In Brief
The Windham Restaurant in Windham, New Hampshire ran for years under a sign that read "Food and Spirits." Staff named their ghosts and let customers in on it. One EVP, caught beside a box standing impossibly on a single corner, asked to be documented.
The Full Story
At the Windham Restaurant in Windham, New Hampshire, an EVP specialist named Karen Mossey was photographing a box that shouldn't have been standing. It was balanced on a single corner, upright, holding a position no box holds. When she played the tape back, a voice on it said, "Get the camera." It read less like a moan than an instruction. Whatever was in the building seemed to want a witness.
The house was built around 1812, on a farm site that goes back to 1729, and it belonged to the Dinsmoor family. Lula and Vess Liakas opened the restaurant inside it in September 2001 and hung a sign over the door reading "Food and Spirits." They didn't keep the rest quiet either. The staff named the ghosts and told customers which was which.
There's Jacob, a man in a blue suit, the one people see most, said to have died of a heart attack falling down the front staircase. There's a boy named William at the second-floor wait station. A little girl wanders the dining rooms. Blonde waitresses got the worst of it: hair touched, a necklace or an earring unclasped while their hands were full of plates. Dishes flew and broke. Glasses slid across level tables. Money went missing from payment folders. During the holidays, empty gift boxes were found stacked into towers, or holding still above the third-floor staircase.
The investigators kept coming back. The New England Ghost Project worked the building across years, even when an earlier restaurant called The Riviera occupied it. A photographer named Leo Monfet ran a sequence of infrared shots one night, and two frames seconds apart told their own small story. The first shows a young boy standing in a doorway. The next shows the doorway empty, with a streak of light running through the space where he had just been.
Vess Liakas stayed a skeptic. He called the activity "more mischievous than anything." Then a medium named Maureen Wood went into a trance in the basement and spoke in a man's voice: "What are you looking at? I have papers buried here." Liakas, who'd watched plenty by then, said it differently. "She had a man's voice. I was freaked out. I never felt so threatened in my life."
The "Food and Spirits" sign is gone now. New owners took over around 2022 and run the place as a plain American restaurant, no ghosts on the menu. An overnight fire gutted the kitchen in April 2025, and they rebuilt. The named dead belong to a version of the building that no longer advertises them.
