The Depot Bar

Several years before he died in May of 1999 (unrelated to story), my uncle was a bartender at a local corner bar called "The Depot Bar" in my home town in Wisconsin. It's been around for probably 100 years and has been through a lot in its years. It is located across from the old train depot which has recently been torn down, since it no longer served a purpose other than a historical land mark.

Because he was everyone's buddy and reliable, and was pretty much a party animal, my uncle ended up closing almost every other night. Many times he had told me that he was never "alone" in the bar, and that paranormal things were happening on a regular basis.

On one occasion, while people were there to witness, an old mirror which took up a chunk of space on the wall behind the bar flew-- not fell, but FLEW--off the wall onto the bar about five feet away from where it was mounted, and shattered all over the counter and floor. The creepy part of this was the fact that my uncle had been telling a customer about occurrences that had been happening to him after closing when the mirror crashed next to him. It was as if the "ghost" was telling him to "shut up!"

Another "event" was on a slow night when the bar was never full of people at any time during the day, so my uncle knew where people had and hadn't been sitting. One particular seat, which is usually occupied by a regular, hadn't been sat on or near all day (he never came in), yet when my uncle made his rounds at the end of the night he noticed that the seat cushion was shredded. When I say shredded, I don't mean torn like as if a buckle or snap got caught on it, but shredded as if someone very upset took a knife to it, which was impossible because no one had been near that seat all day and that is an activity that he would have noticed.

The last story that I can specifically remember of the stories he told me is about the time that an unseen something or "someone" chased him up the stairs when he was in the cellar putting wine and liquor in the cooler before locking the doors.

For skeptics out there my uncle was about 6'2" and weighed in at about 350 (give or take), so being a man of his size, he didn't scare easily. Also, he was very open minded to the paranormal and spiritual side due to his fascination with and studying of native American culture, so he had to have felt the presence of evil for him to be scared enough to run. You can draw your own opinion.