The Whitney

Gordon W. Lloyd designed the house between 1890 and 1894 at a cost near $400,000, with furnishings and artwork adding another $550,000; the Detroit Free Press, reviewing it in February 1894, allowed that it eclipsed every other house on Woodward and called it the most pretentious modern home in the state. The register of deaths inside it is short and real: Whitney himself in 1900; his brother-in-law John McLaughlin, who had moved in with the widowed Sara; and Sara Whitney — his second wife and his first wife Flora's sister — who died there in 1917 after an eighteen-month illness. The family gave the mansion to the Wayne County Medical Society in 1932, rent-free; the Visiting Nurse Association followed. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 and has been a restaurant since 1986, its dining rooms scattered through the family's old parlors and bedrooms.

The reports predate the restaurant by decades — staff at the medical society and the Visiting Nurse Association were already trading stories when the building was offices — and they cluster with suspicious courtesy around the family's own geography. Figures are reported on the staircases and in the second-floor rooms; the 1894 elevator, which should need an operator, is said to run between floors unbidden and arrive with its door open on empty cars; footsteps file in overhead where no one is walking. Witnesses and the house's own lore attach the names David and Sara to the figures, with some retellings promoting a Grace as well — the file notes the roster is larger than the death register. Restaurant staff add their own log: place settings disturbed, voices after close, a presence felt at the bar. None of it rises past anecdote, but the anecdote has now had thirty years of dining service to mature in.

The Whitney now serves dinner in the rooms where the family died, and the third-floor bar is openly named the GhostBar — Detroit's only drinking establishment that lists its resident dead as décor. House historians keep the count carefully: three documented deaths in the mansion, all natural, all in bed or near it. Whether Mr. Whitney still rides his elevator is a claim the file logs without verdict; it is, at minimum, the only elevator in the archive with a witness list and a named operator who died in 1900.