“Ryan.”
Ryan Allen brewed beer into the dark, small hours of the morning. But someone — or something — whispered his own name into his ear. Gooseflesh prickled his arms. His eyes widened. His head turned. No one was there.
“That’s happened twice that I can remember,” Allen said. “I think that freaks me out a little bit because it shows me … that it’s like an entity on the other side that is aware of me as well.”
A Flyer Halloween tradition?
Soul & Spirits Brewery is usually a ghost town on Tuesdays. The taproom is just not open. But a friendly crowd of around 100 sipped beers, joked with friends, petted their dogs, and wrangled their kids there last week.
The Uptown brewery landed a WREG spot, the camera guy needed some B-roll on a schedule, so Soul & Spirits launched a one-hour, $1 beer special to pack the house. And they did.
The camera guy buzzed around the happy guests. They hoisted toasts to each other with mugs of gold and amber. The din of it all echoed cheerfully from the rafters over the big, glowing hall done up for the season — equal parts Oktoberfest flags and Halloween ghouls.
I was there for the dead, though. Well, ghosts. It was a singular feeling amongst the happy-hour frivolity. My fascination with dreadful unknowns had brought me once again to scout portals to the beyond that serve Memphians in the here and now.
Last year, it was Earnestine & Hazel’s. The paranormal investigation team with Historical Haunts Memphis guided me, Chris McCoy, the Flyer’s film and TV editor, and Abigail Morici, our managing editor, on a nighttime ghost hunt in one of the city’s most notoriously haunted places.
These experienced ghost hunters (or ghost fishers as we found out) have logged hours — days — in the pursuit of witnessing spirits of the Memphis dead. They knew the right questions to ask. They had amazing gear. They had attuned spirits. They had patience. They had access.
These folks were and remain professionals. Before that night was through, we had one bit of spooky evidence that I could not explain. A motion sensor near me flashed wildly in the upstairs bar — Nate’s Bar — though I had not moved a muscle. It was, really, my first ever paranormal encounter in a lifetime of fascination with the paranormal.
I am privileged to work at the Memphis Flyer. My editors trust me. Our mission is broad. I can choose what I want to write about (within parameters, of course, and if my pitch lands just right).
So I was lucky enough to put the pen to that paranormal adventure at Earnestine & Hazel’s last year and share it with our many amazing readers. This nerdy news guy got to don the guise of a paranormal adventure-seeker, stay up late with friends at the coolest bar in town, and sit in with seasoned ghost hunters as they plied their trade in dark, hallowed corners. I wish I could’ve shown my 15-year-old self what I was doing.
The Halloween cover of the Flyer was open this year, our editor Shara Clark told us months ago. I was in. I had no plan. But I’d make one. Maybe explore The Pig Man legend close to Meeman-Shelby Forest State Park? Maybe the Orpheum Theatre would let me write about Mary? Their ghost is the most famous in Memphis.
Then I recalled the ghosts of Soul & Spirits. Once upon a long-ago beer, Ryan toured me through the brew house. Among the giant silver tanks and miles of hoses, he pointed to the floor. Tiny footprints there could have only been made by children. It was impossible, though. A dark figure was seen regularly. My Ghost-y Sense cranked to 11.
My newspaper instincts created a bright red folder for these stories on my mind’s desktop and would not allow me to move them to the trash. This was perfect for our Halloween cover, I thought this year, and I could finally tell the tales.
Before we go any further here — the name Soul & Spirits has nothing to do with ghosts. It’s from a very old brewing phrase in which “malt is the soul of the beer, hop the spice, yeast the spirit, and water the body.”
Back to the ghosts, though. I did not plan to meet them at Soul & Spirits. My time last year with Historical Haunts taught me not to expect encounters; they were rare and sacred things.
So I arrived at Soul & Spirits that random Tuesday afternoon as a scribe only, a voice recorder and curiosity my only tools. A phone call would have sufficed for what I wanted to do. But I wanted to be there, to soak up the environment, wrap Ryan’s tales in the brewery’s dark spaces, its haunted, hissing sounds, the mysterious aromas of making beer. I did not know I’d leave with stories of my own.
Ryan Allen and the Haunted Brewery
The Soul & Spirits taproom seems effortlessly cool: the gold throne, the neon, the record bins, the mammoth hall with acres of gathering spaces, the never-ending tap wall. Walk west through the doors, though, and it all changes. The soft, gold-orange light yields to unforgiving white-blue of industrial fluorescents. The shift from the hospitality side of the house to the production side is stark, the lights thrown on at the end of a raucous party. Play ends. Work begins.
