Two Brothers Roundhouse

The Two Brothers Roundhouse in Aurora, Illinois is a brewery now, and the brewmaster won't stay alone in it after dark. He's told ghost-tour operators he hears noises he can't place and sees shadows, and that he won't come back by himself late at night.

Before the beer, the building did one job for a very long time. It went up in 1856 — four years before the Civil War — as a railroad roundhouse for the Chicago & Aurora line, a 40-sided ring of buff limestone quarried in nearby Batavia, roughly 264 feet across, with stalls for the locomotives and a machine shop bolted on. It's the oldest limestone roundhouse in the United States. For 118 years, men hammered and welded inside that stone. The work stopped in 1974, and the place sat abandoned for about two decades.

Walter Payton's investment group rescued the ruin in the mid-1990s; Two Brothers Brewing took it over in 2011. The stone, by every account, did not go quiet.

Staff say they've watched a little girl run across a room and a man with a lantern move through the building. A manager was touched on the shoulder one night on a back staircase, with no one behind him. In the oldest 1856 section, people report shadow figures in the hallways and two full-bodied apparitions — an older man and a young boy, with no names or stories attached to either. Long after closing, employees describe shadows dancing in the Lager Room.

In October 2023, a group called the Ghost Research Society spent a night there. They brought model trains and a railroad spike as bait, gambling that whatever was left might be railroad men. Their devices drained fully charged batteries and logged cold spots downstairs. When they asked a ghost box about trains, investigators say it answered back: "Oh yes!"

A hundred and eighteen years of hammering, sealed up, then reopened — and the ones who work there now still listen for it.