The Publick House

An 1810 Chester tavern where the builder's Methodist mother, killed by lightning mid-sermon, haunts the dining room she disapproved of.

Zephaniah Drake built a tavern in Chester in 1810 over his mother's loud objection. She was a devout Methodist who thought her son opening a saloon was a personal affront to God. According to the story people in Chester tell, God apparently agreed. She was struck by lightning through a sanctuary window during a Sunday service, died on the spot, and has been hanging around the Publick House ever since, presumably still trying to close the bar.

It's a good story. It may even be partly true. The 1810 build date is documented, the National Register of Historic Places added the building in 1974, and Zephaniah Drake was a real person who really did run what was called the Brick Tavern at 111 Main Street. The lightning death is harder to pin down in contemporary records, which doesn't mean it didn't happen, but does mean most of what you read about it started in twentieth-century local lore rather than an 1810 newspaper.

The haunting is specific. Regulars and staff refer to one upstairs dining room as "the haunted room" without quite explaining why. Visitors describe the smell of a perfume nobody in the building is wearing, a draft in the northeast corner that runs five or six degrees colder than the rest of the room, groaning from empty rooms that staff have learned to tune out, and the occasional impression of being watched from the second-floor landing. A few guests over the years have refused to finish dinner and asked to be seated downstairs. None of this rises to the level of a named apparition. There is no photograph. There is no EVP. There is just the mother, or the memory of her, or whatever the building carries from two centuries of people eating dinner inside a structure that used to be a stagecoach tavern on the Washington Turnpike.

Zephaniah Drake's Brick Tavern was a working inn with stables, a taproom, and boarding rooms upstairs. The Washington Turnpike, running from Morristown to Phillipsburg, passed right outside the door. You can still see the scale of the old yard in the side lot. Stand in the parking lot and face the building, and imagine six horses, a coach, a porter, and three travelers who have been on the road from Morristown for six hours. That's what this building was for. Most of the people who passed through left no record. Some of them got sick here, some got drunk here, a few probably died here. Whether any of them stayed is the question the haunting is asking.

The restaurant changed hands multiple times in the twentieth century. It's been a tavern, a general store, a speakeasy during Prohibition, and since the 1970s a white-tablecloth dinner spot that keeps its history as decor, not as the whole pitch. The menu is steak-and-chop standard. The building is what you come for.

Nobody there is selling the story too hard. The story predates the restaurant. The restaurant just happens to live inside the story.