In Brief
At Middleton Tavern in Annapolis, Maryland, staff have spent years sharing the upstairs kitchen with a prankster named Roland — faucets turned on, coffee spilled, silver rearranged. A 1990s seance asked the ghost why he stayed. He liked it, came the answer.
The Full Story
Middleton Tavern sits on the Annapolis waterfront, a red-brick tavern open since 1750, and the staff there share the upstairs kitchen with a ghost they call Roland. He turns on the faucets. He spills the coffee, rearranges the silver, flickers the lights. Some of them won't go upstairs alone.
"Roland does not seem to have a malicious bone in his spectral body," the tavern's corporate secretary, Christina Nokes, put it, "but he does delight in making his presence known when it is quiet upstairs." The tell that he's around is cigar smoke with no cigar — a smell that drifts through rooms where no one is smoking.
In the 1990s, the owner Jerry Hardesty got tired of the pranks and brought in a medium to hold a seance. The medium came back with a name: Roland Johnston, a middle-aged man who dressed well and smoked cigars. Asked why he was still there, two and a half centuries into the place, Roland's answer was almost insulting in how plain it was. He liked it. That was that.
It's an old place to grow attached to. Horatio Middleton opened the tavern in 1750 as an inn for seafaring men, tied to the ferry he ran across the bay to the Eastern Shore. Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin all drank here; so did the Continental Congress. The dining-room window where Roland is sometimes seen looks out toward the harbor, where Middleton's ferries used to dock.
He's not the only thing reported here. The night manager, Mike Conroy, called himself a skeptic, then admitted on local TV that one night he couldn't deny seeing a figure moving about. Glasses fall off the shelves one at a time. A bartender felt a hand close over his while he was mixing a drink, and then the drink went over. The first electronic cash register the tavern ever installed went haywire, and the repairman couldn't explain it either.
Not everyone thinks Roland is Roland. One Annapolis tour guide ties the ghost to George Schmidt, who owned the building and was shot dead on the street out front in 1876, gunned down by a drunk patron after an argument over a contested local election.
So there are two stories about who's upstairs. A man murdered in the road, and a man who simply liked the place. The tavern keeps the friendlier one — the well-dressed ghost who looked at 275 years of Annapolis and saw no reason to leave.