But the massive, tidy, sanitary brewery is the haunted heart of Soul & Spirits. It is also Ryan’s domain, where he knows every tank by name (Elvis, Aretha, and Otis, among others). He knows beer by heart, too. As we talked in the brewery last Tuesday, he rattled off beer science and beer history like a TV doctor: from the endosperm in barley grain to the tenants of Reinheitsgebot, Germany’s beer purity law from 1516. Ryan’s musician ear also knows every sound of that brewery, too.
“Did you hear that?!” Ryan interrupted himself mid-sentence. His eyebrows rose, eyes cut to another brewer, Jonah Dieckhaus, standing with us. Together, they turned in the same direction, toward pallets stacked with grain bags. Something clunked and rustled there, a sound perceptible but hard to define. “What do you think that was? It was not … I can hear a mouse. There’s a window in [the warehouse] that’s loose. It wasn’t that.”
They were having me on, right? Or not? Their simultaneous body language gave me pause, though. Brewers aren’t actors in my experience. If this was acting, it was superb.
“It’s … it’s … just gonna happen, okay?” Ryan said to me, seemingly satisfied a spirit was among us. He seemed also to be reassuring me, and maybe himself. Then, he addressed the room at large. “You’re cool. Hey, thank you. If you’re here, feel free to express yourself and show us that you’re here. We are talking about you, clearly. We’re standing in your spot, I guess.”
Ghost hands and feet
Turns out, those things that are “just gonna happen” at Soul & Spirits have happened to Ryan and Blair Perry, his wife, co-founder, and company CEO, since the beginning. When they got the keys to the building in 2018, they took pictures, of course. Orbs of light, believed by some in the paranormal world to be physical manifestations of spirits, appeared in shots from the boiler room. They saged the entire building to be safe.
Right at the “your spot” Ryan mentioned above were two names etched in the floor: Theodore and Willy. Close to that, the word “pussy” was etched, too. Before tanks ever moved in and as renovation work began, workers were finishing the floors near this spot on the floor. Ryan asked them to persevere “Theodore” and “Willy” but scrub out the other word. The floor spaces in between were scrubbed a pristine, clean, white concrete.
“About two days later, I was walking over here … I saw — clear as day — these footprints that looked like they’d been burned in the ground and we had just cleaned the floors,” Ryan said. “What’s particularly crazy about them is that they are — or it is — barefoot.”
He knelt, pointing to the remnant of a tiny, black footprint, toes and all, about half the size of his own. He pointed to another. The remainder of the prints have been lost to countless forklift trips, but Ryan remembered them clear as day.
“It was right, right, left, left, right, right,” he says. “I grabbed someone else, one of the guys that was working back here, and I was like, have you ever seen this in concrete before? He said no. I said that it looks like it’s burned in.
“One day, the floor’s all cleaned and then one day you come in and there are these kid footprints that showed up? Right, right, left, left, right, right. And you start thinking, well, what does that … ? They’re skipping. Right, right, left, left.
“So I can’t surmise that Theodore and Willy were kids, but there’s a child here for sure. I don’t know who it is.”
Black, burned footprints are rare (if not unique) in the ghost-experience pantheon. But the phenomena would happen again at Soul & Spirits.
Working in the dish room one day, Blair saw a shadow cross along the bottom of the door that led to the brewery as if someone walked on the other side. She called out, thinking it was Ryan. It was not. It was not anyone. No one was back there.
“We immediately came back here to look and I went, ‘Oh, that’s new,’” Ryan said. “There were two hand prints right here [on the other side of the door] like someone was looking down underneath the door.”
Those handprints had been burned into the white concrete floor, just like those tiny footprints had been.
The dark figure
About 20 yards from the footprints and Theodore and Willy, Ryan routinely monitors a set of tanks, always facing the same way.
“I can see it out of the corner of my eye,” he said. “You’ll see someone move, and I look over, and I can just see the trail end of that — whatever it is — moving behind the tank down there. It’s just a big, dark figure.”
Ryan stared at the tanks to show me, motioned with a hand down roughly where “Theodore” and “Willy” were etched on the floor. He said the figure he sees is about as tall as a bracket on a far wall, about six feet tall, he said.
“And it just walks left to right behind that tank?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t say ‘walk,’” he said. “I don’t see feet.”
A similar figure, Ryan said, can be seen as a sort of mist just beyond the dark recess of an open warehouse door.
