One of the bartenders at American Legion Post 163 refuses to close the club by herself.
On New Year's Eve, she and a friend saw something that so frightened them they don't even want their names connected with this story.
Jo Ann Cassidy, the club's spokesperson, said that the women are the latest in a list of people who have experienced the post's ghost. She includes herself in that list, as does Rodger Johnson, a former employee who now drives a school bus and is a maintenance man at Autumn Hill Manor.
What spooked the ladies who were working the bar Dec. 31 was that the soda fountain dispenser, a heavy, hand-held spigot on a long, heavy hose, rose a couple of feet into the air and fell to the floor, Cassidy said.
She added that the dispenser rests in a snug-fitting holster. Had it slipped out, it would have fallen straight to the floor, rather than rising up like they said it did.
Cassidy asserted that the women are the down-to-earth type, never known even to stretch a truth.
Johnson said that the dispenser is in the area of the bar where virtually all of his post ghost experiences occurred. He said that several times he saw glasses slide by themselves along one end of the bar while he was serving customers at the other, and heard a woman's muffled voice and saw disembodied shadows when he was by himself.
Unlike the women who were freaked out New Year's Eve, Johnson said he was forewarned about eerie happenings.
"When I started working here in 1998, Kim Cribbs told me the stories," he said. "She worked here another year after I started, and we heard and saw the same things. Her experiences went back about 15 years."
The history of the building that Americal Legion Post 163 is in, goes back a lot further. The clubhouse was built around a house that's almost a century old, Johnson said. Cribbs told him- that the greater part of the bar is in what used to be a previous owner's bedroom, the very room in which that woman died.
If the bar area is haunted, Cassidy said, it may be because the woman was vehemently against alcohol.
Johnson said that for the first month, whenever he heard the voice, he'd try to make out what it was saying. He never could. After a while, he grew frustrated and turned a TV up so he couldn't hear the voice at all.
But he couldn't ignore a shadow that occasionally drifted by the doorway between the bar and a hall. He also couldn't fail to hear foot steps on the floor above his station, nor explain why an old TV that used to be above , the bar's refrigerator (about where the woman's bed might have been) would turn itself off and on.
Whatever reasons exist to explain what's happening in Post 163 aren't enough to make a couple of women bar tenders be there alone when it gets dark.
