Ghosts haunt Earnestine & Hazel’s.
You get that info in your Welcome to Memphis starter pack, tucked next to other fact cards that read, “Central has great wings” and “The trolleys ain’t for transportation.”
I’d heard about the bar’s many ghosts, and its haunted jukebox. Chris McCoy, our film and TV editor, had, too.
“The first time I ever heard about Earnestine & Hazel’s, the first thing they said was, ‘Oh yeah, it’s haunted,’” McCoy said. “There’s a lot more crazy stuff about this place besides that but … if any place is going be haunted around here, it’s this place.”
I’d heard. McCoy had heard. So had Abigail Morici, our culture editor. None of us were sure, however. None of us had ever had a paranormal encounter in the place. But I knew some people who had, some people with the tools, the know-how, the experience, and a dogged curiosity about what lay beyond the veil to help us turn our second-hand knowledge into, maybe, a firsthand experience.
Last week, the investigation team from Historical Haunts Memphis showed us around Earnestine & Hazel’s in a spooky nighttime adventure that offered the ultimate Memphis Halloween experience, and, perhaps, a glimpse into the spirit world.
Prologue
I don’t work many nights. I get my journalism-ing done in daytime hours so that evenings are clear for family, dinner, and show-binging with my wife. But this was an offer impossible to pass up.
I’m a ghost guy. Well, I celebrate all of paranormalia, really. And I mean really. For proof, look to my first book, published this year — Haint Blues: Strange tales from the American South. It’s full of ghosts, monsters, aliens, and even a psychic horse. Wrote a whole-ass book on this stuff, y’all.
But I’ve never had a paranormal encounter. Never seen Bigfoot. Never spotted a UFO. And never have I ever had an encounter with anything even remotely ghostly — no apparition, nor shadow figure, shade, specter, phantom, presence, revenant … you get it.
I’ve watched a million hours of ghost evidence videos on YouTube, enough to believe that likely 90 percent (or more) were hoaxed for cheap internet attention. But my mind was wide open heading into our guided spirit investigation last week. And as I left Cooper-Young, I also had my antennae up, a sort of low, gnawing anxiety that I could not quite put my finger on nor dispel as regular reporter jitters.
Even as I turned onto South Main from Crump, the “ghost” in Ghost River Brewing took on a strange dread. I love Ghost River and I was truly excited to maybe encounter a real ghost. So what was this anxiety? I wasn’t sure.
Then, I saw the caboose of a Canadian National train pass over me as I drove under the trestle, and thought I remembered that to be an omen of either good or bad. I couldn’t remember which. It didn’t matter. Because just thinking about it underscored that I was, in fact, having some sort of weird anxiety about the evening. Then, I saw the sexy-posing, winking screw on the Active Bolt and Screw Co. building and thought, “Well, there’s that, at least.”
Meet the Team
The Earnestine & Hazel’s building earns the bar’s “ragged but right” ethos. Usually, I revel at a chance to celebrate in those vaunted rooms of peeling paint, uneven floors, low light, and murky history. But that Tuesday evening, the bar slumped on the sidewalk, unlit and sad — like the face of friend lost in an unpleasant revery when they think no one can see them. And, yes, this description fits under the “meet the team headline,” for it was as big a character in our evening as any there with a pulse.
Thomas, a super nice guy in a Pantera T-shirt, unlocked the doors, pulled away the massive door bar, and allowed us entry, leaving us to our own endeavors. The lights seemed lower than usual, casting deeper shadows into an already dim room. Wheel of Fortune played silently on flat screens above, the audience applauding someone who’d just solved the puzzle — “Purple Rain, Purple Rain.” The air was close but not stifling, scented with roasted onions, a hint of stale beer, and the dusty passage of time.
Meanwhile, Bob Roy sat his blue tool tote on a table and began checking his many devices. Though the bag he rifled through was “the small one,” ribbed his wife Barbara Roy.
“We started with just one cheap little meter,” Bob said. “A year later, we probably had $1,000 worth of equipment.”
That’s Bob all over, the data hound. He works in tech and trusts his tools to measure physical aberrations that may hint at a presence our eyes cannot see.
Then, there’s Barbara, the sensitive one. Spiritual abilities run in her family, enough for her to once correctly foretell her sister’s pregnancy. She respects the spirits she connects with like the living.
