In Brief
At the Hubbell House in Mantorville, Minnesota, the staff hear their own names called when the rooms are empty, catch cigar smoke where no one's smoking, and find the music playing again after they shut it off. The manager says the spirits are used to her.
The Full Story
The Hubbell House in Mantorville, Minnesota, is one of the oldest restaurants in the state, and the staff say it keeps ghosts that have manners. The spirits don't loom or rattle the doors. They call the workers by name. Someone says yours from across an empty room, and you turn, and no one's there.
The building has been open in some form since before Minnesota was a state. John Hubbell put up a two-room log structure in 1854, a rest stop for stagecoach travelers and mail carriers on the trail from Winona to St. Peter. Two years later he replaced it with the three-story building that stands now, quarried local limestone laid in a rough random pattern, with flat stone lintels over the windows. Ulysses S. Grant ate here in 1876. So did Horace Greeley, Senator Alexander Ramsey, and the Mayo Clinic's founding doctor. Paul Pappas bought the rundown place in 1946 and made it a fine-dining room; ownership has passed down twice since, most recently to the Powers family in 2022.
The hauntings get tied to two deaths in the building's long history. One man fell down the stairs. Another died by hanging. No source gives their names, or the years, or what happened to either of them — only that the staff blame the activity on the two.
And the activity is steady. Workers hear noises and their own names from rooms nobody's in. Cigar smoke drifts through where no one is smoking. The music gets switched off at close and is playing again minutes later. Lights flicker, too, though the author who wrote the building up is honest enough to note that the old wiring might be the whole story there.
That author is Christopher Larsen, a Rochester computer consultant who wrote a book called "Haunted Mantorville" and gave the Hubbell House a chapter. He keeps a careful distance from his own subject. "I'm not going to believe completely until a full-blown apparition shows up," he said, "and then I'll probably die of a heart attack." Mantorville, by his telling, may be the most haunted town in the Midwest per capita, and the restaurant is a regular stop on the local ghost tours.
Ann Driver managed the place for about three decades, long enough that the building stopped surprising her. She helped Larsen run his investigation through the rooms, and she came away certain the spirits mean no harm. She even has a theory about why they tolerate her.
"I've been here so long," she told the Post Bulletin, "they're used to me."
