Spirits are at the heart of Buzzard’s Roost Distillery, and it goes well beyond the whiskey behind the bar.
Many staff members believe a few highly active ghosts haunt the distillery at 624 W. Main St. in Louisville.
This spooky season, the distillery and the nearby Hereafter Speakeasy, 119 S. Seventh St., are inviting bourbon fans and the paranormal curious to a two-hour, $70 experience geared at tapping into both kinds of spirits. The experience invites guests to sample bourbon at Buzzard’s Roost and a cocktail at Hereafter. All the while, guests learn the lore of the buildings and even attempt to communicate with the spirits that haunt them.
At one point, Buzzard Roost’s resident basement ghost “Gandano” may even select which bourbon is tried next.
I attended the inaugural tour on Sept. 26, and after an evening of fine bourbon and trying to engage with ghosts — I’m not necessarily convinced I personally connected to the spirit world.
What I can tell you, though, is that some very curious things have happened on the 600 block of W. Main Street in downtown Louisville.
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And whether or not you’re a believer, this new unique mix of bourbon and the paranormal is hauntingly entertaining.
‘It’s going to be different every single time’
Several ghosts are believed to haunt the Hereafter Speakeasy in Downtown Louisville. The building dates back to the 1800s and its rumored to have been an old Civil War era map room. At least three different apparitions have been spotted in the building, including a man in a dark jumpsuit and two mischievous red-headed men.
The partnership between the bar and the distillery was a natural one, Laura Coomes, Buzzard’s Roost’s vice president of marketing, told me. Ryan Svab, who co-owns Hereafter, also bartends at Buzzard’s Roost. When the distillery teamed up with Fen Alankus of Feralore and her paranormal investigative team for a two-night investigation, it made sense to do one at Hereafter, as well.
Two centuries ago, the 600 block of W. Main Street was Louisville’s hub for commerce. Local lore says the upstairs mezzanine at Hereafter was once a Civil War map room. In the late 1800s, three major fires happened on the block, and the last one burned all the way through what’s now Buzzard Roost. Five firefighters died that day, and Alankus’ team believes they’ve connected with two of them, “Captain Edward” and “John.” A couple of years after the fire, a tornado blew through and took out the north side of the street. More than 100 people died in the storm.
That kind of history and devastation can be fertile ground for paranormal investigations.
“There’s certain parts of the building where you just feel like you’re not alone,” Coomes told me ahead of the tour. “And we feel like, we’re guests in the building. They’re definitely not out to hurt us. I think they’re glad that we’re here.”
As Coomes, Svab and Alankus carved out this experience, they knew they wanted to do more than tell ghost stories. They wanted to give their guests a chance to interact with the ghosts and decide for themselves whether they believed anything supernatural was there.
“There’s no guarantees of what you’re going to see and experience, because we think it’s going to be different every single time,” Coomes told me. “Even though we’ve planned it out, every person is going to have a different type of time.”
The inaugural tour was an experiment of sorts, and while the paranormal team and the business owners have a formula for the experience — much of the activity depends on the engagement of the guests and the ghosts.
Fen Alankus is a well-respected paranormal investigator, who is leading a unique Halloween experience at Buzzard’s Roost Distillery and Hereafter Speakeasy. On these tours, guests will attempt to communicate with the businesses’ resident ghosts.
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The first tour was relatively intimate. Beyond me, only two couples from Pennsylvania, who knew each other, had signed up for it. One was a skeptic. Another said she often speaks to a spirit she believes is in the office where she works.
The other three of us fell somewhere in the middle.
We started the tour in the still room where Buzzard’s Roost brand ambassador Jimmy James Hamblin offered us a pour of whiskey, while Alankus and Coomes talked us through the building’s history. Over the years, it has been a hat store, a dry goods store, a stationery company and most recently, an ad agency.
Since Buzzard’s Roost opened in 2023, the staff has experienced unexplained broken glasses, books falling off the shelf and many elevator and electronic glitches. Once, during a farewell party for a beloved employee, guests watched a tiramisu flip over all on its own. Coomes has seen unexplained orbs fluttering in upstairs offices on the security cameras. Bartenders hear footsteps when they’re alone, only to discover no one is there.
Hamblin doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he also doesn’t have an explanation for the books he’s seen fall around him.
From the still room, we headed to the speakeasy in the basement. There, the paranormal investigators played us a recording of an unexplained noise they captured in this room during their investigation. In the middle of hours worth of silence, the recorder picked up what could be a muffled man’s voice saying “dimes.”
Then Alankus introduced us to “Gandano,” who had previously told her this nickname using a Ouija board.
She held up a pendulum from which she showed our group how to use it to channel answers from beyond. In this case, if it swung in a circle, it meant the ghost said “yes.” If it moved side to side, she believed Gandano, was saying “no.”
Buzzard’s Roost has teamed up with Hereafter Speakeasy and paranormal investigator Fen Alankus to launch a unique bourbon experience that invites guests to interact with the businesses’ resident ghosts.
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In theory, you could use these yes or no questions to learn about his life and preferences. Or, you could use it to choose what type of Buzzard’s Roost bourbon we should drink.
“Are you cool with choosing the whiskey that we’re going to try first,” Alankus asked him. “Go on Gandano, tell us.”
