Earnestine and Hazel’s
Earnestine and Hazel’s is a bar in Memphis, Tennessee, built in 1893. Bar in Memphis; research record. The archive files it under haunted places and urban legend. The dossier holds 3 reported claims, 1 legend and 1 documented fact — documented record and retelling kept side by side. Access details are unverified — research before visiting.
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Is Earnestine and Hazel’s haunted?
The record holds 3 claims, 1 legend — filed as reported, not verified. The heaviest filing is classed documented legend. The archive documents the claim; it takes no position on the ghost.
The record — long form
On the day James Brown died — December 25, 2006 — two employees at Earnestine & Hazel's were talking about him at the bar when the jukebox switched itself on and played 'I Feel Good.' It is the most-told story in a building that has accumulated more of them per square foot than almost any address in Memphis: a South Main dive bar whose jukebox reportedly plays, unprompted, the song the room was just thinking about.
The building earned the layers. Erected in the late nineteenth century as a church, it spent the 1930s as a pharmacy and sundry store owned by Abe Plough — whose hair-straightening concoction, and later Coppertone fortune, made him one of Tennessee's great philanthropists — and the floors above housed a beauty salon run by two cousins, Earnestine Mitchell and Hazel Jones. When Plough's money came in, the record and the legend agree, he handed the building to the sisters.
The sisters' era
Earnestine and Hazel converted the downstairs to a cafe and kept the upstairs — part salon, part rooms rented to working women, the polite phrasing for what everyone at the time called a brothel. Earnestine's husband Andrew, a promoter known on the street as Sunbeam, ran Club Paradise nearby, and the acts he booked read like a Stax-era roster: B.B. King, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, Chuck Berry. The sets ended at the Paradise; the nights ended at Earnestine & Hazel's — the food, the stories, and the rooms upstairs.
The good decades ended with downtown's. Club Paradise boarded up with the rest of South Main in the seventies. Hazel died in 1995, Earnestine in 1998 — but the bar's second life had already begun: Russell George reopened it as a beer-and-burger joint on St. Patrick's Day 1993, put Soul Burgers on a pre-war flat-top and a jukebox of rare soul in the corner, and made a condemned block famous again. George, who struggled with illness and depression, later took his own life upstairs — a death the building's lore absorbed like everything else.
What witnesses file
Staff and patrons report the expected inventory — the upstairs piano playing in an empty room, figures on the stairs, voices after closing — but the jukebox is the filing cabinet's star exhibit. Beyond the James Brown night, the machine is said to have answered a divorce party with 'D-I-V-O-R-C-E' and exorcism talk with 'Sympathy for the Devil,' selections nobody admits to paying for. Skeptics note that jukeboxes misfire and stories improve; the staff file the incidents anyway, and the bar sells ghost tours upstairs where the brothel rooms were.
The reporters are credible in the way the archive prefers: longtime employees with nothing to gain but a good line. One bartender interviewed by Vice put thirteen years on the record — the piano heard alone, the presences felt — and concluded, 'Weird stuff happens here all the time.'
What remains
The bar still operates at 531 South Main — the Soul Burger still on the griddle, the jukebox still loaded, ghost tours still climbing to the rooms where the sisters' tenants worked and where Russell George died. CNN called it one of America's best dive bars; the paranormal press calls it one of its most haunted. In Memphis those are, by now, the same review.
The record of claims
Tennessee tourism records Earnestine and Hazel's haunted reputation — the Memphis dive bar that was a brothel upstairs and a sundries store below, now as famous for its ghosts as its Soul Burger. The building's lore is layered like its history: pharmacy, brothel, bar, and — if the reports hold — occupancy.
Staff and patrons report the jukebox playing unprompted — including songs seemingly timed to conversations, the claim that made the bar's ghost file famous. A haunted jukebox is perfect Memphis: the building's dead apparently keep their own taste in music, and they pay for it in nobody-knows-what. It remains the site's standing claim.
Reports describe footsteps and voices from the upstairs rooms of the former brothel — sounds from a floor that hasn't legally operated in decades. The upstairs is where Earnestine and Hazel's lore concentrates: the building's most storied rooms are the ones visitors can't rent anymore. The telling survives; the proof stays folklore.
Tennessee tourism records a haunted reputation. An old bar in Memphis, Tennessee gives the account a setting with real history behind the bar. The story is documented as legend — recorded and retold, never verified as fact. The account appears in 'Unique, Immersive Experiences at Haunted Destinations in…'. The tale is the site's other archive — oral, embroidered, and outlasting the documents.
Two accounts on file
Bar in Memphis; research record.
Dive-bar landmark with a haunted jukebox and a brothel past.
Preserve both source-backed variants; no automatic overwrite.
Discovery pass. Precise location, historical chronology and current visitor conditions require independent enrichment. Confidence concerns provenance only.
Historical enrichment pass from encyclopedia/official records; paranormal claims remain source-attributed reports, not verified events.
Preserve both source-backed variants; no automatic overwrite.
Documented history
The building dates to the 1890s and served as a pharmacy, bar and boarding house with a documented brothel upstairs. The bar in Memphis, Tennessee has a documented past — this entry belongs to that layer, not the lore. The fact is historically verified — the part of the file that doesn't need hedging. 'Earnestine & Hazel’s' documents the entry. The entry's timeline holds it; the lore holds the rest.
Verified historyWikipedia
Sources on file
- 01Unique, Immersive Experiences at Haunted Destinations in TennesseeTennessee Department of Tourist Development · tourism · A3
- 02Earnestine & Hazel’sWikipedia · encyclopedia · A4
Field notes & open questions
Discovery pass. Precise location, historical chronology and current visitor conditions require independent enrichment. Confidence concerns provenance only.