In Brief
Max's Taphouse sits at 737 South Broadway in Baltimore's Fells Point, one of the largest draft systems in the country. A worker once ran up from the cellar screaming about headless chickens. Nobody learned why until 23 years later.
The Full Story
Max's Taphouse sits at 737 South Broadway in Baltimore's Fells Point, an operating beer bar with one of the largest draft systems in the country. It also has a basement full of chickens that aren't there.
The story the staff keep is about a worker who went down to the cellar near the kegs and came back up in hysterics, describing what one account calls "a slew of decapitated chickens running rampant." Ron Furman, who opened the place and calls himself a skeptic, had no explanation for it. He didn't get one for roughly 23 years. That's when the family learned what the building had been before the beer: a chicken slaughterhouse.
The man saw the chickens first. The reason came later.
The building goes back to the 1800s, and it has worn a lot of faces. A restaurant. A boardinghouse. A brothel. A slaughterhouse. This was the Fells Point waterfront, a sailor's district the local ghost tours call "The Three B's": bars, brothels, and boarding houses. The neighborhood survived Baltimore's Great Fire of 1904, the one that took more than a hundred acres downtown, so the buildings that catered to all that vice are still standing, Max's among them.
The chickens aren't the only thing reported here. Staff describe a woman in white on an upper floor, who they tell as a brothel-era figure, territorial, said to yell at people who linger too late at night. A male apparition is reported to walk straight through the walls. And near the bar, witnesses describe beer bottles sliding and floating with no hand on them.
The detail the owners tell, harder to source than the rest, is about the night an alarm tripped upstairs and Baltimore police brought in their K-9 dogs. As the family recounts it, the dogs reached the bottom of the staircase, sat down, and would not climb it.
By the time any of this was lore, the building had already started over again. The Furmans bought a former disco on the corner in 1985, and Ron opened it in 1986 as Max's on Broadway, a live-music room where more than a thousand acts played before they were famous — Dave Matthews, Smashing Pumpkins, No Doubt among them. In 1994 he and his wife, Gail, dropped the bands for beer and renamed it Max's Taphouse. They've run it for about 40 years, and named it for Ron's grandfather, Max.
The slaughterhouse closed long before any of them arrived. They just inherited what it left in the cellar, and only found out, two decades in, what the chickens had been.
