The Whitney

A Romanesque Revival mansion built in 1894 by lumber baron David Whitney Jr., one of the wealthiest men in Detroit's Gilded Age. Now an upscale restaurant with a cocktail lounge named the Ghostbar.

The Whitney is a Romanesque Revival mansion at the corner of Woodward Avenue and Canfield Street in Detroit, built between 1890 and 1894 to the designs of architect Gordon W. Lloyd for lumber baron David Whitney Jr., one of the wealthiest men in Michigan. The mansion is clad in rose-pink South Dakota jasper stone and features fifty-two rooms, twenty fireplaces, numerous Tiffany-style art glass windows, a secret vault, and an elevator. David Whitney Jr. commissioned the house as a gift for his wife Flora, but she died in 1882 before construction even began. In his grief, Whitney married Flora's younger sister Sara just one year later, and it was Sara who became the first lady of the completed mansion.

David Whitney Jr. died in 1900, and the mansion passed through several owners before Detroit businessman Richard Kughn acquired it in 1979, undertaking a major rehabilitation that transformed it into the fine dining restaurant that opened in 1986. The Food Network named The Whitney Michigan's most haunted restaurant, and the paranormal activity within the building is both persistent and well-documented.

The most commonly reported phenomenon involves the elevator, which moves between floors entirely on its own with no riders and no one pressing the call buttons. A crying woman dressed in white has been spotted by multiple guests in the third-floor ladies' lounge. Whether she is Flora, the wife who died before seeing the house completed, or Sara, who lived and died within its walls, remains a matter of debate among paranormal researchers.

Perhaps the most unusual haunting at The Whitney involves a Victorian tea set in the carriage house. If anyone moves the tea set from its customary position, a sudden wave of paranormal activity erupts throughout the mansion, with china falling off shelves and breaking. When the tea set is returned to its proper place, the disturbances immediately cease, as though the house itself is enforcing domestic order.

Dye Paranormal leads regular paranormal dinner tours at The Whitney twice a month, which are open to the public. After dinner in the restaurant, the team takes guests on a ghost hunt through the mansion and the famously active carriage house. Detroit PBS featured The Whitney in their "Haunted Detroit" series, and US Ghost Adventures includes it as a highlight of their Detroit ghost tour. The mansion's combination of Gilded Age grandeur, family tragedy, and persistent unexplained activity has made it one of the most investigated and most visited haunted locations in Michigan, a place where guests come for the fine dining and sometimes find that the original residents are still at the table.