The Spirit of the Bartender

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
Bars, taverns, lounges or even man caves could be the places with the best memories, or perhaps the ugliest and bloodiest ones. There are spirits, and then there are Spirits; these are some of those stories.

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The writer of the story gave this example as similar to the one that was central to his story.

The following is a story of a haunted bartender picture. This style of print is very common, in other words this is not tied to an original artist. Perhaps what this person experienced is what happened around this print while it hung on a wall.

This is the story:

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Last year, my junior year of college, me and 4 other friends moved into a house together. We all brought our own things to decorate the house with (posters, paintings, etc.). One of the paintings was of a bartender pouring a martini. We would end up calling this painting the Martini Man. I had a weird feeling about it right off the bat. His wide eyes would follow you around the room, and there was just something creepy about it. When you were alone with it, it still felt like there was a real presence with you. About a month or two after the move in, activity started happening.

One day, I was sitting on the couch in the living room playing some video games, I started hearing slamming at the front door, and it was LOUD. It sounded like somebody sprinting and body-slamming the door (BTW we have a foyer so I can't see the door from the living room). Thinking it may have been a loud knock, I go to see if there's anyone there. Nothing. This persists throughout the day, and I get up several more times to see if anyone is there. Nothing each time. It's the middle of the day so I'm more confused than creeped out. I decide to test the door, shaking it, slamming it, knocking on it, even jumping into it. Nothing I did was close to as loud as the noises I was hearing. To top it off, this happened one day and one day only. I never heard this happen again. Not necessarily attributed to the painting, but I’ll explain how it connects later.

The last personal story is about the footsteps. This happened in the summer, when it was just me and one other guy living in the house. It was about 2 am, and I was lying in bed playing on my laptop. I start hearing really loud footsteps coming from downstairs. They were like fast stomps. It sounded like someone sprinting while completely drunk. At first I just though it was a drunken roommate, but there was something strange in the pattern to them. I would hear them start in one part of the house, stomp to another, stop for a while, then pick back up in a completely different part of the house.

Eventually, they came running up the stairs, directly to my door, and stopped. I was frozen with fear during the silence. They then started up again, downstairs this time. It kept going for at least 10 more minutes.

I should probably explain why I pin all this on the painting and not the house itself. As I already said, its eyes would follow you around the room, and had an overall creepy vibe to it. People would come over and say that the painting scared them without hearing any of these stories. We had some girls over for a party and they insisted that we take the painting down. I hastily agreed and took it off the wall. That's when I saw, written on the back of the canvas, the name of the painting: "The Spirit of the Bartender". Quite frankly I thought this was hilarious, as I had been expressing my distaste for this painting to my roommate for some time, and this corroborated my claims nicely.

After that year, the roommate to whom it belonged moved out, and he took the painting with him. The activity died down after that. He ended up giving it to the bar he worked at, and they threw it out after only 2 weeks. I can imagine why. We actually managed to find the artist on the internet, and it seems he just paints the same thing over and over again. I'll attach an image of one of his works that's closest to what we had in our home.

A reader of the story commented the following:

My sister was a maritime artist. She committed suicide last July in West Palm Beach. My wife and I brought a lot of her unsold pieces back, some are really well done. So we hung several of the larger ones.

Mean while my sister's ashes got lost in the mail when the mortuary sent them back to me in Houston, Texas. It took two months and her remains made several round trips from Florida and back. However my sister did love to travel. Once the ashes finally arrived is when the trouble started.

When we get in a argument about her, one of the paintings always falls off the wall. Her ashes are in the guest bedroom closet. The guest bedroom was our three house cats' favorite afternoon hang out, now they refuse to go in there.

My father-in-law has a Hatteras with a large enclosed cabin that can accommodate several people. We are going to invite some of my sister's closest friends and go out a bit in deeper water. There is a large back deck and a door in the transom so you can step down near the water. We will go when the weather is calm this summer, spread her ashes, and give our cats their hang-out pad back

Picture mentioned by commentator that is found at the John Ringling Museum

Another story:

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I visited the John Ringling Museum of Art and Estate in Sarasota, FL a few years back. There was a haunted painting there. It was a portrait of a young woman, wearing a deep emerald bodice and a blue scarf on her head as she looked down with her body turned down a bit, and it cast a shadow on her breast. I took a photo because the depth of the emerald velvet bodice seemed to be an abyss, it was so dark and the painting had a licked surface, which Dutch painters from the Renaissance era would use as a technique to diminish brush stroke textures so that colors and implied textures were more intense. I remember getting stuck on this piece. Her eyes were so sad, the textures we're so rich! Too rich. Too perfect. I decided I didn't like this work after all.

When I was later looking through my pictures, I noticed a red devil or demon looking thing where that deep abyss of dark green emerald was when I saw it in person, on the wall. I showed so many people this picture and asked them if they saw anything unusual and every single person saw that red demon right away. It was NOT on the painting at the museum, but it showed up on my picture.

No other photos had these red obstructions, or whatever, in them, but I took multiple pictures of this paintings from different angles and every picture has the red demon.

Mont Robinson a bartender who drowned himself haunted the gravel pit where he died c.1893

In February, 1893, J.M. "Mont" Robinson, a bartender who lived in Summitville, Indiana drowned himself. He went to a gravel pit filled with water near town, and left his coat and hat on the shore. He was 40 years old, and left behind a wife and four children. He had some financial reverses and his health was bad.

The pond was deep, and saloon men from where he worked had been cutting ice from it during the cold weather. The next day, his boss passed by and saw the hat and coat on the bank. Right away he realized they belonged to Robinson.

Suspecting what the man had done he went back to town, and brought a party of friends with grab hooks and dragged the bottom thoroughly. Eventually the body was found, and taken to his home. It seemed that once Robinson lived in "good circumstances" and owned a farm near Summitville, but he lost it through bad management and sickness.

Less than a month after he died, Mont Robinson was seen near the pool where he drowned. People who passed by the area at night, which was half a mile outside of town, would see him standing on the bank as if in the act of plunging into the pool. It seemed he didn't realize he had been successful in ending his life.

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