The Bellin Building

The ghost of Dr. Julius Bellin, the prominent surgeon who built this 1916 Chicago-style office tower in downtown Green Bay, plays tricks with the building's rare manually controlled elevator and appears as a gray-haired man in a suit in the hallways. The same figure has also been spotted at the nearby Astor House Bed and Breakfast.

Tenants in the Bellin Building have described a man in his late fifties, gray-haired, wearing a suit, standing in the hallway. He looks real. Then he's gone.

The building opened in 1916 at the corner of East Walnut and South Washington in downtown Green Bay, designed by architect Perry T. Benson in Chicago commercial style, the first of its kind in the area. Dr. Julius Bellin, one of Green Bay's most prominent surgeons, built it for medical offices through the Bellin-Buchanan Building Company. Six floors of steel and concrete skeleton on piles driven eighty feet underground, the exterior clad in terra cotta on the north and east sides. In 1924, the eighth and ninth floors were added as a penthouse. Bellin owned the building from 1915 until 1972. He died in 1928, but his name stuck.

The building's history runs surprisingly deep for a medical office tower. Green Bay Packers executives Gerald Clifford and W. Webber Kelly kept offices there. Vince Lombardi announced he was leaving the Packers for the Washington Redskins from this building. It's a waypoint on the Packers Heritage Trail today.

The ghost story is simpler than Lombardi's exit. Dr. Bellin, according to local paranormal researcher Tim Friess and multiple tenants over the decades, never stopped doing rounds. The elevator is the main stage for his activity. The building houses one of the few remaining manually controlled elevators in the United States, built in 1947, and Dr. Bellin treats it as a toy. Visitors get taken up when they pressed down. Doors open on floors nobody selected. People get stranded between floors for no mechanical reason. Green Bay Ghost Tours, run by the author of Haunted Green Bay, includes the building as a stop. Their guides say Dr. Bellin "likes to play games in the elevator."

Beyond the elevator, office workers over the years have heard footsteps in empty hallways, found lights on in locked offices, and felt sharp temperature drops near the building's older sections. The ghost is described as playful rather than threatening. Friess and others note that Dr. Bellin was known for his charitable work in life, and his ghost seems to maintain that approachable personality.

Dr. Bellin also turns up at the Astor House Bed and Breakfast nearby. His figure has been spotted in the parlor room in the early morning hours. Whether that's the same ghost making house calls or separate wishful thinking is an open question. The Bellin Building sits at the heart of downtown Green Bay, now housing offices, restaurants including the Black and Tan Grille and Daily Buzz Espresso Bar, and event venues. Few buildings in downtown Green Bay have changed as little since construction. The doctor who built it seems to feel the same way about leaving.