Rest in Pizza
Updates here get tougher and tougher as (after)life gets in the way……As I gear up for my October ghost tours, I look back and see my last blog was approximately a year ago. Between then and now, I’ve absolutely visited some blog-worthy sites and one theme I find in common among some them is……well, food. I am going to highlight some of the venues with the most interesting dark history.
Let’s start with a real show-stopper of a haunted establishment: The White Horse Tavern in Newport, RI, which is allegedly the oldest operating tavern in the United States. This place has an almost absurd amount of history packed into one building. Constructed in 1652 and converted into a tavern in 1673, it became a meeting place for Newport’s General Assembly, criminal court and city council, and over the centuries welcomed everyone from colonial politicians to sailors, pirates and British soldiers. That long history may explain why the tavern has one of Newport’s strongest reputations for paranormal activity. Guests and employees have reported visions of an older man in colonial-style fashion, assumed to be a traveler who died at the tavern. He is often seen near the fireplace or in the dining room before suddenly disappearing. Other visitors have described unexplained footsteps, a hand touching or tapping a shoulder, and the apparition of a woman floating above one of the dining tables. There are also stories of a young girl’s cries coming from within the building. With centuries of deaths, war, illness and human drama attached to the property, the White Horse’s reputation as one of America’s oldest—and supposedly most haunted—taverns almost writes its own ghost story. Blend that lore with the deliciously strong old fashioneds, the tasty charcuterie (pictured below), the foie gras, and the lobster bisque, and it’s no wonder it has survived all of these years.
Next we go a little south, to Covington, GA, the site of our 4th annual Professional Ghost Tour Guide Meet up. Covington is the “Hollywood of the South”. Halloween II was filmed in and around Covington and continues the original Halloween film in the slasher horror genre, written and directed by Rob Zombie and released in 2009. The protagonist, Laurie (of course that was her name), struggles to come to terms with her brother Michael’s deadly return to Haddonfield, Illinois. Meanwhile, Michael prepares for another reunion with his sister. I’m going to have to rewatch it. I haven’t seen it probably since it came out. There are plenty of other movies and television shows that have been filmed here too, including Dukes of Hazard, Sweet Magnolias, In the Heat of The Night, and most recently: The Vampire Diaries, which the town has really capitalized on. There are vampire-themed stores on every corner and each cafe trying to outdo the next, with cocktails resembling blood and Vampire-themed offerings. For the past three ghost tour guide meet-ups I’ve written blogs, and embarrassingly it has taken me six months to write about the fourth one. It was originally scheduled for January, but because of blizzard conditions all over the country, we had to push it back to March. It is now September. Better late than never, eh? Our host, Ann Wildmon, graciously led us through the streets and told us where the proverbial bodies are buried throughout the town. Her local art shop marks the starting point of her own ghost tour, https://www.covingtonghosttours.com. It was a really fun weekend and we participated in lots of investigating, particularly of her art gallery. I got to be the person wearing the headphones for the “Estes Method”, which was really creepy and I felt almost like I was in a trance. The Estes Method is a paranormal investigation technique where one person wears a blindfold and noise-canceling headphones, which are connected to a spirit box to receive messages without external bias. Someone else in the room asks questions and the person donning the headphones speaks when they hear a word or words from the spirit box. It is eerie how timely and how fitting the words to answer the questions being asked are. The person with headphones has no idea when the questions are being asked or what the questions are, so at first it feels kind of weird, because you are just blurting out words, but after the session is over, it is fascinating to hear the accuracy of the word(s) that very often appropriately answer the questions being asked.
