Shaker's Cigar Bar

A former Schlitz cooperage turned Capone speakeasy and brothel, built on an old cemetery where ground-penetrating radar found human remains beneath the basement. Three named ghosts haunt the building, bones of a murdered teenage brothel worker were found in the walls during a 2001 renovation, and Jeffrey Dahmer was a regular in the months before his arrest.

Ground-penetrating radar found two complete sets of human remains huddled together beneath the basement concrete. Nobody asked for an excavation.

The building at 422 South 2nd Street in Milwaukee's Walker's Point started as a cooperage for Schlitz Brewing in 1894, built in Queen Anne style by John Paulu with mason John Czoplewski and carpenter Charles Druse. That origin story is tame enough. But the land underneath predates the building by decades. This was one of three original cemeteries in southeastern Wisconsin, and when Milwaukee consolidated burials into Forest Home Cemetery, not every family could afford to move their dead. The bones stayed.

Around 1922, Al, Frank, and Ralph Capone acquired the building and ran it as one of their Milwaukee operations. The legal front was the ABC Soda Company, a bottling outfit that looked innocent enough if you didn't notice the Canadian liquor coming across Lake Michigan in beer barrels. The basement hosted gambling. The main floor ran the speakeasy behind mob enforcers. The upper two floors were a brothel until 1945. The second floor, called the "B" floor, housed six to eight working girls between fourteen and eighteen years old, alongside a doctor's office. The third floor "A" level kept one to three premium girls with wealthy sponsors. A Juliet balcony let the women advertise their services to passersby below.

During a 2001 renovation of the third-floor penthouse, workers found bones beneath the floorboards. A medical examiner determined some were human, roughly seventy years old, placing them in the Prohibition era. Then came a worse discovery: a mass of charred bones 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. The penthouse now operates as an overnight rental. Most guests don't make it through the night, often waking to find their belongings scattered around the room.

The bar counts 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, haunts the women's restroom. Faucets turn on by themselves. Stall doors slam shut and won't open. Staff leave toys for her. Molly Brennan shows up on the upper floors and has appeared in visitor photographs next to the outline of her suspected killer. A spirit identified as O'Connor, a Confederate soldier from Milwaukee, has a reputation for targeting women with red or blonde hair and for unwanted physical contact. The basement adds its own layer: a stone cistern so deep nobody can see the bottom, dark shapes moving at the edges of vision, a phantom black cat, doors shaking like an earthquake, and women getting their hair pulled. Tour guide Marley Decker has noted that covering the cistern triggers negative activity, suggesting it may have been used to dispose of bodies.

Then there's Jeffrey Dahmer. He started showing up in January 1991, just months before his arrest in July. Owner Bob Weiss, who has run the bar since buying it in 1986, says Dahmer insisted 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 said Dahmer "looked out of place" from the moment he walked in. The bar now runs its Cream City Cannibal tour through Walker's Point, following Dahmer's footsteps through the neighborhood.

The Huffington Post named Shaker's one of America's five most haunted bars. Thrillist put it on its list of the country's most haunted restaurants. Marketing director Amanda Morden has said that skeptics arrive for the history and leave converted. That tracks. The ghost stories here are layered onto real bones, real crimes, and a documented serial killer who liked his regular seat. The original 1905 glass-topped humidor from the speakeasy era sits in the bar. A massive lead railroad safe in the basement has resisted every attempt to open it. Nobody's tried that hard.