Elevator Brewery & Draught Haus

A blue-ribbon bar from the 1893 World's Fair, a murder that might never have happened, and bare footprints that appear in February snow outside 161 North High Street in Columbus. The Elevator Brewery sits in one of Ohio's most storied buildings, with sealed tunnels in the basement and a ghost story built on a frozen clock.

The 45-foot mahogany bar at 161 North High Street won a blue ribbon at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago before it ever poured a drink in Columbus. Hand-carved from Philippine mahogany, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and anchored by Italian onyx columns, it was a showpiece built to impress judges. The Bott brothers, Joseph and William, installed it when they moved their billiard parlor into the Columbia Building around 1905. Forty pool tables, a thousand-bulb electric sign on the facade, a cigar counter near the entrance, and whiskey distilled upstairs on the second floor. The place was one of the most elaborate saloons in Ohio.

Then there's the murder story. On a cold February night in 1909, someone came to the door of Bott Brothers Buffet and Billiards and asked for Colonel Randolph A. Pritchard by name. Pritchard, known around the saloon as an infamous womanizer, stepped outside. A woman stabbed him repeatedly with a knife. He stumbled back through the door, collapsed on the floor, and bled to death. The large clock on the front of the building stopped at 10:05 p.m., the exact minute Pritchard died, and stayed frozen there for years. When people rushed out to find the attacker, they found only two small, bare footprints in the fresh snow leading away from the building. She had escaped in a waiting coach.

The prevailing theory is that Pritchard's killer was a former lover he had wronged, and that she froze to death the same night running barefoot through the winter streets. The clock stayed stuck at 10:05 for so long that when the saloon closed during Prohibition in 1923 and reopened as a restaurant, they just named it The Clock. That restaurant lasted from 1924 all the way until 1994, and at its peak it hosted Minnesota Fats (Rudolf Wanderone) at the billiard tables.

Here's where the story gets interesting from a research angle: no death certificate for a Colonel Randolph Pritchard appears in Ohio records for 1909. A scan of microfiche from the February 1909 Columbus Dispatch turned up nothing. The blogger Theresa at Haunted History of the Tri-State, who digs into these claims methodically, has written that she found zero historical evidence supporting the murder. It might be a legend that attached to the building because the building looked like it should have a good ghost story, and the broken clock needed an explanation.

That said, the reports are specific enough to be interesting. Staff at the brewery describe seeing a ball of light drifting through the restaurant, which they attribute to Pritchard's ghost. On snowy February nights, especially around the anniversary, footprints appear in the snow outside the building where nobody has walked. Multiple witnesses claim to have watched the prints materialize right in front of them, two small impressions forming one after the other in fresh powder, then fading.

Below the main floor, the building hides something else entirely. The basement has three doorways that once connected to a tunnel system running beneath downtown Columbus. The tunnels linked businesses and government buildings, and local lore says they ran all the way to the Ohio Statehouse. They were used to move goods (usually illegal ones) from building to building without attracting attention on the street. The Ohio Exploration Society documented the sealed doorways during a 2004 visit with owner Dick Stevens, noting that all three had been cemented over but that Stevens had offered to drill through someday to see what was on the other side.

The Elevator Brewery and Draught Haus has occupied the space since 2000 (the company started in Marysville in 1999 before expanding to Columbus). The original bar, the mosaic tile floor, the stained glass windows, the ornate ceiling work, and two billiard tables from the 1800s with original Bott Brothers plaques are all still there. One of the tables is cast iron. They brew twelve beers in-house and the food is solid.

Nobody has drilled through those basement walls yet. The clock is long gone, replaced and removed during the Chasens era (1996 to 1998). But on a February night, if it snows, people still check the sidewalk outside 161 North High.