Our group of Ghost Tour Guides dined at the Mystic Grill (not to be confused with Mystic Pizza in Connecticut), made famous by the fictional town of Mystic Falls from the Vampire Diaries. It is a real restaurant, based on a fictional restaurant, but it has plenty of its own stories without the show. The building dates to 1906, when it was constructed as the Bank of Covington, and over the years housed businesses including a dress shop, Sears, a billiard parlor, a bakery and other establishments. But the paranormal story goes back even further: in 1883, the lot was occupied by a saloon owned by Colenel Robert Bagby, whose presence is said to linger even after the saloon itself disappeared. According to local legend, Bagby’s spirit remains attached to the property and has been seen as a rugged, bearded man who seems to patrol or guard the building. Rather than appearing as an angry apparition, he is generally portrayed as a watchful caretaker, as though he never quite accepted that his old establishment was gone. The restaurant itself acknowledges that Bagby “still makes his presence known” on occasion, giving the ghost story a particularly nice connection to the site’s documented past. The food served there is actually *not* Vampire themed, but southern themed. I had fried chicken, which was delicious. Our table also shared some pimento cheese as an appetizer, which did not disappoint either.
On the subject of Mystic Pizza, I actually did visit there about a month ago. Made famous by the 1988 movie starting Julie Robert’s, this The restaurant opened in 1973, and screenwriter Amy Holden Jones encountered it while vacationing in Mystic, eventually using its name and concept as the inspiration for the film. The actual restaurant wasn’t used for the movie’s interior scenes—the filmmakers constructed a set because the tiny pizzeria couldn’t close for the duration of filming—but the real Mystic Pizza became a tourist landmark after the movie’s release. Mystic lore tells of a spirit associated with the business that occupied the building before Mystic Pizza (the movie), with reports of mysterious cold spots and a restless presence lingering after closing time. That makes this one particularly fun from a storytelling standpoint: underneath the neon, movie memorabilia and “Slice of Heaven” nostalgia is supposedly an older story belonging to the building itself. I couldn’t really find a whole lot to substantiate this, but still a cool place to visit, nonetheless. And the pizza really did hit the spot.
For the next spot, I’d like to venture a little closer to my home, but in the opposite corner of the state. In the small town of Yellow Springs, my son and I visited Ye Olde Trail Tavern. Built by Elisha and son, William Mills in 1827 as a tavern, the cabin style structure was called Elisha’s Tavern. It was the only structure in Yellow Springs on US Route 68 at that time. In 1847 Franz and Mary Ann (Sroufe) Hafner moved his home (the front bar) to the cabin and took over as owner of what is now Ye Olde Trail Tavern. Today, several spirits are said to linger here. The most frequently reported is a woman in a blue dress who has been seen walking through the building, sometimes smiling and apparently watching over the tavern; local researchers have suggested she may be Mary Hafner, who reportedly promised her dying husband she would care for their home. Another, far more sorrowful apparition is a dark-haired woman in black, seen upstairs crying. Some accounts identify her as one of the Hafner daughters-in-law, while other local lore connects her to a woman who discovered that her husband had manipulated her into marriage by interfering with letters from the man she truly loved. Staff and patrons have also reported footsteps, voices, objects moving on their own, and other unexplained activity. My son gave his chicken strips two thumbs up.
Interestingly enough, one of my favorite things about the town of Yellow Springs is Antioch College, Rod Serling’s Alma mater.
Mr. Serling was brilliant and ahead of his time and his creative episode themes from Twilight Zone reflect his brilliance. He grew up in upstate New York, but he often uses Ohio as a backdrop to some of his settings, particularly Willoughby. (They offer a local ghost tours, by the way, which I have not yet taken, but I intend to.) Mr. Serling deserves a blog of his own, so I will save the details for a later Twilight Zone themed blog.
Closer to my own home yet, I often visit Zoar, but last fall I attended a ghost dinner there at Zoar Canal Tavern. The Canal Tavern opened in 1829 after traffic began on the Ohio & Erie Canal between Massillon and Dover. The Society of Separatists of Zoar, who had obtained financial security by digging 7 miles of the canal across their lands, subsequently built the tavern and hotel for travelers on the canal. In addition to offering accommodations and food to Canal travelers, a blacksmith shop adjacent to the Tavern shoed mules and horses that pulled the canal boats. The photo below is the “Rathskeller”, which was used to house the excess bodies during the cholera epidemic and other interesting history. The food was quite good. There was the “Ghoul”osh and the Witch’s Purse chicken pot pie. Cute theming. The dessert was……what else: Devil’s Food Cake.
