BANGOR – Andrew Taber had deja vu Thursday morning.

There was Al Brady, lying dead in the middle of Central Street, again – just like he had been on Oct. 12, 1937.

Only this time, the bullets weren’t real and the gangster was an actor instead of Public Enemy No. 1.

Taber operates a watch repair shop that overlooks the spot where FBI agents gunned down the notorious gangster Brady and his cohorts.

On that eventful October morning 63 years ago, Taber rounded the corner from State Street to find Brady sprawled across the streetcar tracks, his body riddled with bullets. The jeweler was a 15-year-old high school sophomore when he inadvertently wandered into history.

“I was here that day,” Taber reportedly told surprised film crew members as he arrived to open his shop Thursday. When the 79-year-old man introduced himself, the crew arranged to film an impromptu interview to augment their re-enactment of the Brady Gang shootout for the History Channel.

The story of the dramatic end to the notorious Indiana gang, wanted for three murders and a series of grocery store and bank robberies, is legendary in Bangor. A plaque on the sidewalk outside the Friars’ Bakehouse commemorates the event. And hometown author Stephen King included a version in one of his novels.

Brady and his cohorts, Clarence Lee Shaffer Jr. and Rhuel James Dalhover, came to Maine for the same reasons many tourists venture Down East in early October – fall foliage and seafood. They also were looking for a tommy gun.

On Oct. 5, 1937, Dalhover arranged to purchase it from Everett “Shep” Hurd, the 42-year-old owner of Dakin’s Sporting Goods Co. at 25 Central St.

Hurd told Dalhover to come pick up the gun in a week or so, and the store owner, who suspected the men were not the Ohio residents they’d claimed to be, went to the state police, who alerted the FBI.

When the gang came to pick up the gun the next Tuesday morning, a dozen of J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men were waiting for them.

Dalhover was captured inside the store and later executed. Shaffer was shot 23 times before falling on the cobblestones outside the store.

Their guns drawn, agents approached the stolen 1937 Buick double-parked a few doors down from Dakin’s.

Brady was shot and killed when he was ordered out of the car. He got off four shots and ran several feet before collapsing onto the streetcar tracks.

The History Channel did not come to Maine looking for gangsters; it came looking for ghosts. And, the ghosts of Brady and Shaffer do “haunt” the street where they were killed, according to Dick Shaw, editorial page assistant for the Bangor Daily News, who has done extensive research on the Brady Gang. Shaw was on-site consultant for the re-enactment.

“Every time I drive through here, I feel the presence of those two people,” he said during a break in the filming. “Actually, there are three ghosts. Even though he didn’t die here, Dalhover’s spirit is here, too.”

Late last fall, the cable network contacted Ryan King, who works for Maine Public Broadcasting Corp., after reading about the tour he organized for the Bangor Historical Society. A BDN story about “Downtown Bangor by Lamplight: A Ghostly Candlelight Walking Tour,” picked up by wire services and reprinted in a Los Angeles newspaper, led Graystone Productions to the amateur historian.

The shootout with Brady was one of five segments shot this week for the cable network’s Haunted History series. The show is scheduled to be broadcast on Friday, June 8.

In addition to the “ghosts” of the Brady Gang, producers throughout the week filmed segments about former Bangor Mayor Samuel Dale, Col. Jonathan Buck, Sarah Ware, and the wife of a lighthouse keeper who reportedly haunts her former home on Seguin Island.

Dale died under suspicious circumstances in 1871 in the Thomas A. Hill House in Bangor and was suspected of embezzling money intended for the victims of the Great Chicago Fire. Dale’s spirit is reported to live upstairs in the house, now home to the city’s historical society.

Buck, who founded Bucksport, the river town that bears his name, reportedly testified against a woman in the late 1700s who was found guilty of witchcraft. When a rough, whitish outline appeared on Buck’s gravestone more than 60 years later, the tale of “The Witch’s Curse” became local legend.

Ware, who also lived in Bucksport, disappeared on Sept. 17, 1898, at the age of 52. Her body was found two weeks later off a remote, wooded lane, partially decomposed, her jaw broken and her skull smashed. The murder remains unsolved, and, although her skull was laid to rest than more than two years ago, having been held by the state as evidence, the legend persists that she wanders the wood searching for her head.

The lighthouse keeper’s young wife was lonely and unhappy, so her husband had a piano moved to their home on the remote island off Popham Beach.

But the woman had only one piece of sheet music, which she played over and over again. The repetition of the music drove her husband mad, and he reportedly murdered her with an ax and destroyed the piano. Sailors passing by claim they can still hear her playing the tune.

To the best of knowledge, no one has ever claimed to see Brady’s ghost stumble along the streets of Bangor. The streetcar tracks and cobblestones on Central Street were covered with asphalt long ago. One of the buildings peppered with gunfire was torn down and never replaced.

Yet Shaw praised the crew’s efforts to be as historically accurate as possible.

“It’s nice that Hollywood is finally noticing the Brady Gang, and I was most impressed with their attention to detail,” Shaw said Thursday evening after spending the afternoon with the film crew as it shot at Brady’s grave in Mount Hope Cemetery. “It was eerie to see Brady walking down this lonely road to his own unmarked grave at the back of the cemetery.”

Except for shooting in March instead of October and substituting a Packard for the gang’s Buick, the company paid close attention to detail in re-creating the incident, he said. Throughout Thursday morning, production officials peppered Shaw with questions about which gangster carried what kind of gun and how and where the bodies fell.

Most of the people working on the production were looking for a way to stay warm. Actors shivered and searched for a sliver of sun between takes. History buffs watched for inaccuracies, while curious passers-by peered out of shop doorways where they sought shelter from the wind. Motorists waited patiently as Bangor police officers stopped cars periodically while the camera was rolling.

Brothers Kenneth and Donald of the Friars’ Bakehouse joked about giving Al Brady “last rites,” but helped chip more than 2 inches of ice off the sidewalk to uncover the plaque marking the site near where the gangster died. The bakers also let the production crew run electrical cords through a shop window and borrow electricity.

AZ, the ginger-colored cat who surveyed the action from the window of the Briar Patch shop, appeared unimpressed. Since sound effects will be added in postproduction, the rat-a-tat-tat of tommy guns did not disturb the tabby’s slumber. The Fourth of July parade causes the cat more consternation than “gangsters” on the streets of Bangor, according to her owner, Cathy Anderson.

Ned Miller, director of photography, got into the spirit of the shooting. He shouted orders at the five actors portraying the three gangsters and two G-men.

He focused on their gray shadows cast menacingly across a manhole cover. Then, as an FBI man pointed a machine gun at the fallen Brady, Miller hoisted the camera to his shoulder and moved in for a tight shot.

“Shoot, dance and die,” he barked.

The lawman’s shoulder shook with the reverberations of his tommy gun, and the gangster’s body convulsed as the imaginary bullets hit him.

Taber the jeweler traveled back in time.