Margaritas Mexican Restaurant

Margaritas in Concord sits inside the old 1890-1975 police station, and diners can book tables inside the original jail cells. The ghost is named George.

At Margaritas Mexican Restaurant in Concord, you can book a table inside a nineteenth-century jail cell and eat nachos there while the ghost throws your silverware.

The building at 1 Bicentennial Square spent 85 years as the Concord Police Department. From 1890 to 1975, officers clocked in, suspects got booked, and some of them spent the night in cells built into the back of the building. When the police moved out in the mid '70s, the structure sat empty for a while before an early Margaritas location, branded as Tio Juan's, took it over.

The owners made a decision most restaurants wouldn't. They kept the cells. Not decoratively, either. The iron bars are still there, the stone walls are still there, and tables are set up inside and in the hallways between the cells. You can request a cell to sit in when you make a reservation. Groups fight over them.

The ghost has a name. Staff call him George. He's described as a former inmate who decided to stay, and by most accounts he's harmless but bored. George's repertoire is small: he moves furniture and place settings, drinks unattended beverages, throws food, and has been heard after closing when there's nobody left in the dining room to talk.

The one piece of evidence that keeps getting circulated is video. The Northeastern Paranormal Research Society investigated the restaurant and recorded a glass appearing to slide across a table on its own. The clip has been picked up by local news, including WMUR, and ghost-hunting sites love it. The blogger Theresa at Theresa's Haunted History of the Tri-State has a sharper take. She wrote that condensation on a cold glass can absolutely make it move across a flat surface without any help from the spirit world, and the video doesn't rule that out.

That skepticism is worth holding onto, because George is a ghost story where the building does most of the work. A 19th-century jail that nobody emptied out properly before turning it into a taqueria attracts stories on its own. Staff hear things late at night. Plates end up in weird places. Someone finishes a margarita nobody remembers pouring. It all gets filed under George.

The reason to visit isn't the paranormal activity, though. It's the architecture. The cells are small, dim, and heavy in a way modern construction can't fake. Sitting in one with a plate of enchiladas feels like a small act of trespass. You can reach out and touch bars that held real people on real bad nights between 1890 and 1975. That's a concrete experience. The ghost is a bonus.

The chain has grown since this Concord location opened. There are Margaritas restaurants across New England now, all serving the same menu, but this is one of the only ones where you can ask the hostess to seat you behind iron bars that were installed to hold people, not atmosphere.