Restaurant feeds on appetite for apparitions

Poogan’s Porch is only the third most haunted restaurant in the country, according to Charleston, S.C., tour guide Barbara Burns of Summerville.

She wasn’t too sure about the other two, except that one was in Savannah.

They must be beauts.

Burns told our Ghost Tour this week that the restaurant was once the home of spinster schoolteacher sisters Elizabeth and Zoe St. Armand. “They were not social butterflies,” Burns said in a bit of Southern understatement. In 1945, the more sociable sister, Elizabeth, passed away leaving Zoe all alone in the big house. She used to stand on the second floor asking passers-by if they had seen her sister.

Zoe died in 1954, but, apparently never left the premises. New people (lucky them) moved in and heard noises, saw things moving – you have seen all the movies.

Not surprisingly, the family moved out and the building eventually became a popular restaurant. A manager was talking to a customer one night when the customer turned on her heels and walked though the wall.

Check, please.

Another manager saw a barstool thrown across the room. Customers at the Mills House hotel across the street reported seeing a scowling woman in the second-floor window. Several called police to report seeing the woman in the closed restaurant.

“The first time, the Charleston police came speeding to the scene, with sirens screaming and lights flashing. As the reports grew, the police dropped the siren, then the lights, but drove up slowly to see what was happening,” Burns said.

The famous Ghost Tour of Charleston was provided by the semifamous John Purcell who has turned Southern hospitality into an art form. John, many will remember, was a South Thomaston selectman who ran for Congress with about 50 cents against Linda Bean, who had substantially more cash. He lost.

He now hawks real estate and operates a unique cigar-martini bar, Club Habana. When the half-frozen folks from Maine drop by, John provides single malt, cask-strength whiskey and cigars, many of which are legal. He insists on providing a care package of almost-legal cigars for the remainder of the trip.

An ardent whiskeyphile, Purcell forgave the Mainer who ordered a mere Dewar’s scotch at his posh bar. But he left the room until the inferior libation was consumed.

The meals and drinks were not enough, so Purcell insisted on the Ghost Tour. About 20 of us gathered for the walking tour.

It was cold that night and a little colder in St. Michael’s Alley. That was because a recorded 140 duels were fought there. It was these ghosts that lowered the temperature, Burns said. I put on a jacket and looked carefully into the shadows.

Burns took us to a house, which was haunted for a century before it was purchased as a priest’s house. “No one never heard another sound,” she said.

She showed pictures taken during other tours with strange shapes hovering over the cemeteries and graveyards. Double exposures?

One picture shows what could be a woman kneeling over a grave. When Burns went back to the grave with the picture, she found out that a child, Sue Howard Handy, had died 100 years to the day that the picture was taken.

It was the graveyard of St Phillip’s Church. There was so much publicity over the picture that the church issued a comment that “the only ghost is the Holy Ghost.”

Because the city moved headstones, but not the coffins underneath, for several business expansions, the ghosts are unhappy, Burns said.

When the Citadel expanded its football stadium, bones from ancient mariners were discovered. In keeping with ancient tradition, the bones were buried during low tide so they would be covered by water as well as dirt.

When pirates were captured in Charleston, they were hanged and left on the gallows for days as a lesson to others, then buried in the ocean. Their unhappy souls could account for some strange sights and sounds, she said.

By then, I was seeing ghosts behind every gravestone.

I insisted on going back to Purcell’s bar. I let him order the single malt, cask-strength potion.

I needed it.

Needless to say, I never made reservations at Poogan’s Porch.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.