In Brief
Belvoir Winery in Liberty, Missouri pours wine inside the old Missouri State Odd Fellows Home, where a real skeleton named George stands in a case in the tasting room. He is not the part that unsettles the staff. The children are.
The Full Story
The skeleton in the tasting room at Belvoir Winery in Liberty, Missouri has a name and a job. They call him George. He stands in a display case while guests sip wine a few feet away, and on wedding days the tradition is to bring him flowers for luck.
George was a real man, an Odd Fellow who died sometime in the 1880s and signed his bones away before he went. Every fraternal lodge in the order kept a skeleton named George; blindfolded initiates were marched up to him and shown what waited at the end of things. This one outlasted his lodge and ended up here, in the home the Odd Fellows built and ran for nearly a century.
It was a campus, not a building. The Odd Fellows started in an old resort hotel built over mineral springs; it burned to the ground in 1900, during an attempt to thaw frozen pipes, and they replaced it with something built to never burn again. What grew up around it was an orphanage, a school, a hospital, a nursing home with a morgue in the basement, and a working farm, all on one stretch of ground outside Liberty. Hundreds of children and elderly members lived their last years there. Nearly 600 of them are buried in a cemetery still on the property. The winery and its guest rooms sit in the old orphanage and school, and it is the children, not George, that the people who work there keep meeting.
Owner Jesse Leimkuehler says he has seen a small boy in a red shirt, blue knickers, and brown boots by the women's bathroom fireplace, and a woman who shows up in the library. Staff report doors that open by themselves and "the sound of children running and giggling on the second floor." Sing a nursery rhyme in the old orphanage wing, and they say a chattering answer comes back. One staircase is worn down on a single side, scooped out by orphans who climbed it single-file to bed, night after night, for decades.
Not all of it is gentle. Near the old hospital, ghost-history accounts describe an older man who lingers, dark and brooding, nothing like the children running upstairs. In 2013 a SyFy crew spent a night in the place. While one of the property's two pianos was being played, they heard the second one playing somewhere else, with no one at it. A glass shattered. In the basement morgue an investigator was grabbed. A recorder left running in a bunker on the grounds came back with a child's voice on it.
George knew his bones would be put to use. He agreed to it. The children never agreed to anything, and they are the ones who stayed.
