating class, Rev. Gary Dilley and Rev. John Corredato, for help. He feared Rudy was foretelling his death.
Several weeks later, one of the building’s owners died at age 69.
For Blasko, the coincidence was chilling enough. Perhaps more unsettling was the possibility that Rudy’s apparition had not simply appeared to frighten the living—it had delivered a prophecy.
By 1979, the owners decided they had heard enough. Three priests were brought in to bless the establishment, sprinkle it with holy water, and pray for Rudy’s soul. Since Rudy had been Catholic, some believed that he needed absolution for the “worst sin.”
Blasko later claimed that the ritual worked.
But the history of the building—and the man said to haunt it—suggests that the Sober Duck had accumulated plenty of shadows long before Rudy’s death.
From the Lake Club to the Sober Duck
Before it became the Sober Duck, the establishment was known as the Lake Club, once described as the “belle of Midwestern nightclubs” and one of the hottest destinations between St. Louis and Chicago.
The club opened in 1940 inside a building that had already gone through several incarnations. Its founders were Harold Henderson, Hugo Giovagnoli, and a third unidentified man. Each reportedly contributed $3,000 to launch the venture.
The Lake Club soon became known for fine liquor, good food, and prominent entertainers. But behind the respectable façade was another attraction: a secret back room where patrons could participate in high-stakes gambling.
In those days, Lake County had developed a reputation as a gambler’s paradise, even though gambling violated Illinois law.
The club changed its name in 1968, the same year Rudy Cranor died. Afterward, new employees reportedly began noticing strange sensations inside the building—unexplained cold spots, the feeling of being watched, and lonely footsteps echoing through rooms when no one else was there.
And eventually, the identity of the “owner” from Rudy’s warning became known.
It was Harold Henderson, one of the founders.
The Bartender with a Troubled Past
But who was Rudy Cranor?
His history was considerably more complicated than that of a simple bartender.
Cranor married young widow Evelyn Burkhart nee Carlson (1909-1978), in 1940. The following year, he was operating the El Rancho Restaurant in Waukegan. By 1946-47, he owned the Red Pepper Restaurant at Green Bay Road and Washington Street on the outskirts of Waukegan.
That same year, Rudy found himself in the newspapers for something considerably less respectable.
A grand jury indicted him for failing to pay income taxes on profits from slot machines and approximately $4,000 he had allegedly earned from poker games with customers.
The case attracted attention because gambling was widespread in the area despite being illegal.
Even more unusual was the support Cranor received from local officials. The Lake County state’s attorney, sheriff, Waukegan’s mayor, and Lake Forest’s chief of police all reportedly submitted letters praising Cranor’s “high character, integrity and good citizenship.”
The judge had one obvious question: Did these officials know Cranor had slot machines operating in his restaurant when they wrote those letters?
The question went unanswered.
Cranor received three years of probation and was ordered to pay a fine. But in 1949, he was arrested at his restaurant after failing to pay the fine—and was reportedly still operating slot machines.
He managed to avoid violating his probation by pointing out that ownership of the restaurant had been transferred to his wife, Evelyn. Since she technically owned the premises, Rudy argued, he was not responsible for what occurred there. His wife had put him on the payroll as a bartender.
Cranor and his wife didn’t only rely on the good character referrals provided by the local officials; they were using the services of attorney Eugene Bernstein, who was tried and acquitted on charges of criminal conspiracy in connection with visits to Capone gangsters in Leavenworth penitentiary before they were paroled in 1947.
The legal battles continued. In 1950, he sought a reduction of his fines.
And then the trail grew cold.
The Final Mystery
What happened to Rudy Cranor between those legal troubles and his death in 1968 is difficult to determine.
No prominent obituary appears to have explained his final years, and little survives to illuminate what might have driven a seemingly established businessman and bartender to take his own life inside the Lake Club.
That unanswered question adds another layer to the Sober Duck mystery.
Why there?
Why did Rudy choose that particular place to die?
And if the reports are true, why did something seem to remain behind?
Perhaps the strange activity was nothing more than coincidence, suggestion, and the atmosphere of an old nightclub with a complicated past. Or perhaps the building had become a kind of crossroads for the dead and the living—a place where old secrets refused to stay buried.
Whatever the explanation, employees continued to describe the same inexplicable sensations: the sudden cold, the footsteps, the unseen music, and the unsettling feeling that someone was standing just beyond sight.
Then there was the warning. An owner is going to die. Weeks later, one did.
This was not the only mystery swirling about Rudy Cranor. His wife, Evelyn, had lost her first husband, Paul Burkhart, in 1930 when he was 22 years old. He had gone duck hunting on a lake near Ashland. As they were rowing toward a blind, a shotgun lying in the boat was accidentally discharged, the shot striking Burkhart in the chest. When he was struck, Burkhart lunged forward, upsetting the boat, and both men were plunged into the icy water. Onlookers pulled them out, but he died shortly after.
What are the chances of losing two husbands to the same injury? Coincidence the club would soon be renamed the Sober Duck?
Although three priests eventually blessed the Sober Duck with prayers and holy water, the story of Rudy Cranor leaves behind one final, unanswered question:
Did the priests truly drive Rudy’s ghost away—or did whatever haunted the Sober Duck simply learn to remain silent?