“I’ve always felt like there was more out there for us to understand,” Barbara said.
During the load-in, settle-in, meet-and-greet beginning of our investigation, Emily Guenther seemed at home in the darkened barroom, at ease, checking her phone and the windows. She’s a well-tuned empath, among other things, who has spent hours in that very place doing the very thing we were about to do, so her ease was no surprise. That experience was a calming influence for the uninitiated, like us, as she tried to contact spirits, even inviting one to sit in her lap.
Emily’s husband, Stephen, served as a sort of a lead guide for us that evening. He, too, has spent countless hours investigating countless haunted sites, attempting to glimpse other realms in real life. In a Flyer story ages ago, I called Stephen the “Mayor of Spooky Memphis” for his familiarity with the city’s spirit side, a title I’ll renew here, but not just for his knowledge. Stephen can break down complex spiritual concepts and draw them broadly enough that even I can understand.
Chris McCoy, who we met earlier, has worked on Memphis’ independent film scene for more than two decades. He loves a good story in the theater, but on the street, he’s a man of science. Ask him about rocketry or the chemical reasons hemp can get you high, and you’ll see what I mean. Still, it was plain Chris came to the evening with an open mind and an open heart.
When I asked Abigail Morici, who we also met earlier, if she’d ever had a paranormal encounter, she immediately (and shockingly) replied, “Well, my mom says I had a ghost friend when I was 3.” Dorea, Abigail named the ghost girl. Though, when I asked her to spell it, she didn’t know. She was 3, she explained.
“I told my mom things like she wore pantaloons, and she came on a boat with her brother and her mom,” Abigail said. “We lived in New Orleans, in this house right by all the cemeteries. [Dorea died of] yellow fever, we think, maybe. It gave my mom the creeps and she won’t talk about it to this day.”
The Set Up
Our team assembled under the bar’s bare naked light bulbs by the downstairs bar. All the hands were shook, introductions made. Bob explained how he uses all his tools. Stephen explained the evening’s basic run-of-show. Then, he explained some of what we might expect.
“Sometimes, especially here at Earnestine & Hazel’s upstairs and in the backrooms, at times it’s very heavy,” Stephen said. “It almost feels like barometric pressure, like you can almost feel a bit of pressure.
“Some people get touched, never violently. You may feel, particularly women, someone touch your hair.”
Then, he explained what we should not expect.
“Ghost hunting is a bit of a misnomer; it’s really like ghost fishing,” he said. “You just go sit somewhere, set up your stuff, and wait.
“A lot of the [ghost hunting] TV shows are about … 22 minutes long, without commercials. That might be days of filming — three or four days — edited down to the best parts.”
Much of the evening, Stephen warned, might be boring. We’d snug in somewhere, sit in the dark, and ask a lot of questions. Actually communing with the dead, it turns out, can be every bit as tough and tedious as any other worthwhile endeavor made to look easy by a charismatic TV host. (I’m looking at you, Bill Dance.)
Questions would form the core of our evening’s commune. That’s how we let the spirits know we were there and there to listen to them, not drink Hi-Life and draw cuss words on the wall. And there were a few best practices for those questions.
Ask binary questions, not open-ended affairs. So, Stephen explained, instead of “What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?” ask “Do you like chocolate?” That way, a spirit can more easily communicate with the team — lighting up a motion sensor or tripping a meter rather than soliloquizing about frozen desserts. While the veil may be thin in places like Earnestine & Hazel’s, it can be hard to be heard through the curtains, it seems.
Some other guidelines for clarity: Keep conversation to a minimum. Use your voice to “tag” human noises like passing cars, passing pedestrians, or even passing gas. (Stephen joked his team has a strict no-Taco-Bell rule before their investigations.) Phones go in airplane mode to not give trip electro-magnetic equipment for false positives.
With the team and ground rules established, it was time to wobble up the familiar wobbly back stairs and into the must-odored heart of the unfamiliar, the unknown.
The Black Room
You’ve sat in this room. Make a 180 right turn at the top of the stairs to the end of the hall and choose the room to the right. The walls are painted black, illuminated with a single blue light bulb. Being in this room with a beer and your friends is one crazy stitch in the fabric of this great city. But in that room with ghost hunters, the room vibrates with some silent expectation that had me focused to the very edge of senses.
