There’s a restaurant in Phoenix, AZ that is haunted. It’s
called the Spaghetti Company and it’s on Central Avenue.
There are quite a few tales about this place, so if you have
the time to read, here they are!
The restaurant is in what used to to be two old homes that
had been converted by knocking out two side walls and
joining the two houses together to make one big building.
Inside, some of the walls were torn down to make for larger
spaces and some were kept the same to keep that feeling that
one is in a home and not a restaurant.
When I was 20 I was hired as a hostess there to help pay my
tuition through college. My first day on the job I was told
by many fellow employees that the place was haunted but I
thought I was getting razed because I was the new kid. I was
assured by everyone they were not kidding, I should give the
place a month until the ghosts were comfortable with my
presence and I would see for myself.
To make the story a bit clearer I will give the reader a
brief description of the layout of the restaurant. This
place is big and the front door was located in what was
known as the lobby. The lobby consisted of a huge living
room with comfy chairs and tables and lamps. At the far end
of the room were the bathrooms and a fireplace. The lobby
was filled with rooms that had most of the walls removed so
one could see all the way down to the fireplace at the far
end. After passing through the lobby, a customer would come
to the hostess stand in another large room. Off the hostess
room was the bar straight ahead and through a large doorway
and the main dining area, through a large doorway on the
left. Both areas required the customer to go down steps to
enter these areas. Off the main dining area were two more
large rooms for dining. In the main dining area there was a
trolley car in the middle of the room and against the far
wall there were cubicles containing four or fewer tables per
cubicle. The decor was street lamps around the trolley car
and old rugs on the hardwood floors. The tables were
mismatched as well as the chairs. The place looked great,
very homey and warm, but what is important to the story is
the place is quite large and if a person was standing in the
lobby, they would not be able to see into the dining room or
bar. Only if they were standing by the front door in the
lobby would they be able to see the room with the hostess
stand, and not until they went into the hostess stand room
would they be able to see the other rooms.
To continue, a month went by, maybe a bit longer, when I had
my first experience. I was closing hostess that evening.
This meant that when the clock struck 1 a.m. I was to lock
the front door so no more customers could enter. I was also
suppose to go around and turn off each lamp in the lobby.
This was creepy, not only because of the hour but there were
only a few employees on the premises. A hostess, (me), one
busboy, one waiter or waitress, one cook, one bartender and
one manager. Only seven employees in a huge building and I
was the only employee in the front of the building. Anyway,
I had gone around turning off the lamps and went to lock the
door when I heard my name quite loudly in my ear. The funny
thing was I couldn’t tell if the voice was male or female. I
turned around and said “yes” thinking it was my boss or
another employee who had come up into the lobby to tell me
something but there was no one there! Remember this is a big
place so if there had been a flesh and blood human being,
there is no way that person could move away fast enough
through these large rooms where I wouldn’t have been able to
see them go. To cover my bases, I checked behind the chairs
to make sure some smart butt fellow employee wasn’t playing
a trick on me but found no one. So I made my way back
through the hostess stand, no one, the bar, no one, the main
dining room, no one, and finally the kitchen in the back of
the building to find every one of my remaining fellow
employees talking. I asked if anyone had been up in the
lobby looking for me and they said no. I didn’t mention I
had heard my name, but I was a little weirded out.
A few weeks later, I had another experience in the lobby.
Once again I was closing and was going around turning off
the lamps. Near the bathrooms was the circuit breaker and I
had the option of throwing that breaker which would turn off
all the lights in the lobby instead of doing each by hand. I
usually didn’t do this though, because the lobby gave me the
creeps and I had a long way to go from the circuit breaker
to get back to the hostess stand room. However, occasionally
I would do just that and run like heck to get back to the
lighted room.
This particular night I was turning the lamps off by hand
when I came to the circuit breaker. Suddenly, I thought,
what the hell? I opened the panel and threw the switch. What
happened next nearly made me faint. Right next to my head
was a white spirally thing floating in the air. I gasped and
it vanished instantly. Well, I ran and vowed never to hit
the circuit breaker again.
After these two incidents, I decided to start asking
questions of my fellow employees and did I get a lot of
answers. I found out that management could not keep a
cleaning crew for any length of time and sometimes these
crews would quit without notice. When this would happen, the
manager would ask the male employees, (bartenders, waiters
or busboys) if any of them would stay late of come in early
and clean for extra money. One busboy, Fred, was asked to do
this frequently and he had many stories to tell me. He told
me that quite often, when management opened up in the
morning, all the tables and chairs would be stacked in one
corner and Fred had to put them back. The upper floors of
the restaurant were used as storage for furniture and such
and the door leading up there was double locked and bolted,
yet every morning, without fail, the door would be wide
open. The restaurant had a laser security system across the
floor and at least several times a week, the system was
activated in the middle of the night and the police would
have to come out as well as the manager, only to find nothing.
