Hartford Elks Lodge

At the Hartford Elks Lodge on Prospect Street in Hartford, Connecticut, members and visitors keep reporting a man who isn't there. He turns up as a black shadow near the bar, a presence felt in the basement, footsteps on stairs no one is climbing. The glasses are the part people fixate on: by their accounts the glasses don't just slide off the bar, they fly sideways, as if thrown at the bartender.

The activity clusters in three places. The bar. The basement. And the fire escape.

That last one is why this story has a name attached to it. In 1972, a man named Robert Taylor was found dead on the sidewalk outside the lodge. He's said to have come from the fire escape, and the account stops cold right there. Nobody could ever say whether he fell, jumped, or was pushed. No record settles it. The question just hangs there, the way it has for fifty years.

An unanswered death like that draws a TV crew. SyFy's Ghost Hunters investigated the lodge in July 2011, building the episode — fittingly titled "Membership Denied" — around Taylor's death. The team says it caught audio of a voice during the night, though the exact words aren't pinned down in any solid record.

The building itself is older than the ghost story. The Hartford chapter organized in 1884, and in May 1903 it moved into this turn-of-the-century, yellow-brick lodge — said to be the first structure ever built in America specifically to be an Elks lodge. The National Register added it in 1984. Inside, a dark mahogany staircase climbs under a skylight, and the meeting hall still has its big iron lever for dimming the lights.

People have their theories about who the man is. A long-dead founding member. The resident of a house that supposedly burned on this spot a century before the lodge. Or Robert Taylor, still on the sidewalk in 1972.

The lodge is still open. It rents out a room it calls the Chamberlin Room.