A vanishing man, a flying martini glass, mysterious footsteps: The ghosts haunting Hampden

Gerri Tipton only needed to review the security footage one time to accept that her Hampden office was haunted.

Sometime between 2 and 3 a.m., the receptionist’s usually secure desk drawer slid open, slowly, seemingly by itself. That video, from four years ago, gave her evidence of the ghost she’d already suspected of dwelling there.

The pit Tipton felt in her stomach wasn’t fear. It was excitement. Now, the amateur ghost-hunter just had to figure out who he was.

Probably a soldier, she decided. That would make the most sense. The property at 921 W. 36th Street houses Tipton’s employer, Chalet Settlements, and other businesses, but it was a meeting house for Civil War veterans until 1912. She’d seen door handles move up and down without anyone standing nearby. She once heard a woman who wasn’t there whisper in her ear.

It was just office intrigue until the Hampden Village Merchants Association asked if she’d join a haunted tour of local businesses. She could pull out all her ghost-hunting equipment — radio scanners said to interpret voices from beyond, cat toys that flash at the slightest movement, a meter gauging the strength of nearby electromagnetic fields — and do a live investigation.

It’s now year three of the Haunted Hampden tour of local restaurants, shops and other businesses, but this is the first year the association is offering separate family-friendly and boozy options. Lovelyarns owner Melissa Salzman initially pitched the initiative as a fun way to draw more patrons to nearby businesses. And if Fells Point had a popular ghost tour, she thought, why didn’t Hampden?

Her store doesn’t have any otherworldly guests (as far as she knows), and she likes it that way. She wasn’t sure about others — until she started asking questions. There were stories up and down The Avenue.

A child’s footprints appearing in spilled flour on a bakery floor. A restaurant employee spotting a ghostly patron at the bar well after closing time. The sound of mysterious footsteps echoing through an office building late at night.

“I didn’t realize we had so many ghosts in the neighborhood,” said Salzman, who sits on the board of the merchants association.

The most shocking story she heard was one that had already been reported: A decade ago, as contractors renovated what would become The Bluebird cocktail room, they discovered a casket with a full skeleton inside. The building used to be a gathering place for a fraternal order, which may have used the bones for rituals.

At the Golden West Cafe, a crosswalk away from the bar, owner Sam Classen has seen some things.

A martini glass flew off a shelf on its own. Music howled when no one had started the playlist. Security alarms, triggered by motion sensors, went off when the cameras didn’t show anyone there. The activity seemed to ramp up during building renovations. (Tipton, the ghost-hunter, said spirits don’t like change.)

Several employees have also reported seeing a man in a hat who suddenly vanishes. A worker was stocking the freezer one day when she saw a man out of the corner of her eye. Thinking it was a manager, she asked for help putting everything away — but when she turned around, the figure had disappeared.

As to why so many ghosts seem to be gathering in Hampden, there’s one leading theory.

“This street has been a hubbub for a long time,” Classen said. “It’s a place where people are coming and communing and spending a lot of time and energy, spending their lives working, eating and drinking. … I just think that that’s a hard thing to leave.”

On a scale of one to haunted, Classen says Golden West is maybe a five or six. Hampden as a whole, though? “Pretty spooky.”

A block away at The Duchess, general manager Danvic Celebrado-Royer said the restaurant probably rates about a two. He has long felt like someone was watching him and has heard unexplainable noises late at night. An employee once saw an apparition of a woman at the bar.

The more he learned about the building’s past, the more plausible the stories seemed. It had past lives as jewelry and hardware stores dating back to the 19th century and was most recently Cafe Hon, which closed in 2022. Many of the surrounding buildings are just as old and have their own storied histories.

If there are ghosts, “it seems as if the spirits are very nice and have no nefarious intent,” Celebrado-Royer said. “You’ll hear some knocking and some rumbling up the stairs or something like that. … You won’t feel anybody grab your feet.”

There’s no set time frame for a paranormal investigation, but the regular walking tour ($25) takes about an hour to an hour and a half, while the boozy version ($30) runs for 2 1/2 to three hours. Tour participants also have possible stops at nearly 20 other Hampden businesses, including Sage Cosmetic Tattoo, Atomic Books and the Baltimore Art Gallery.

If you’re lucky — or unlucky, depending how you view it — perhaps you’ll meet some of the main characters from their stories.

It’s happened before at the real estate firm Chalet Settlements, where Tipton is again hoping to gather strong evidence with her ghost hunting equipment. Tour groups in the past have heard voices and seen motion-activated lights turn on from across the room, she said.

After watching the desk video years ago, Tipton gathered three coworkers and her equipment in the office kitchen in the hopes of reaching the ghost.

“Is anybody here?” she asked her scanner, which is known as a spirit box. “What is your name?”

The man’s voice came through clearly: “Steven.” She needed to make sure she heard him right, so she asked again a half-hour later. Same answer.

Now with a name for her officemate, Tipton did what any reasonable paranormal investigator would do: She asked more questions. Who was he? What was his job?

Turns out Steven was neither a soldier nor a mill worker, as so many others were back in the day. He was a farmer. That’s what they heard on the device.

But Tipton still thinks there may be some remnants of the building’s Civil War history. She heard rumors that a woman who lives in the apartment building upstairs woke up one morning to find a soldier standing in her room.

She saw him just for a moment. Then he was gone.