Gallatin, Tennessee sells its downtown as the most haunted public square in America, and the shopkeepers there play along. A movie-house owner answers questions on tape decades after his death, an antique shop keeps two child ghosts, and a bar bangs its own doors long after last call.
Ask the voice on the tape its favorite actor, and it answers, "Clark Gable." Paranormal investigators recorded that reply inside the Palace Theatre on Gallatin, Tennessee's public square. The man they think gave it, Bill Roth, had been dead since 1977, and the Palace had been his whole life.
Roth built the theater in 1913 as a gift for his daughter, who died before it opened. It is the oldest silent-movie house left standing where it was built anywhere in Tennessee, and Roth ran it himself, 5-cent tickets and all, until the year he died. The same investigators caught video of a flashlight switching off in the empty room the moment they asked it to.
Roth is only one of the ghosts the shopkeepers here keep. Gallatin sells its downtown as "The Most Haunted Public Square in America," a ring of working businesses whose owners keep reporting the same sorts of visitors. Bless Your Heart Kitchen & Bar fills an 1883 building that served as a firehouse, a city hall, a jail, and a brothel before it started pouring drinks; the staff say chairs get knocked off the tables after closing, something bangs on the door of the empty women's restroom, and during quiet solo sets a woman's whisper turns up near the stage. A few doors down, at an antique shop called Timeless Treasures, two child spirits are said to clink the teacups and move toys through the wicker chairs. One of them, a little girl, guards a fairy house and touches anyone who tries to buy it.
The busiest stop belongs to a small brick building the ghost walk calls Andrew Jackson's old law office. Inside, the legend runs, are 16 Confederate soldiers. Guide Pat Fitzhugh watched his flashlight and his EMF meter blink over and over on the window ledge, and by the time the group moved on, his gear had quit entirely. "The batteries in all of my equipment died before the walk was over," he wrote. No roster and no execution record tie that number to that room; the 16 are a figure the tour hands down, not a count anyone kept.
But soldiers did die on this square, and that part is written down. During the Civil War, Union General Eleazer Paine ran Gallatin from here and had men he suspected of spying shot in the open square without a trial, until Sherman relieved him of command in 1864. The townspeople who lived under him took to calling him the Tempest. A cholera outbreak in 1873 took 68 more of them in a single June. The slogan sells the ghosts. The bodies underneath it are a matter of record.
