Arrow Rock

Judge Joseph Huston, a town commissioner, built the tavern in 1834 as the City Hotel — a two-and-a-half-story brick federal pile that picked up a store and a second-floor ballroom around 1840, the ballroom still carrying its original stenciled walls. The guest register of the town around it is the kind historians dream of: three Missouri governors (Claiborne F. Jackson and two Marmadukes, father and son), Dr. John Sappington of quinine fame, and George Caleb Bingham, who built his house there in 1837 and whose Election series — the paintings that fixed frontier democracy on canvas — may have drawn on scenes from the tavern's own common room.

The Santa Fe trade that built the place moved on, and Arrow Rock declined gracefully into an exhibit of itself: the Friends of Arrow Rock incorporated in 1959, the Baptist church became the Arrow Rock Lyceum's summer repertory theater, and the state historic site absorbed the rest. The Missouri Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution furnished the tavern in period antiques; it still serves lunch, which makes it a rare National Historic Landmark where you can order fried chicken.

The tavern's haunting file is unusually well staffed, because the witnesses are employees with shifts. Chef and proprietor Liz Huff, who took over in January 2009, has gone on record counting the encounters at 'a ton' — by her telling, experiences run up to six times a day. The inventory: a woman in a white gown seen as a reflection moving across the dining room door glass, with no one in the dining room; shadow figures; shuffling feet; phantom whistling that a waiter reported getting louder until, in his words, 'it freaked me out'; coats moving on racks; hanging pots banging in an empty kitchen.

The most-quoted sighting is Huff's couple in the parlor — seated together, awaiting water glasses she briefly wondered why no one had filled, gone by the time she looked twice. 'I just started laughing,' she told the reporter, which is the healthiest attitude in the file. The basement gets a different grade entirely: staff developed what they call the Basement Buddy system because no one likes going down alone, citing a heavy, oppressive feeling that the kitchen above does not share.

None of it is older, on the record, than the tavern's second century of operation — the reports cluster in the restaurant era, which is when there were people around to file them. The archive rates the accounts as workplace folklore in a building that earned its ghost stories the long way: 180 years of travelers, a ballroom upstairs, and a spring out back that watered the Santa Fe Trail. The figures, per the staff, are friendly upstairs and unwelcoming below — a distribution the file notes without commentary.

A town of eighty people curating the jump-off point of a continental trade route: the bluff, the spring, Bingham's house, the tavern still seating diners under the 1834 roof. The reported residents remain off the books — the only documented permanent population being the frontier the town stopped moving with.