The Whitney

Ghost Hunters caught a floating light drifting down the stairs here in 2016. The carriage house, with Grace's tea set, is where it gets weirder.

Dave Tango was resting inside the Whitney during a lull in the Ghost Hunters investigation when a pale light floated down the staircase, drifted through the room, and turned to leave. A cameraman saw it too. The episode, "Phantom for the First Course," aired on Syfy on August 17, 2016, and it's one of the most cited investigations of a restaurant where investigators also documented the elevator opening by itself every five minutes and a hidden passage behind a faux wall.

David Whitney Jr. was the richest man in Detroit when he died in 1900. A Massachusetts-born lumber baron who moved to the city in 1857, he left behind a fortune estimated above $15 million and a 21,000-square-foot Romanesque Revival mansion at 4421 Woodward Avenue that he had lived in for only six years. The cause of death was a heart attack. The house had eaten four years and roughly $400,000 to build (1890 to 1894), required South Dakota rose-pink jasper on the exterior and Tiffany glass inside, and counted 52 rooms, 218 windows, 20 fireplaces, and the first functional residential elevator in Detroit. That same elevator is the one the Ghost Hunters crew watched cycle on its own.

There's a popular story that Whitney's first wife Flora haunts the third-floor women's restroom, sobbing because she never got to live in the house she helped design. That part is at least historically plausible: Flora died in 1882, eight years before construction even started. Whitney married her younger sister Sara a year later, and Sara did live in the mansion, and she died in it, in 1917. If there's a "woman crying in the bathroom" ghost, it's as likely to be Sara as Flora. Guides tell the story as Flora because the heartbreak is tidier.

Then there's the carriage house. The building sits behind the mansion and has produced more paranormal reports than anywhere else on the property since the current restaurant era began. The legend, repeated by staff and tour operators, is that a tea set kept in the carriage house belonged to Whitney's daughter Grace (Grace Whitney Hoff, 1862 to 1938, who actually outlived the house as a residence and died in Lausanne, Switzerland). Move the tea set and china in the main house starts falling off shelves. Put it back and the activity stops. Take that legend for what it is, a tour story, but the carriage house has generated more documented activity than any other corner of the estate.

On a PBS "One Detroit" shoot with investigator Andrea Riley, a spirit box locked inside a Faraday cage was asked whether the spirits were happy the crew was there. Riley and her colleagues said they independently heard a girl's voice answer "No." Guests on the paranormal dinner tours run by Chad and Heather Dye (Dye Paranormal, the restaurant's resident investigators) have also reported what sounds like children singing near the tea table. A second-hand story has dinner-tour guests capturing an EVP where a guest's question, "Would you like me to get out of your seat?", was answered by a whispered "Yes" on playback.

The other piece that doesn't get said often enough: this mansion was a working medical office for decades before it was a restaurant. It sat mostly vacant after the Whitney family left in 1920, was occupied by the Wayne County Medical Society beginning in 1932, and was formally donated to the Society in 1941. The Visiting Nurse Association bought the property for $150,000 in 1957. Some of the coughing-fit reports guests describe in the upper halls come from that era rather than the Whitney family, though nobody really knows. Richard Kughn, the Lionel Trains magnate, bought the mansion in 1979 and opened it as a restaurant in 1986. Bud Liebler bought it in 2007 and still runs it.

Take the paranormal dinner tours with a grain of salt; they're part of the restaurant's business. But three things about this place are harder to dismiss. The Syfy investigation produced specific mechanical oddities that the team themselves partly explained (the elevator, the drafts), which is the opposite of a hype reel. The carriage house has returned named-witness reports across independent crews, from Syfy to PBS. And the house itself, 22,000 square feet of jasper and dark wood built by a grieving widower for a wife who died before a single stone was cut, sells its own ghost story before anyone walks in.