Pesky pub poltergeist

COEUR d’ALENE — The Irish culture is laden with tales of spirits and the supernatural.

In Coeur d'Alene, Kelly's Irish Pub has its own version of spooky stories about a presence that has proven to be a pesky poltergeist.

Just three weeks ago, a clock in the kitchen came off the wall and hit pub co-owner Meg Sullivan in the head.

"Here’s the clock,” Sullivan said Friday, standing about 3 feet to the left and a counter's width from the timepiece in question. "It hits me right here on the top of my head, and I’m like, ‘What?!’ It was weird."

Another incident involves a loaf of bread that hit a former cook in the head.

"I’ve had bread fly off of the shelf," Sullivan said. "And I’ve seen it, when it just flies off and hits them in the head."

Workers in the pub have experienced blasts of cold air from ducts when the air conditioning is off and burners that seem to turn themselves on when the oven has been turned off.

Amber Clark, kitchen manager, said about an hour and a half after the clock incident, she put two sheets of raw bacon on top of the oven, which was off and cold. She said there was no physical way the dial burners could have turned on.

“Within five minutes, I’m going, ‘What is that smell?’” she said, walking to the stove. “These two burners were on full blast, absolutely full blast."

In that same spot, she experienced a pair of tongs sliding off the utensil rack and defying gravity to come toward her and hit her in the foot.

“They came out this way and straight down onto my foot,” she said, demonstrating how impossible it would be for the tongs to land the way they did.

Employee Pete Lindahl said he has felt the rush of cold air, experienced the burners turn on when they were off and he has even witnessed a photo fly off the wall.

"I was doing my prep work here, and a picture comes off the wall and ends up over there, in the middle of the room," he said. "We’ve had people who say they’re intuitive to this kind of stuff sit here and go, ‘Wow, this place is something else.'

"Now you remember, we do have a funeral home next door."

And the lights in the bathrooms, especially the men's room, are always turning back on. Sullivan said her husband, Ed O'Brien, turns off the lights each night and goes outside to secure the doors. When he comes back in, the men's bathroom light and the light in the back room are on again.

"It’s just kind of weird stuff, that’s all I can tell you," she said. "I don’t know. I’m not a big ghost believer and we kind of made jokes about it for a couple years, like, ‘Ah, it’s just the ghost,’ but then it just got weirder and weirder.”

Sullivan said she has heard whisperings of a murder on the property back in the 1960s when it was a laundromat, but she hasn't found anything to support the rumors.

Coeur d'Alene Police Det. Jared Reneau checked records and didn't find any reports to confirm them, either.

"Records checked back to 1985 and couldn’t find any record of anything, either at that address or directly around it," Reneau said in an email response.

Sullivan said she would like to know more about the history of the property and is interested to know if any longtime locals have any clue about the building's past. She said she talked to a neighbor who has been in Coeur d'Alene for a while and he had never heard of a murder or a ghost, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible.

"All I know is, if we have a poor soul sitting here, we’d like to let them move on," she said. "We don’t want anyone getting hurt. I was the first one, I got a big lump on my head."

Do you have a spooky local ghost story for Halloween? Contact paranormal reporter Devin Heilman at 664-8176 x 1111 or dheilman@cdapress.com.