In Brief
At the Wabasha Street Caves in St. Paul, the bullet holes in the Fireside Room fireplace are from three gangsters shot dead at a card table. Police searched the caves and found no bodies, no blood, no evidence at all.
The Full Story
At the Wabasha Street Caves in St. Paul, Minnesota, the bullet holes in the Fireside Room fireplace are the part of the tour no one explains away. The story goes that four gangsters were playing cards in front of that stone hearth one night in the 1930s when a well-dressed man arrived with a case and told the band to leave. They had unfinished business. A waitress back in the kitchen heard the pops of a Thompson submachine gun, ran out, and found three men shot dead at the table. The fourth had fled with the gunman.
She called the St. Paul police. They searched the caves and found no bodies, no blood, no evidence at all, and accused her of filing a false report. The only thing she could point to were the holes gouged into the fireplace stones, where they remain today.
The caves were carved by hand from soft sandstone, mined in the 1840s for the silica sand that goes into glass. By the 1880s growers were raising mushrooms in the cool, damp dark, more than 50 caves at the peak of what locals called the Mushroom Capital of the Midwest. A French immigrant named Albert Mouchnotte ran one of those mushroom operations, and during Prohibition he turned it into a speakeasy. Then, on October 26, 1933, William and Josie Lehmann opened the Castle Royal here, a nightclub with chandeliers, oriental carpets, and a gambling room in the back. The papers called it the World's Most Gorgeous Underground Nightclub. Cab Calloway and Harry James played the stage. The story has Dillinger and Ma Barker in the crowd, though there's no record they ever came.
The club closed when the war came, and the caves went back to mushrooms, then aged cheese for Land O'Lakes through the 1950s. Today the place hosts weddings and swing-dance nights, plus tours of the gangster history and the ghosts.
What people report now are quieter. An old gangster in a suit and hat, sometimes with music. A phantom couple on the old dance floor. A forlorn woman, the one guides call the most frightening of them. Items move on their own. Voices come from empty rooms.
"I have actually seen a ghost in the cave," says tour guide Deborah Frethem. "It is definitely haunted."
The Star Tribune named these caves the most haunted place in Minnesota. The waitress who heard the gun was the only witness, and the police told her nothing had happened. The fireplace says otherwise.
