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Ashbary Coffee House
Ashbary Coffee House is located in Willow Springs, a suburb south of Chicago Illinois. It is located on Archer Avenue which is almost a legendary stretch of road for the paranormal enthusiast due to its ghostly history. The avenue is anchored on both ends by supposedly haunted cemeteries – Resurrection Cemetery on one side and St. James-Sag Cemetery on the other. Along the length of the road (which was once a well-worn Native American pathway) is a haunted restaurant once owned by the illustrious Al Capone as well as a dance hall that was once visited by the Devil himself. With such a colorful backdrop, it’s no wonder that the paranormal occurrences in the Ashbary Coffee House are said to happen with some degree of frequency.
The second floor of the building is said to be famous for the appearance of anomalous cold spots, and the bottom floor is known for poltergeist activity, disembodied voices, and other such ghostly occurrences. Due partly to the fact that business’s on Archer Avenue have to be comfortable with the idea of paranormal experiences, there are some stunning personal accounts that come out of the coffee house.
One employee recounted that when she was playing around with a Ouija board, asking innocent questions, when the planchette was taken from her hand by an invisible force, and immediately started spinning in circles in the center of the table. Similarly, when the coffee house was hosting a psychic fair, a tarot card was bent in half while someone was holding it in his hand. At another time a barista began mocking the spirits, proclaiming loudly that all of this haunting nonsense was a product of everyone’s overactive imagination. At that moment a coffee cup levitated off a nearby table and struck the naysayer, shutting him up.
A lot of the folklore surrounding Ashbary Coffee house comes from the report of a visiting psychic named Amy Cooper. She thought that the spirits that inhabited the building were a family of four: father, mother, son of about 10 years and a daughter of about 5 years. Though the father came across as an extremely dominant figure, there have been no reported incidents of these spirits causing anyone harm. They are most likely the remnants of a family that owned the house long before it became a coffee joint.
The coffee house was a polish deli before the current and also previous owners. The foundation though had a brothel on it in which had a couple women die in a fire.
