Drinking Wyoming: Ghosts Might Join You For A Drink At Suds Bros. In Evanston

Cowboy State Daily’s 'Drinking Wyoming' is presented by Pine Bluffs Distilling

EVANSTON — It can get a little creepy in the old Suds Bros. Brewery, which offers a refreshing slate of original craft brews on tap, as well as delicious bar food like hot wings and pretzels with beer cheese dip.

The workers, though, sometimes feel that they need a stiff drink after working there, particularly if it’s their turn to close. Once all the customers have all gone home, the employees find themselves there, alone, wiping down the bar counter in a place that has plenty of old building sounds to spook them.

But it’s not just the creaking and squeaking of old floorboards that cause that stiff drink feeling.

It’s things like the ghostly handprints from a child that sometimes appear on freshly cleaned windows. Because of that, some employees pointedly refuse to look at the windows as they’re leaving the bar late at night.

Then there’s the occasional tugs on ponytails or, for the unlucky who have to go downstairs, the occasional shove in the back.

And let’s not mention the occasional plink of a piano with its cover closed. The ghosts have forgotten about that piano lately. They haven’t been playing it as much. Let’s just keep it that way by not mentioning it too loudly.

“We have three ghosts here,” General Manager Rhonda Berlener told Cowboy State Daily. “We have a little girl, about 9, and she wears a little white dress and she’s been seen running around upstairs.”

The girl ghost becomes particularly active whenever any of the waitresses are pregnant, Berlener said, and has been known to tug on the clothing of servers, particularly the new ones.

“Supposedly, there’s a picture of her that the owner’s mom still has,” Berlener added. “She’s standing at the bottom of the steps. Someone was taking a picture of their group’s table, and she happened to be in the background, watching.”

Another ghost at the restaurant is something of a prankster.

“He’ll like take the pizza cutter and hide it for about a week,” Berlener said. “And then, suddenly, it’ll show back up. So, we just use knives to cut the pizza for a while, because we know the pizza cutter will eventually show back up.”

Meet Cowboy

And the third ghost? They call him Cowboy, when they speak of him at all.

Cowboy’s a little creepy, so most of the time people don’t talk about him. They leave him alone and try not to think of him at all.

“He is grumpy,” Berlener said. “He’s actually, sometimes as you’re walking up the stairs, it gets like, cold, for no reason.”

Maybe that cold explains why Cowboy seems to prefer hanging out with the old boiler that’s downstairs, way, way in the back. It’s as far from people as Cowboy can possibly get.

It’s also, perhaps coincidentally, right next to where an old tunnel entrance used to be.

Cowboy doesn’t like it when people get too close to his boiler, Berlener said. That and its proximity to the old tunnel entrance is why she’s taken to calling it her “Freddy Krueger” boiler.

“We’re not sure what Cowboy’s story is, because I mean, these old tunnels used to run through Suds, and our boiler is the original heating for this (city) block,” she said.

Did Cowboy use the tunnels once upon a time? No one knows for sure. But those tunnels are why Berlener believes there are so many ghost stories in downtown Evanston.

“They used to run all the way from the state hospital to town,” Berlener said. “And you know what the original purpose of those tunnels was? It was so the migrant Chinese workers — we’re talking the 1800s — and they didn’t want to always see the Chinese workers, so they made them use these tunnels.”

Berliner said there’s still an entrance to those tunnels from the state hospital, though she believes most, if not all, of the entrances in the downtown area have since been closed.

“They were sealed because of collapsing, settling issues,” she said. “And they don’t want people down in there because they don’t want kids, I mean it’s been almost 200 years, so they don’t want the kids down there playing and stuff.”

With several businesses in the four-block downtown area having tunnel entrances, it’s fueled lots of stories, Berlener said.

“If you talk to a lot of the business owners down here, they do have little stories that they’ve been told,” she said. “And we’ve had our issues here and there, too. It gets a little creepy in this old building. I mean it was built in (the 1800s), so it does have some history.”

Wyoming’s Second JCPenney Store

Everyone knows that Kemmerer is home to America’s first JCPenney store. Not as many know that Evanston is home to the second.

“So originally, this was a feed store and then it was a JCPenneys,” Berlener said. “James Cash Penney worked here as a manager at the Golden Rule store (in 1899), then he went to Kemmerer to open the first JCPenneys.”

Kemmerer opened his own Golden Rule store in Kemmerer in 1902, which eventually became the first JCPenney.

After the success of that first store in Kemmerer, Cash bought out his partners, including the Evanston Golden Rule store where he’d once been a manager, making it the second in what he envisioned as a six-chain store.

Ultimately, Cash was far more successful than he’d dreamed, though. His six-chain store became 26 stores, and then 2,053 at its height — one of America’s largest retailers.

Old-timers sometimes come into the brewery and tell Berlener stories about the Golden Rule store. They’ve shown her where everything used to be in the old department store.

“Before this area was the bar, it was all the men’s department,” Berliner said. “And upstairs, that was the women’s area.”

Suds Bros. has kept quite a few things that were original to the JCPenney Store, Berlener added.

“These lights are original to JCPenney,” she said. “They’ve had the electrical upgraded, but the lights are still the original. And these floors are still the original floors that were here when this was built.”

About Those Child Handprints

Lukis Hill, who works at the restaurant, is one of the employees who has reported seeing child-like handprints appear on Suds Bros. windows.

“She leaves little fingerprints everywhere,” he said. “And in the mornings, when you come in and like wipe down the windows, you’ll see like little handprints sometimes.”

The first time that happened, Hill went outside to wipe the windows down again, thinking some little children must have walked by and done that as a prank.

“But, no, the handprints were on the inside,” Hill said.

Inside, where there was no one with such small hands, because the business wasn’t even open yet.

“One time, I had to work a closing shift and so when I left, I looked at all the windows and they were clean, no fingerprints,” he said. “Then, the next day, when I came back, there was a little handprint on the door. It was on the inside.”

Berlener, meanwhile, has gone upstairs in the area where the child ghost is known to play and found that the jukebox, which doesn’t even have any songs loaded up, is inexplicably on.

“We have even unplugged it,” she said. “We’re getting ready to open the bar upstairs, but we haven’t had it open in a while. So we unplugged the jukebox, because it was turning on by itself.”

Unplugging it didn’t solve that little problem, however.

“I’ve walked up there many times and it’s been on and I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m holding the plug in my hand, so that’s really weird.’”

Another Photo Of The Playful Ghost

The restaurant still has a picture taken during its early JCPenney days. Some believe that the restaurant’s child ghost may be pictured in it.

The original photo is a rather small portrait that the owners decided to blow up to hang in the restaurant. They used Photoshop to add the words “Suds Bros. Brewery” to the picture.

When they blew the photo up, however, they noticed that a tiny thumbnail-sized white blur in the original had become recognizable as the figure of a young girl, wearing a white dress, stepping into the JCPenney store. A white dress eerily similar to the aforementioned photo of the ghost girl, taken by a diner of her group’s table.

There are no adults pictured with the girl, so some, including Berlener, have speculated the girl might have had a parent who worked at the store. Or perhaps she was just following a parent into the store who was shopping that day.

“We couldn’t find any back stories on her or anything, though,” she said. “So, we still don’t know anything about her, except that she likes to play. She’s our playful ghost.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.