The Lower Greenville Snuffer’s location is supposedly haunted. Everybody knows this. Even after the original space was demolished in 2013 and rebuilt, the ghost still lingers. The origin of the haunting is a bit murky but the most popular claim is that the spirit of a man who was murdered in the building, when it was a pool hall, still roams the space.
I reached out to a handful of Snuffer’s staff members who have had encounters with the notorious ghost. These are their chilling tales.
“I’ve had my share of ghost encounters at the Snuffer’s on Greenville Avenue. I’ve heard someone calling my name. I’ve seen the lamps rock and shake. We’ve had employees who’ve heard footsteps in the hallways late at night. The rumor is there are two ghosts in the restaurant. One of them is the spirit of a gentleman who was stabbed or maybe shot in The Easy Parlor (the restaurant that was there before Snuffer’s.) The story is that they were having a going-away party in the biergarten when, all of a sudden, a fight broke out; the guy was shot or stabbed. He walked into the restaurant and ended up on the bathroom floor with the door open. So years later, before the remodel, managers would sit at the table closest to the bathroom to do their closing paperwork. No one was in the building, but they would hear footsteps walk down the hallway, the bathroom door would open, but it would never close.” — Bradley Anderson, systems analyst at Firebird Restaurant Group, number of years as an employee: 27
“You know, every day you would get this uneasy feeling as you walk down the hallway from the front room to the back room. One time, I had a lady stop me in the restaurant and say that whatever is in here is following me around. But the ‘face in the mirror’ still sticks with me. This happened probably 10 years ago or so. We would always have people stop by the restaurant and want to take pictures. It happened all the time, and that was nothing out of the ordinary. But one day, a customer snapped a picture of the front door, and right next to the door, up high, close to the ceiling was a mirror. When the customer was reviewing the pictures, they saw the face. It was clear as day, there was a face in the mirror, almost like a skeleton, but you could see a nose, eyes, and it appeared to be wearing a coat.” — Frank Knight, general manager, number of years as an employee: 25
“One night, I was closing down the store and saw a black silhouette over in the secondary bar area. Typically, we use that bar for larger events, but I just thought it was the bartender working, cleaning up, so I didn’t think anything of it. A few minutes passed, and I went to talk to the person and make sure every thing was going okay with their closing procedures. They were gone. All of a sudden, I had a cold rush over here and an indescribably creepy feeling. In that moment, I 100 percent knew it was a ghost.” — Corey Holmes, general manager, number of years as an employee: 10
“Everyone talks about the ghost, but I didn’t really believe in the whole thing at first. I was just playing along with the guest experiences. And then I experienced it for myself. One night, another manager and I were shutting down the restaurant. We shut off the kitchen lights and were walking out the front door when all of sudden the lights in the kitchen came back on. We both looked at each other knowing we were the only people there and decided to just go back in and turn the lights off one more time. As we were walking out the door the second time, the kitchen lights came back on again. I was like ‘nope, gotta go,’ and we decided to leave them on.” — Ross Fortson, bar and hospitality manager, number of years an employee: 1
“My friend and I were just sitting down in a booth eating a salad during our lunch break. I had a straw in my water and every now and then, my straw would just move. It wasn’t like we were bumping the table to make it or move, the straw literally moved by itself. It kept happening over and over again. I went to grab the straw to make it stop, and it moved away from me. We got so scared that we had to move booths.” — Maria Hernandez, server, number of years as an employee: 2.5
