At Harrie's Jailhouse in Middletown, Connecticut — a restaurant inside an 1846 county jail — the staff pour a drink nobody ordered and leave it behind the bar. It's for Sarah, a little girl they believe never left.
At Harrie's Jailhouse in Middletown, Connecticut, the staff pour a drink nobody ordered. They set it on the windowsill behind the bar, where the regulars can see it, and they leave it there. It's a mocktail, their version of a Shirley Temple, and legend has it the drink is for a little girl named Sarah.
By the owners' reckoning she was eight to ten years old, and they believe she died somewhere in the building after it stopped holding prisoners. When she gets restless — the lights flicker, things slide off the bar — the staff say the drink settles her. No record names her. No death date, no last name, no proof a child ever lived here at all. She's lore, and the people who run the place pour for her anyway.
The building is a real jail. It went up in 1846 on the grounds of the Middletown Alms House, the oldest surviving poorhouse in Connecticut, and it held twelve brownstone cells — a small county lockup for minor crimes, the principal jail being over in Haddam. Owners Carrie Carella and Heather Kelly opened the restaurant in early 2021 and named it for themselves, Heather plus Carrie. They knew it came with a ghost before they signed the lease. That was part of the appeal.
Sarah isn't the only one reported there. In 2016, the *Ghost Hunters* team filmed an episode on the property — "Stone Cold Colonists" — and tenants told them about a gentleman in a top hat, shadow figures, doors that slammed, a bed frame scratched for no reason anyone could find, and a heavy medicine ball that rolled six feet across the floor on its own.
What the team caught on tape was a child. A small voice, recorded in the old jail, saying three words.
"Let's play dress up."
They concluded the spirits were innocent. The tenants, they said, had nothing to fear.
