The Bird & Bottle Inn

The Bird and Bottle Inn in Garrison dates to 1761 and served as a Revolutionary War headquarters. The ghost of Emily Warren Roebling, who helped complete the Brooklyn Bridge, reportedly rearranges furniture, hums in the hallways, and fills the inn with lavender perfume.

Emily Warren Roebling helped finish the Brooklyn Bridge. Before that, she spent childhood summers at her great-grandparents' place on the Albany Post Road, a 1761 tavern in Garrison that her family built from scratch. Staff at what's now called the Bird and Bottle Inn think she never really left.

The inn started as Warren's Stop, a stagecoach rest between New York City and Albany run by Samuel Warren. Travelers changed horses here, ate, slept, and moved on. When the Revolution broke out in 1776, Warren's son-in-law Absalom Nelson took over after marrying Esther Warren, and the place became Nelson's Tavern. The Continental Army seized it as a regional headquarters. British soldiers drank here too, before and after.

The building closed in 1832 and sat quiet for over a century until it reopened as the Bird and Bottle in 1940. (The "bird" references the wild pheasants in the surrounding woods.) In the 1960s, Skitch Henderson, Johnny Carson's orchestra conductor on The Tonight Show, bought the place and visited regularly.

But the ghost predates all of that. Emily Warren, who visited as a child and later became famous for overseeing Brooklyn Bridge construction when her husband Washington Roebling fell ill, has apparently taken up permanent residence. A portrait of her hangs in the library lounge, and the room named after her on the second floor seems to be where she's most active.

Guests wake up to find their belongings moved to different spots overnight. Doors lock from the inside of empty rooms. The curtains in Emily's room rearrange themselves, pulled aside as if someone wants to look out at the view of the Hudson Valley. A chair repositions itself near the window. Staff who close up at night report a hazy figure in the upstairs hallway, and some hear a woman humming or singing softly after hours.

The smell of lavender perfume drifts through the halls with no source. It shows up in clusters, strong enough that multiple people notice it in the same week, then nothing for months.

Continental Army soldiers reportedly left their mark too. Heavy bootfalls on the stairs, the kind made by men in riding boots, echo through the building when nobody's walking. Given that the tavern served as a military headquarters during the Revolution, the boots make a certain kind of sense.

What makes the Bird and Bottle unusual is how domestic the haunting feels. Emily isn't slamming doors or screaming. She's rearranging furniture, humming songs, making sure the curtains frame the view she liked as a child. It's less a haunting and more a woman who decided 265 years wasn't enough time with her favorite house.

The inn still operates as a restaurant and event venue at 1123 Old Albany Post Road. The food gets consistently good reviews. Whether Emily joins you for dinner is another question.