One morning Fred had an interesting story to tell me when I
came into work. He and another busboy, John, had been asked
to stay and clean when yet another cleaning crew refused to
work there any more. Fred had been in the lobby and John
down in the bar. Both too far from each other to see or hear
the other. Fred reported that the lights suddenly began
blinking off and on repeatedly when they suddenly went off
and stayed off. He looked out the windows from the lobby,
thinking the power may have gone off but saw that all lights
besides the Spaghetti Co. were on along the street and at
the buildings surrounded the restaurant. Then he began to
hear his name being called over and over. Thinking it might
be John as he couldn’t see well in the dark, he answered but
there was nothing but someone repeatedly saying his name
over and over. Scared, he said he ran to find John and found
him in the bar back by the cooler where John told Fred he
had also heard his name being called over and over. The two
guys were so freaked out that they locked themselves in the
manager’s office and refused to come out until the manager
came down to lock up and let them go home.
Another time, I talked to the manager’s wife, who used to
come in and clean late at night to help out when the
cleaning crews bailed. She told me one night she was
cleaning one of the dining cubicle in the main dining room
when she heard a woman crying. The sound seemed to come from
the basement of the building. Most buildings in AZ don’t
have basements, but the two buildings that made the
Spaghetti Co. were two very old homes and they both had
basements. She went to her husband, the manager, and they
both went into the basement but found nothing. The basements
were kept completely empty and she said there was nothing
down there, only cobwebs.
It wasn’t long after that incident, that a bad smell emitted
from that cubicle. There was a fireplace in that cubicle,
the fireplace of the first house. (The fireplace in the
lobby was the fireplace of the second house.) Anyway, the
smell became so bad that customers could not be seated in
that section. The owner became quite concerned because empty
tables meant a loss of income and he was eager to try and
rectify the situation. The cubicle had books lining the
walls and all the books were removed, thinking they might be
mildewing. That did not take away the smell. The fireplace
was bricked up and the bricks were removed thinking a rat
may have die behind the bricks and was rotting, but nothing
was found. The fireplace went down into the basement so the
base was torn open in the basement, once again looking for
animals that may have become trapped and were decomposing,
but nothing was found. A wall adjoining the fireplace wall
had a section that had been covered so that was torn open
only to find an underground passage that went under Central
Ave. No one knew it was there and no explanation for what it
was once used for was ever found. Never the less, there was
nothing decomposing in this passage way either. The owner
was beside himself as he could not get rid of the smell and
simply could not find out what was causing it, when one day,
it just stopped.
Another time, I was working lunch when I seated two young
women on the trolley car. Half way through their lunch, one
of the women jumped up and pointed at a lamp post in the
dining room. She started yelling about a man leaning against
the post and watching the people at the tables. She kept
saying “Do you see him? Does anyone see him?” But none of us
did, it gave me the willies!
Then there was the time, a family came in for lunch, over
six people, and one of the women had a small child around
one years old. I sat them and all of sudden the child began
screaming and crying. The mother tried to comfort the child
but the child could not be comforted. Realizing she was
annoying the other diners, she came up into the hostess area
and began pacing back and forth with the child who still
would not stop crying. Finally, she went back to the table,
said something to her husband and the entire party got up to
leave, not having a chance to order or eat. I walked them to
the front door as she apologized for the disturbance and I
assured her it was no trouble. I opened the door for them
and watched them step down the steps and into the bright
sunshine. The second the women went out the door with the
child, the child stopped crying abruptly and began smiling
and cooing. Yikes! I was a bit freaked!
After working there for a while, one of the bartenders, Mary
told me she wanted to get to the bottom of the history of
these buildings as she had a few experiences herself. She
went to records to find out the history about the place and
this is what she told me she found. The first house, the one
with the lobby, had once belonged to an older gentleman a
long time ago. He had been sleeping by the fireplace (the
lobby one) when someone had apparently broke in and murdered
him by bashing in his skull. The second house was a little
newer, but not much, and apparently in the 1930’s a women
had been shot and killed in the basement. (The fireplace in
the cubicle) Her assailant had never been found. Mary’s
findings seemed to explain a lot about the hauntings!
If you’re ever in Phoenix, go check out this restaurant. It
is still there, though the rooms have changed a little bit.
There are tables in the hostess stand room now, but it’s
still pretty much the same and I would imagine it’s still
haunted!
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