In Brief
The Gandy Dancer in Ann Arbor, Michigan is a seafood restaurant inside an 1886 stone train depot. Staff keep seeing a well-dressed man walk the halls and vanish, in a building that reportedly once held the bodies of soldiers shipped home from the war.
The Full Story
The Gandy Dancer in Ann Arbor, Michigan is a seafood restaurant inside an 1886 stone train depot, and the staff keep seeing a man who isn't there. He's well-dressed, and he walks the halls like he has somewhere to be, then he's gone. They've described him the same way for years. Nobody who works there has a name on record for him, only a face and a way of disappearing.
The building was the finest station on the Michigan Central line when it opened, built by the Detroit firm Spier & Rohns out of rock-faced local stone, with two terra cotta fireplaces, stained glass windows, a red oak ceiling, and French tile floors under a squat square tower. Trains stopped here for nearly a century. The restaurant took the depot over in 1970 and named it for the gandy dancers, the section crews who once laid and maintained the track by hand.
Not everyone who passed through the depot was alive. The legend, repeated for decades and traced to a longtime employee who told it to a reporter in 1991, holds that during the First World War the building held the bodies of soldiers shipped home from the front. They were lined up inside the depot until their families came to claim them for burial. No record fixes how many, or for how long. The story has simply stayed attached to the building.
Then there was the night the train itself caught fire out front. On September 15, 1940, a Michigan Central train doing about 30 miles an hour began ripping up its own track near the Broadway Bridge and derailed right in front of the station, bursting into flame. A transient named Walter Flinn, who had jumped the train where it started, burned beyond recognition. Another man was severely burned. The cause was a single flattened spike someone had set on the rail. The engineer said he saw nothing wrong before it happened. "The engine just began tipping and finally derailed," he reported.
So the people who report the well-dressed man are reporting him in a building where the dead were once laid out by the dozen, and where a man burned to death on the track outside the door. They describe other things, too. Lights turned upside-down. Glasses flying off the shelves. Attic doors opening and closing on their own, over an empty room.
A depot is a place people pass through on their way somewhere else. This one seems to have kept the ones who never finished the trip.
