LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The spookiest night of the year is just around the corner. But it’s not just Halloween that brings out ghosts and spirits at some classic Louisville haunts.
On Frankfort Avenue, you’ll definitely find treats at Sweet Surrender Dessert Café. But you might also find some tricks.
“Our owner says she heard wedding march being hummed,” employee Caroline Johnson said. “And it’s interesting because we make wedding cakes so maybe the ghost knowns.”
Amidst the cookies and cakes lies a history. The current café is the old office of a surgeon, who performed surgeries in the building’s attached upstairs unit.
“I come up here sometimes to get storage stuff, and it’s just like I have this feeling that someone’s here,” Johnson said.
But this ghost isn’t the only one that haunts the halls of Louisville businesses. When 3rd Turn Brewing in Jeffersontown opened six years ago, the previous business left a message for the new tenants.
Someone wrote on the wall, “I will miss the Moose Lodge. Little girl be nice to the new owners. Don’t scare them."
Soon owner Greg Hayden and his staff started noticing some unexplained occurrences.
“We hear voices upstairs when everyone is downstairs,” Hayden said. “We come upstairs, there’s cold hot spaces in the place for no apparent reason that we can figure. We hear little voices coming through, window tappings, little shirt tugs.”
Since then, paranormal investigators have come out, and explored the history of the building, which was built as a church in 1878. The mason’s daughter, a little girl, passed away during construction, when a brick hit her in the head.
Then there’s the Downtown cocktail bar Meta’s resident ghost.
When Jeremy Johnson moved into the building, formerly a strip club, in 2013 – the unexplained began to happen. His keys would go missing and appear somewhere he hadn’t even been. He consulted one of his customers who used to work in the club.
“I went up to her and I said, ‘hey you know when you worked here did you ever notice anything weird?’ And she said, oh yeah that’s just Paula,” Johnson said.
Paula is a ghost who protected the women who worked at the club – after she was rumored to have been killed there when the building was a burlesque club years ago.
The customer told Johnson a man was getting aggressive towards her, and then the mirror behind her just split, and the man ran out.
These Louisville legends aren’t malicious, just sometimes a bit of an inconvenience.
“It’s like a roommate, you know, sometimes they get in the fridge and they eat your leftovers,” Johnson said.
