The Gandy Dancer

An upscale seafood restaurant housed in the beautifully restored 1886 Michigan Central Railroad Depot. The Romanesque Revival building served as a working train station for nearly a century before its conversion to a restaurant.

The Gandy Dancer occupies what was once considered the finest station on the Michigan Central Railroad line when it was built in 1886. Designed in the Richardsonian Romanesque style with heavy stone walls, deep-set round-arched openings, large fireplaces, and beautiful stained glass windows, the depot served Ann Arbor as a bustling transit hub for over eight decades. The restaurant's name references the "gandy dancers," a slang term for the railroad workers who laid and maintained the tracks that made the station possible.

The building's haunted reputation traces to its role during wartime. According to a well-respected employee who spoke to MLive in 1991, when the building still functioned as a depot, it was used to temporarily hold the bodies of World War I soldiers who had been shipped home after dying in battle overseas. Their grieving families came to the station to claim the remains for local burial. The depot also saw heavy soldier traffic during World War II, with countless emotional farewells and homecomings passing through its stone archways. In September 1940, tragedy struck directly at the station when children placed a railroad spike on the tracks outside, causing a freight train to derail and killing a man named Walter Flinn.

Paranormal investigators have theorized that transportation hubs like train stations are particularly prone to supernatural activity. The reasoning is twofold: the sheer volume of passengers passing through over decades may create conditions that allow spirits to linger, and the intense emotions associated with wartime departures and the receiving of war dead may imprint themselves permanently on a location.

Staff and diners at the Gandy Dancer have reported several recurring phenomena over the years. Lights in the restaurant have been found turned completely upside down with no explanation. Glasses have been seen flying off shelves on their own, sometimes in full view of startled patrons. Most notably, multiple witnesses have described the ghostly figure of a mysterious, well-dressed man who appears to wander the halls of the building before vanishing. Some speculate this could be a former station master or a soldier who never completed his journey home.

The restaurant's founder, Chuck Muer, met his own tragic end in 2005 when his boat disappeared during a storm near the Bahamas. Muer, his wife Betty, and two companions were never found, adding yet another layer of loss to the Gandy Dancer's history. The Crazy Wisdom Community Journal has featured the Gandy Dancer among Ann Arbor's most notable haunted locations, and Detroit Paranormal Expeditions has included it on their list of Michigan's most haunted restaurants and bars. Whether the spirits belong to fallen soldiers, grieving families, a railroad worker, or someone else entirely, the 1886 depot continues to serve both the living and, perhaps, the dead.