In Brief
The Bowery in Myrtle Beach has a ghost the tour guides call Barman Joe, a bartender who died on his stool, came back to finish his beer, then died again. The real Joe Shotkus poured beer here for 53 years, and the owner who watched him collapse says the haunting is nonsense.
The Full Story
The ghost the tour guides sell at The Bowery in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, is a bartender who died twice. The way they tell it, a man they call Barman Joe dropped dead on his stool one night, snapped back to life just long enough to finish his beer, and then died again for good. Patrons say they still hear him singing near the bar, somewhere under the din of a room that has been packed since it opened in 1944.
There was a real Joe, and the real one was stranger than the legend built on him.
Joe "Don't Cry Joe" Shotkus poured beer at The Bowery from opening day until he died in 1997 — 53 years behind the same bar, about 50 yards from the Atlantic. He'd earned the nickname years earlier at a place called Sloppy Joe's, where he would sing the old song "Don't Cry, Joe" and start weeping halfway through, every time, until the name stuck to him.
Before any of that, back in the 1930s, he and his sister Mary danced for 5,295 hours without stopping — seven months, ten days, and fifteen hours — for a marathon record that still stands. Behind the bar, as a party trick, he'd have patrons pack him inside a coffin filled with ice and leave him there for up to an hour.
The man who owns the place has heard the ghost version enough times to be sick of it. Victor Shamah was standing right there the day Joe really did collapse at the bar. Joe went down, turned blue, and was revived, and the first thing he asked for afterward was to go back to work. That, Shamah says, is where the fiction took root, and the tour companies have been bending it further ever since. "The Bowery is not haunted and there is no Barman Joe," he says.
His own staff don't entirely back him up. Long after last call, with the doors locked and the room dark, some of them report noises near the bar they can't account for, and the sound people keep coming back to is the singing near where Joe stood.
So the legend holds a man who died twice on a barstool and came back for his beer. The record holds a man who danced most of a year without sitting down, climbed into a coffin of ice for a laugh, and stood behind that bar for 53 years — and the one person who watched him actually go down swears there is nothing there at all.
