Margaritas Mexican Restaurant

A Mexican restaurant inside a former county jail — the old cells have been turned into private dining rooms. It's a fun conversation starter before the food even arrives.

The old jail cells are still here, remodeled into dining booths where customers eat burritos and drink margaritas in the same spaces where Concord's criminals once awaited trial. And according to the staff, at least one former inmate has never left. They call him George, and he has a talent for chaos.

The building at 1 Bicentennial Square served as the Concord Police Department headquarters and city jail from 1890 to 1975. Designed by noted local architect Edward Dow with Albert Bodwell, the structure features arched openings in the Richardsonian Romanesque style that give it a distinctly imposing character, even now that the bars have been replaced by menus. When Margaritas Mexican Restaurant moved in, they made the inspired decision to preserve the jail cells intact, placing tables inside the original iron-barred enclosures and seating diners in the hallways that once echoed with the sounds of booking and arraignment.

The activity began almost immediately after the restaurant opened. George, the resident poltergeist, is blamed for an impressive catalog of disturbances. Staff report faucets turning on by themselves and overflowing, dishes and glassware sliding across tables with no one near them, and food being thrown from kitchen surfaces by invisible hands. Furniture has been found rearranged after closing, and employees working alone in the building have heard voices in empty dining rooms -- full conversations from tables where nobody's sitting. Diners occasionally see a shadowy figure drift past in their peripheral vision, gone by the time they turn to look. Whenever a server drops a plate or a glass shatters for no apparent reason, the staff simply shrugs and blames George.

The Paranormal Research Society has conducted investigations at the restaurant, and the New England Legends podcast devoted Episode 299 to what they call 'Concord's Most Haunted Jail.' Atlas Obscura has featured the location as one of New Hampshire's most unusual dining experiences, noting the strange convergence of Mexican cuisine and 19th-century incarceration. The building sits in the heart of Concord's historic downtown, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and contains one of the finest collections of 19th and early 20th century commercial architecture in New England.

No one knows who George actually was. The identity of the ghost has never been definitively established, though the most popular theory is that he was a prisoner who died in custody sometime during the building's eighty-five years as a jail. What is known is that George has a particular fondness for hiding customers' leftovers, moving their drinks when they're not looking, and making his presence known to anyone working late in the building alone. The staff at Margaritas has learned to coexist with their spectral tenant, and most take his antics in good humor. As one server told local news, you get used to it after a while, but you never quite stop looking over your shoulder when you're closing up alone.