In Brief
On snowy February nights at Elevator Brewery in Columbus, Ohio, staff say bare footprints appear in fresh snow where no one has walked. The story blames a woman who stabbed a man inside the door in 1909, then froze in the storm. No record proves any of it happened.
The Full Story
On snowy February nights, the staff at Elevator Brewery & Draught Haus in downtown Columbus, Ohio say bare footprints appear in the fresh snow outside the front door. Two small prints, pressed into untouched white where no one has walked, and people claim to watch them form in front of their eyes. Inside, a ball of light is said to drift through the rooms. Both belong to the same story, and the story starts on a cold February night in 1909.
The way it's told, a Colonel named Randolph Pritchard was drinking at the saloon that filled this room back then. Pritchard was an infamous womanizer, and that night someone called him out onto the street, where a woman he had wronged stabbed him. He stumbled back through the door, collapsed, and bled to death just inside it. The woman ran off into the storm, leaving only those two small bare footprints in the snow, and the legend says she froze to death before morning.
A large clock hung on the front of the saloon. It stopped at 10:05, the minute Pritchard died, and stayed frozen for years. When a restaurant took over the space in the mid-1920s, it simply named itself after the broken clock: The Clock. The name lasted until 1994.
The room they all inherited is genuinely grand. At its center is a 45-foot mahogany back-bar, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and anchored by Italian onyx columns, that won a blue ribbon at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and survived a fire in 1903 to be installed here. Two original Bott Brothers billiard tables from the 1800s sit on the mosaic-tile floor, in the old pool hall where Rudolf Wanderone — better known as the hustler Minnesota Fats — once played.
Here is the catch. No death certificate for any Colonel Pritchard turns up in Ohio records for 1909, and the February 1909 Columbus Dispatch has nothing about a stabbing. A regional ghost-history blogger went looking for the murder and came back empty, writing that several sites call it "just a nice legend," a good back story to explain why the clock was broken and to draw in customers. The likeliest reading is that the building was beautiful enough to grow its own ghost — a $100,000 saloon advertised as one of the show places of the city, with a clock that quit one winter and never started again.
And yet, every February when the snow falls, the staff describe the same two small footprints appearing on the sidewalk, forming in front of them where nobody has walked.
