In Brief
The Publick House in Chester, New Jersey has kept a ghost who disapproves of the bar for two centuries. Locals say she's the tavern-keeper's devout mother, struck dead by lightning in church, still trying to close the place her son built.
The Full Story
At the Publick House in Chester, New Jersey, the ghost staff and locals talk about is a woman who never wanted the place to exist. She's said to be the mother of the man who built it as a tavern, and the story goes that two hundred years on, she's still trying to shut the bar down.
Her son was Zephaniah Drake. Around 1810 he put up a three-and-a-half-story brick building at 111 Main Street, on the corner of Hillside Road, to take in stagecoach travelers on the old Washington Turnpike that ran past his door. He called it the Brick Tavern, and it sat on the routes that linked New York, Morristown, New Brunswick, and Phillipsburg, so the coaches came through and the rooms filled. His mother, the way the story is told, was a devout Methodist married to a Methodist minister, and she hated that her son had opened a saloon. The legend has God settling the argument for her: a lightning bolt through a sanctuary window during Sunday service, and the woman dead in her pew.
None of that last part is written down. No newspaper, no church record, no line that even names her. The lightning death lives only in the lore Chester has passed along, told and retold long after Drake was gone. What the record does keep is the building itself, its Flemish bond brickwork laid up in the Federal style and listed on the National Register in 1974, and Drake, and the date.
She kept her post anyway. Staff and guests describe one upstairs dining room as the haunted one, and the stories told about it are small and domestic: a perfume that drifts through with no one wearing it, a cold that settles in, a low groan in a room where nothing should be groaning. People have asked to be seated in that room. People have asked to be seated anywhere else.
The building never sat empty for long. Drake sold it in 1821; by 1854 it had become a college prep school, the Chester Institute; the Fleming family bought it in 1916 and made it the Chester House. Through every name it stayed open, eventually as the Publick House restaurant, a Main Street staple that outlasted wars, a depression, and the 1918 flu before COVID-19 closed it in 2020, after 211 years. It sold for nearly four million dollars and reopened under new owners as a steakhouse and a small hotel, the bar pouring again.
Which is the part that should unsettle anyone who believes the story. Whatever the devout mother has been trying to do for two centuries, it has not worked. The saloon her son opened never closed for good. And she is said to be upstairs yet, in the one room people would rather not sit in, waiting on a last call that never comes.
