Small, historic Missouri town holds its secrets

The two-story, red brick Old Tavern Restaurant in Arrow Rock, Mo., sits much as it did in 1834 when the town was a stopping spot for Westward travelers. Arrow Rock is on a bluff that once overlooked a Missouri River heavy with traffic.

“Arrow Rock used to be the bustling city on the river,” said Kathy Borgman, executive director of Friends of Arrow Rock, Inc. “But the river changed.”

So has Arrow Rock.

Today Arrow Rock, population 79, is a tourist stop home to the historic Lyceum Theatre, antique shops, museums, a number of bed and breakfasts and the tavern – the haunted tavern.

A brick sidewalk runs across the front of The Old Tavern Restaurant. The building has been home to a tavern, inn and mercantile. It’s now run by the state of Missouri as a historic site and contracted out as a restaurant. Bunny Thomas, who now runs a bed and breakfast in town, knows there are ghosts at the Old Tavern Restaurant – she used to live with them.

“There are ghosts there,” she said

Her first experience was in 1976, when she accepted a job as a waitress at the Old Tavern.

“At that time, it had swinging doors, and we were getting ready for lunch and I walked through those doors and a very male, very sexy voice said ‘hello there,’” she said. “And I looked around, and no one was there.”

At the time, nobody working there believed she had heard a disembodied voice.

“I talked to Clay (Marsh, then the proprietor) and my daughter. I said ‘somebody spoke to me’ and they said ‘what are you drinking?’ And I hadn’t been.”

They all eventually discovered it wasn’t uncommon for someone invisible to speak to them. Lynn Jackson has worked at the restaurant for four years. She’s also heard her share of noises.

“We had a full room, and there was a loud noise and I went up(stairs) and nothing was moved,” she said. “There are just noise and things being moved.”

Does the restaurant have ghosts?

“Yes,” Lynn said. “We have.”

In the 1980s, when Bunny was going through a divorce, she lived in an apartment above the restaurant, and her experiences escalated to more than just name calling and doors shutting.

“The very first night I moved in, everybody came down and played cards,” she said. “When everybody left and I got undressed and got in bed and I heard the stairs squeaking and I heard the floor squeaking, and the next thing I knew, the floor at the foot of my bed was squeaking. And I sat up in bed, and there was nobody there. I put a table over that spot after that.”

But Bunny’s upstairs apartment, now the restaurant’s office, isn’t the only spot people have seen a presence.

“The last thing that happened was right before we left,” Bunny said. It was 2000, the last year Clay and Bunny ran the restaurant. “We were shutting down. I would always go around and check everything. I walked into the taproom and saw a woman standing there. I thought she was a customer. I went in to tell her I’d let her out and then there was nobody there. She was a large lady dressed in a paisley-type dress. She had a round face. Here hair was pulled back like it was in a bun.”

There’s a legend associated with this ghostly woman. When the building was a stagecoach stop in the 1840s, a woman traveling alone got a room. In the middle of the night, the other guests heard a lot of moaning and a baby crying. The next morning they found bloody spots and bloody footprints down the stairs, through the snow and to the river. But neither the woman nor a baby were ever found.

Throughout the decades, many people have heard a baby crying in the tavern and, although Bunny said she’s never felt threatened in the tavern, “I’ve heard grown men say you couldn’t pay them to go in there after dark.”