“Emily, if you sense anything, you let us know,” Stephen said as we settled into the Black Room’s squishy seats.
“I sense the batteries in my audio recorder are dead,” Emily said.
“So,” Stephen began, “we usually just start talking. This is Stephen. I’m here with Emily, Bob, and Barbara. We have some guests with us. They wanted to come over and hear and just kind of experience for themselves how it feels here. So many have expressed the presence of spirits here. So we hope that you’ll interact with us tonight.
“We come peacefully, just to talk. We like to tell your stories. That’s how people live on. We tell their stories.”
Silence. Focused silence. Extended silence. I busied myself taking photos of the scene. Chris angled his phone video rig around the room. Abigail clutched her bag on her lap with two arms as if in fear of some ghostly ne’er-do-well. Bob moved a small, black, digital device back and forth.
“It got up over one just a second ago,” Bob said, almost to himself as he watched the readings. This drew a mild hmm from Barbara.
Stephen asked if any of the spirits were women and promised that the men in the room would leave if that made them feel more at ease. Silence. “Any waitresses or servers among us?” Emily asked. “The building was once a church,” Barbara said.
“When it was a church, did a little girl fall down the stairs?” Barbara asked.
More silence. Who else? The team asked if any among them had been cooks, clergy, or musicians — horn or piano players. Silence. Stephen said aloud he’d heard there were no spirits in Earnestine & Hazel’s, a gentle taunt to coax communication. Nothing.
Barbara said she’d spoken once with the spirit “Mr. George,” Russell George, the bar’s former manager who had committed suicide in the building, about his famous Soul Burgers, and their famously secret sauce.
“Does anybody here know the secret?” Emily asked.
There was a soft pause and Chris then softly said, “Worcestershire sauce and pickle juice.”
After some gentle snickering, Stephen said to the spirits, “Chris just shared the secret. Is that okay?”
The men eventually did leave the Black Room but it was not enough to bring any spirits to the fore.
Nate’s Bar
You’ve been in Nate’s Bar, too, at the far other end (the front) of the building. There, Stephen said he’d heard reports of encounters with the spirits of Ike and Tina Turner, Ray Charles, and B.B. King. He himself connected with the ghost of Wilson Pickett there one night. (The details are creepy and amazing. Ask him.)
The team continued with familiar questions: Any one with us tonight? Anyone had a drink here? Silence.
Stephen then turned on a spirt box. It’s a digital device that (to my unscientific ear) produces a skipping stutter of static. With them, ghost hunters can ask direct questions and, sometimes, get direct answers. When Emily asked, “Any musicians here?” amid a pause in the stutter, a voice could be heard to say, “yeah” or “yup.” Later, this prompted Stephen to begin talking about Ray Charles and his alleged carousing at the bar.
“I don’t know why people have to bring out the negative all the time,” he began. “Clearly, we each have things we struggle with. So …”
With that, one of the motion-sensor balls lit up in a sparkle of multi-colored lights. Barbara and I had been four feet from the dark thing for at least 15 minutes. Neither had moved to touch it — even to look at it — as it lit up. This drew shallow, excited gasps. This was the moment we’d planned for, organized for, and waited patiently for.
“Oh, hello!” Stephen said. “Thank you! I hope you agree with that. You should talk about the good times and the contributions of folks …”
With this, another motion light dazzled in a spray of color, a different one, drawing another wave of muted, respectful exultation, and a “thank you” from Barbara.
Heading Home
There it was. Something I could not explain, in an environment I thought I knew. In short, it was a paranormal experience, my first in the more than 30 years since I fell into the rabbit hole of myth, legend, and the unexplained.
In the moment, my heart raced and eyebrows went wide. Though, the situation called for respect and calm, I wanted to yell, “Holy fucking shit!” I didn’t.
Instead, I felt kind of warm. And in the place of that weird anxiety on my way there, my way home was a state of sort of quiet contemplation. Did I witness a sign or message from the dead? Did the veil open just feet from where I stood? If it did, what then? Is there an afterlife? If not, what did I see?
I decided to not think too hard about the answers to those questions. Instead, I put on some Wilson Pickett and decided that Bob was right. It’d be easy as hell to spend big money just to have that experience one more time.
