Shaker's Cigar Bar

Built in 1894 on top of a cemetery, this warehouse district spot was a Capone-era speakeasy and brothel during Prohibition. Now it's a cigar bar that runs its own ghost tours.

The John Paulu Building at 422 South 2nd Street was constructed in 1894 as a cooperage for the Schlitz Brewing Company, where massive wooden barrels were built for one of Milwaukee's brewing giants. Designed in Queen Anne style by its namesake John Paulu with mason John Czoplewski and carpenter Charles Druse, the brick building sits in Walker's Point on land that was once one of three original cemeteries in southeastern Wisconsin. When Milwaukee consolidated its burial grounds into Forest Home Cemetery, not all families could afford to relocate their dead. Owner Bob Weiss and a research team confirmed that human remains still lie beneath the building, a discovery corroborated when ground-penetrating radar detected two complete sets of human remains huddled together beneath the basement concrete, along with deeper anomalies too far down to identify.

The building's darkest chapter began around 1922 when Al, Frank, and Ralph Capone acquired it as one of their Milwaukee speakeasies. The legal front was the ABC Soda Company, an innocent-looking bottling operation, while in reality the Capones were importing Canadian liquor across Lake Michigan in beer barrels. The basement hosted gambling, the main floor ran the speakeasy behind mob enforcers, and the upper two floors operated as a brothel until 1945. The second floor, designated the "B" floor, housed six to eight working girls aged fourteen to eighteen along with a doctor's office; the third floor "A" level kept one to three premium girls with wealthy sponsors. A Juliet balcony allowed the women to advertise their services to the street below. The original 1905 glass-topped humidor from the speakeasy era survives in the bar today.

During a 2001 renovation of the third-floor penthouse, workers discovered a collection of bones beneath the floorboards. A medical examiner determined some were human and approximately seventy years old, placing them squarely in the Prohibition era. Separately, a mass of charred bones was found inside a wall, confirmed as the remains of a female in her late teens or early twenties. Staff believe these belonged to Molly Brennan, an eighteen-year-old brothel worker who, according to the building's oral history, was murdered by a client, dismembered, and burned in her fireplace to avoid detection. Today, the penthouse operates as an overnight rental, but most guests reportedly fail to complete a full night's stay, often waking to find their belongings scattered around the room.

The building harbors at least three named spirits. Elizabeth, an eight-year-old girl who died in 1835 after falling from an apple tree and breaking her neck on the cemetery grounds before the building existed, haunts the women's restroom. Faucets activate independently, stall doors slam shut and resist opening, and staff leave toys for her. Molly Brennan manifests on the upper floors and has appeared in visitor photographs alongside her suspected killer. O'Connor, identified as a Confederate soldier from Milwaukee, reportedly targets women with red or blonde hair and has a reputation for unwanted physical contact. The basement, with its stone cistern extending so deep that the bottom can't be seen, generates its own phenomena: dark shapes, a phantom black cat, doors shaking as if from an earthquake, women's hair being pulled, and a massive lead railroad safe that has resisted every attempt to open it. Tour guide Marley Decker has noted that covering the cistern consistently provokes negative spiritual activity, suggesting it may have been used to dispose of bodies.

The building gained an additional layer of notoriety when serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer began frequenting the bar in January 1991, just months before his arrest in July. Weiss, who has managed the bar since purchasing it in 1986, recalled that Dahmer insisted on sitting on one specific elevated barstool and refused service from female bartenders. Weiss described his eyes as "dead and yet gimlets at the same time" and noted that Dahmer "looked out of place" from the moment he first walked in. The bar now operates its Cream City Cannibal tour through the Walker's Point neighborhood following Dahmer's footsteps. The Huffington Post named Shaker's one of America's five most haunted bars, and Thrillist selected it among the most haunted restaurants in the country. Marketing director Amanda Morden has noted that skeptics often arrive for the historical aspect alone but leave converted by the time the tour ends.