The pendulum swung in a small circle near Buzzard’s Roost’s smoked barrel rye whiskey, which has previously won a double gold medal at the San Francisco World Spirits competition. Hamblin served the blended three-year-old rye finished in toasted barrel, which had a smooth, almost vanilla taste.
As we sipped on that, Alankus showed us a pair of divining rods. Like the pendulum, Alankus explained that the position of these L-shaped rods could be used to answer yes or no questions. After a short test, we learned that when the rods swung apart, Gandano was saying “no” and if they crossed, it meant “yes.”
And this is where the real fun began.
So much so, eventually Hamblin ended up choosing the second and third pours of whiskey for us, instead of Gandano. Our little group was having too much fun trying to learn about the spirit to give him another shot at selecting a bourbon.
“Gandano are you Italian,” one woman asked, and the rods positioned themselves into a “no.”
“Gandano are you an orphan,” Coomes asked.
“Yes.”
“Gandano were you the voice on the recorder?” Hamblin asked.
“No.”
“Gandano are you alone?”
“No.”
This kind of banter went on for about 25 minutes, until finally it was time to head around the corner to Hereafter.
As part of Buzzard’s Roost Distillery’s new haunted experience, the tour group ventures into a hidden speakeasy in the distillery’s basement.
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“I would like to know if Gandano enjoyed himself this evening,” Hamblin asked, playfully.
“Yes.”
I sighed and smiled in relief. Whether or not we were speaking to the dead ― at very least we hadn’t ticked this supposed spirit off.
‘Lots of creepy, weird things’
Hereafter Speakeasy has teamed up with local paranormal investigator Fen Alankus and Buzzard’s Roost Distillery for a unique, Halloween-time bourbon tasting and haunted tour.
Around the corner at Hereafter, we wound through the downstairs concert venue and then to the upstairs bar. The paranormal team had set out stacks of tarot cards. Each card had a corresponding cocktail that went with it, which left the final drink of the night in fate’s hands.
I pulled the Lover card, and the bartenders mixed up Manhattan-like libation for me, as we settled into the second and final stop of the tour.
Hereafter is one of the most active spaces Alankus has ever investigated. Co-owner Svab and some of her staff believe they’ve seen a male apparition in a dark work suit roaming the building. Several workers have also described seeing a few 20-something, red haired men with a mischievous vibe. Those boys, in theory, enjoy turning lights on and off and knocking things off the wall.
“There’s lots of creepy weird things there, but not scary things,” Svab told me.
Just last week, one of the bathrooms locked itself from the inside for hours. They worried someone might be in trouble inside, and then when the staff finally got the door open — no one was there.
“To generate that kind of energy as an entity as far as we understand it, takes a lot,” Alankus said.
During the new Favorite Haunts and Spirits Experience guests are invited to choose a tarot card, which indicates what type of cocktail they’ll try at Hereafter Speakeasy.
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As we sipped our fortune cocktails, the team passed around a collection of sensors designed to detect electro-magnetic energy or unexplained changes in temperatures.
They encouraged us to wander the bar and music venue to see if any of the decor might seem sensitive. Svab keeps a “cabinet of curiosities” filled with creepy dolls and bizarre antiques in the downstairs bar, and she said many of the objects seem to have a supernatural charge to them. She has several bubble portraits from the 1800s decorating the walls that her staff suspects might have a spirit connected to them.
But really, most of the supernatural activity at Hereafter occurs when the building is quiet and only one or two people are there. As I took the sensor around, I wondered if the full music venue below, the busy bar and our curious, increasingly intoxicated group, might be too much for the spirits to show themselves. We only had a few minutes on the tour left, and the lights on my sensor wouldn’t budge.
Then, for whatever reason, as I talked with the believer in the group about her daughter, Julia, the sensor showed a moderate presence. Every time one of us said the girl’s name, the lights flickered.
So then the woman tried calling out to other significant names in her life.
“Catherine,” she said, pausing. “Sissy? Agnes?”
No luck.
I was just about to put my sensor down and call it a night when conversation in the group turned back to those red-headed, mischievous, 20-somethings.
“If I’m in the spirit world,” someone mused. “And I’m observing, and I’m watching what’s going around, what would be my motivation to throw a picture or to mess with people?”
Right as she said “mess with people” every light on my sensor went off, as though that was the answer.
Those boys must have a sense of humor.
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And candidly, that was enough to convince me it was time to call it a night and explore the spirits downtairs behind the bar … rather than tempt these red heads into “messing” with me from the afterlife.
Reach Courier Journal Features Columnist Maggie Menderski at mmenderski@courier-journal.com.
Want to go?
WHAT: Favorite Haunts and Spirits Experience at Buzzard’s Roost Distillery
WHERE: The tour begins at Buzzard’s Roost at 624 W. Main St. and ends at Hereafter Speakeasy, 119 S. Seventh St.
WHEN: Fridays and Saturdays now through Nov. 8 from 7-9 p.m., No bookings are available on Oct. 17-18, and extra bookings are available on Oct. 31 at 4 p.m. and 6 p.m.
COST: $70
TO BOOK: Visit https://tinyurl.com/HauntedBuzzardsRoost
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Buzzard’s Roost Distillery haunted tour, ghosts in Louisville