“Sometimes you have a feeling like something’s down there, something’s watching you, and that’s when you look,” he said. “I’m kind of getting that chill right now.”
“Me, too,” I said. “I think I’m freaking myself out.”
“I do feel like there’s something down there right now,” Ryan said, eyes locked on the space. “I feel like I’m being watched right now.”
Sounds, smells, and “Big Guy”
Liz Moak, a brewery employee, said she hears giggles while she’s working in the dish room and laughter in other places around Soul & Spirits. She’ll walk through air pockets that smell of cigarette smoke.
“One time I was here cleaning in the middle of the day and all the lights were off,” she said. “Right there on that door … hand prints.”
She described them as adult-sized prints, too high for children. I asked what side of the door they were on, as if that mattered somehow.
“I was not going to find out because it was literally just me here,” Liz said. “I was not going to find out on my own.”
Jonah, the brewer we met earlier, said he hears whistling in the building. He described the smoke smell “like an old smoker’s house.” You can walk in it, he said, walk out of it, reverse, smell it again, then it’s gone in 10 minutes. He said his practicality alarms him first to concerns of an electrical fire somewhere. He investigates, he said, but in the half-dozen times he’s experienced the smoke smell, nothing’s been wrong. When I asked him about ghosts, Jonah said he just doesn’t think about it.
Blair said she has heard chittering conversations when she’s opened Soul & Spirits alone. She’s smelled the cigarettes and another fragrance she described as “old lady.” She’s seen the dark figures walking through the brew tanks. She’s heard whistling that sounded like an Otis Redding song.
“I know there are multiples here,” she said, meaning more than one spirit in Soul & Spirits. “There’s probably a lot of spirits or souls that have found a little safe haven here. I’m like, ‘Hey, I mean you no harm. If you’re here, that’s fine. Just don’t scare the crap out of me.’”
But one did. Halloween time at Soul & Spirits means it’s “Big Guy” season. He’s a nine-foot-tall, hooded-skeleton-ghost-ghoul mash-up, like what your neighbor gets for trick-or-treaters. Big Guy also shrieks when you trip a motion sensor.
Blair was, once again, opening by herself, she said, and worked nowhere near Big Guy. But he started to shriek anyway. Stunned then, she called Ryan to make sure Big Guy was not on a timer. He wasn’t. Looking back now, “That is creepy as hell,” she said.
For Ryan, he said he can still hear that whisper in his ear, a man’s voice. Also, a late-night woman’s scream pushed him out the door one night. Another time, it was a late-night woman’s moan that did the trick.
One final spirit
Ryan pulled us fresh pints on my haunted tour of Soul & Spirits last week. That’s why I was in the bathroom when the night’s final spirit arrived.
“WHOOOAAAAA! Oh my god! WHAAAT?! TOBY! Dude, get out here!”
The four or five last folks to leave raised a commotion in the taproom. When I arrived on the scene, they stood around a plastic skeleton holding a can of beer. He’d been sitting with a mate on a high ledge overlooking the entryway.
“That skeleton just got pushed off!” someone told me. “It’s been up there for weeks!”
Ryan stood over the plastic bones, looking from them to the ledge, searching for logic. None came.
“He has never fallen off before!” Ryan says. “He would have fallen off 400 times before.”
“Thin” Memphis
Ryan waved from his truck as I took some exterior nighttime shots of the brewery. As his taillights faded, I faced the building, breathed deeply, and thought about “thin places,” where our world and others may collide. Soul & Spirits must be one of these.
My head placed digital map pins on other “thin,” Memphis places: the Orpheum, Rhodes College, Earnestine & Hazel’s, The Arcade, and scores of others unknown to me.
I thought, then of the upcoming Samhain, or Halloween, when tradition tells us that the veil between the physical and spiritual worlds is at its thinnest. All of those thin places on my map would get even thinner on Halloween, the veil pulled almost all the way back.
I thought of that unexplainable sound we heard at the tanks. I thought of the skeleton falling to the floor. I thought of the scores of creepy stories Ryan told me that had not changed from the first time he told me more than a year ago to that random Tuesday.
Soul & Spirits was indeed a “thin” place and there it stood before me, answers to my life’s paranormal curiosities waiting within. It will be a lively place for souls and spirits this Halloween, I thought. But just then it was a real-world creepy ghost town under the street lamp glow. No one around at all.
So I shuddered, smiled, and walked on. My fancy loosened as I approached my car and some of Jonah’s rationality took hold. It can all probably be explained, I thought. Then, I walked into an air pocket that smelled of cigarette smoke.