In Brief
LaBinnah Bistro fills an 1870 Victorian on Hannibal's Millionaires' Row, the old Munger mansion. Co-owner Arif Dagin once heard his name called in the laundry — a voice like his partner's, but rolling an R his partner never rolled. The man it may belong to was axed to death across town.
The Full Story
Arif Dagin was alone in the laundry room of LaBinnah Bistro in Hannibal, Missouri when a voice called his name. It sounded exactly like his partner Jim, except it rolled the R in "Arif." Jim doesn't roll his Rs. And Jim wasn't in the building.
The restaurant — its name is "Hannibal" spelled backward — fills an 1870 Victorian on what locals call Millionaires' Row, the former home of W.A. Munger, once the town's mayor. The Mungers threw card parties there for Hannibal's wealthy, and one of their regular guests was Amos Stillwell, a pork-packing magnate who liked to play euchre late into the night.
On December 29, 1888, Stillwell played his cards and went home around 11:30. In the early hours of the next morning, someone took an ax from his own woodshed and struck him in his bed. The blade severed his carotid artery, and he died almost at once. His wife Fannie said she woke to a figure and a whirring sound, and heard Amos ask, "Fannie, is that you?" About $40 lay scattered near the alley and his pocketbook was gone, but the silverware was untouched and nothing had been forced. A year later Fannie married the family physician, Dr. Joseph Hearne. Both were eventually indicted. His trial began in December 1895 in Bowling Green; after two weeks of testimony the jury acquitted him. Fannie was never tried, and the case is still officially unsolved. (Some accounts give the year as 1889.)
Stillwell didn't die at LaBinnah. He died across town. But local lore holds that he came back not to where he was killed, but to where he was happiest, at the Munger card table. The house where he died, the story goes, was eventually torn down in the hope of quieting the disturbances there.
The disturbances pile up small. An upstairs closet door opens and shuts on its own, several times a day for a stretch, then nothing for months. A doorknob has turned with no hand on it. A tenant in the second-floor apartment said she watched a translucent figure hurry across the dining room, fold into a glowing blue dot, and vanish; she moved out soon after. Weeks later, a guest photographed what looked like a small child through the glass of the front door, the same shape the tenant had described.
Dagin sold the place in 2023, but he never called it a haunting. He called it reverberations from the past.
