TWO HARBORS — Nicole Beveridge still remembers her first alleged encounter with Sarah.
“I can feel people that aren’t always with us, in the living,” she said. “I just felt a nice little chill and a brush behind me, and then I asked somebody, ‘Is there somebody that lives here?’ and they said, ‘yes.’ And that’s when I began to learn the story of Sarah.”
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Sarah is a ghost — or at least an oral history of a supposed ghost — said to lurk in the Black Woods Bar & Grill in Two Harbors. Beveridge and some other longtime employees believe she’s a young child who is responsible for otherwise inexplicable mischief there.
They claim that Sarah has smashed a tableful of dirty dishes when no one else was nearby; flung a stack of drinkware from a secure shelf; tossed aside hamburger buns; rearranged silverware overnight; poked customers and servers; and fussed with the lights when nobody was near the switch.
“You can’t even debunk what happens because there’s no other way that. We don’t have a breeze going through to knock down plates; we don’t have a dog running around the building to knock stuff over,” Hannah Story, who's been a server there for about eight years, told the News Tribune. “It’s got to be somebody doing it, and it’s Sarah.”
Beveridge showed the News Tribune security camera footage of one such antic. In the video, a bartop menu quickly disappears from the edge of the frame — tossed violently, she said, by Sarah. Patrons who were reportedly nearby left, disturbed, shortly afterward.
“She flies it off of there,” Beveridge said. “In the blink of an eye.”
The rumored ghost shows up in fits and starts. Sarah is particularly active after alterations to the restaurant: new carpeting, roofing, renovations to the second floor, and so on, according to Story and Beveridge.
But neither seemed worried about the rumored ghost. Story said it can feel eerie when she’s by herself in the restaurant at night, but that Sarah’s apparent presence is normal now.
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“I’ve been here for so long that she’s just like my other co-worker that’s here. She makes noise and throws plates at everybody, but it’s nothing to be scared of. I’ve never been scared of her,” Story said. “She’s great. She’s fun to have around. She’s always definitely a little excitement for the day. Definitely a story to tell. Everyone asks about her all the time.”
Beveridge and Story believe Sarah as an orphan who broke her neck and died after a fall down the precipitous steps leading to the restaurant’s upper floor. Up there, a sputtering fluorescent light illuminates a hallway connecting dead-quiet, dormitory-style rooms that are now used for restaurant storage.
Sarah’s purported origins, though, don’t square with the building’s recorded history. It previously served as a boarding house and a bakery, according to Ellen Lynch, head of the Lake County Historical Society, but not an orphanage, as the rumor contends. Lake County records indicate the property has been owned by about 16 people or organizations since 1900, none of which are apparent orphanages or organizations that might be conceptually adjacent to an orphanage.
It’s unclear if anyone — let alone a little girl — died there. Finding a record of the accidental death of a child at that location among newspaper archives or death records, Lynch said, would be a needle-in-a-haystack sort of search.
Cheryl Watson, who’s been a server at Black Woods for 21 years, said she’s heard Sarah stories but hasn’t seen much, if any, evidence of the purported ghost herself. More of the same was true for a pair of younger and relatively new staffers at the restaurant, who said they’d heard stories about a ghost there, but had not witnessed anything out of the ordinary themselves.
“She maybe just comes out at certain times,” Watson said.
The Trust Project
