Bodega Brew Pub
A bar in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Bodega Brew Pub is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Bar associated with documented cultural history. It sits in the archive under haunting reports. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend, every one filed as account rather than fact. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip.
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Is Bodega Brew Pub haunted?
The record holds 1 claim, 1 legend — filed as reported, not verified. The heaviest filing is classed local folklore. The archive documents the claim; it takes no position on the ghost.
The record — long form
The ghost predates the beer. The brick building on Fourth Street in downtown La Crosse dates to the late 1800s; in the 1890s it held Malin's Pool and Sample Room, and local lore has its owner, Paul Malin, hanging himself on the premises in 1901 — a death the retellings assume and the documentation has not caught. After his death the building ran as the Union Saloon; today it is the Bodega Brew Pub, a long-running taproom on the city's short list of most-haunted addresses.
What employees say
The reports cluster where bar ghost stories do: slamming doors, objects moved or fallen, a cold spot a customer claimed moved through her in the basement, and the occasional apparition attributed to Malin himself. The best story is structural: a former employee closing alone claimed a stack of basement bricks toppled overnight and was found neatly restacked the next morning, though the same employee had been last out and first in. Wisconsin's tourism office carries the pub on its ghost-tour map; the management, for balance, has told reporters they have never personally seen anything weird.
The file keeps the verdict open the way the record does: a Victorian commercial block with a documented string of saloons, one alleged suicide that anchors every version, and a century of staff who keep reporting that the basement resents being closed alone.
The record of claims
Local lore associates a former pool-hall owner with the building. Bodega Brew Pub, a bar in La Crosse, Wisconsin, keeps the story on the menu alongside everything else it serves. It survives as local folklore, which is to say it survives because people keep telling it. The report is preserved in sources like 'Haunted History: 9 Ghost Tours Throughout Wisconsin'. The haunting is unproven and unfired: it keeps showing up for work anyway.
Local lore associates a former pool-hall owner with the building. The bar's reports are the kind old establishments accumulate — footsteps after close, presences in empty rooms. The claim is neighborhood knowledge — retold locally, verified nowhere. The report is preserved in sources like 'Haunted History: 9 Ghost Tours Throughout Wisconsin'. Every community keeps one story like this; this is theirs.
Sources on file
- 01Haunted History: 9 Ghost Tours Throughout WisconsinWisconsin Department of Tourism · tourism · A3
Field notes & open questions
Discovery pass. Earliest attestation, primary history, precise location and current access require independent enrichment.