Ernestine & Hazel's

Memphis dive bar with a jukebox that picks tracks matching your conversation. Former brothel upstairs. Yelp called it America's 4th most haunted spot.

The jukebox at Earnestine and Hazel's plays records nobody picked. It cycles on by itself, often lines up tracks that match the conversation in front of it, and then goes quiet again. The machine sits along the wall opposite the bar, and a Boston Globe piece from October 2022 got the house explanation straight from staff: "You punch in the numbers and it plays whatever it wants." Bartenders, customers, and visiting reporters have been describing the same behavior for years.

The building at 531 South Main has had a long career. It opened around 1909 as a church, was converted to a pharmacy, ran as Earnestine's Sundry Store and a jazz cafe, and by the 1950s had become a brothel above a bar that catered to Stax Records musicians and the South Main neighborhood. Earnestine Mitchell and Hazel Jones bought the place from Soulsville drugstore owner Abe Plough and ran it themselves. The brothel closed years before Russell George took over the bar operation in the 1990s, but the upstairs rooms were left intact, and walking up there still feels like trespassing in a closed motel.

One of the named ghosts haunts the upstairs hallway, sometimes seen sitting on the edge of a bed in one of the back rooms. Bar staff and customers who've gone upstairs after midnight describe a piano playing somewhere up there, even though the upstairs has no piano. They describe footsteps in the hall above the bar when nobody is up there, which can be checked because the staircase is the only way up.

Russell George's death added another layer. George owned the bar for two decades and lived above it. In 2017, Vice reported he had died by suicide at the building roughly a year earlier, which places his death around 2016. Bartenders since then have described a man they believe is Russell lingering in the back hallway near the kitchen. Southern Spirit Guide's account names a similar figure associated with a white pillar candle in one of the upstairs rooms, which may be the same ghost traveling through different retellings. George was protective of the bar in life. Staff say he stayed protective.

Some of the deeper history is uglier. The building's pre-1990s use as a sex-work venue is the source of most of the Most Dangerous Brothel In Memphis lore, and Memphis press accounts from the 1960s and 70s record at least one murder upstairs. The jukebox is the specific thing people come back to.

Yelp ranked the bar the fourth most haunted spot in America in 2018, which is a ranking that doesn't mean much but sells soul burgers. The TV-show treatment has come and gone. What keeps Earnestine and Hazel's in the Memphis ghost conversation isn't the upstairs, or Russell, or even the murder accounts. It's a jukebox that answered somebody out loud on one night and answered somebody else on another night with a different song.

If you visit, the bar is open evenings, the soul burger is worth ordering, and you can walk upstairs if you ask. Staff will not stop you. They will let you make your own decision about how long to stay up there.