You’re About To Inn-Ter The Twilight Zone

[May 6th, 2009]

Nestled near Cathedral Park in St. Johns, the charmingly named Your Inn Tavern (7004 N Catlin Ave., 285-0420) offers video poker, flat-screen TVs and its very own ghost. Established in 1923, the bar has remained largely unchanged over the years. Catering to locals who maintain their own barstools (and who receive calls to the bar from their spouses, telling them to come home), it’s the type of bar people keep coming back to for the rest of their lives. And in one case, maybe even longer. No one remembers exactly when the ghost—described as a man in his sixties wearing a flannel shirt—first appeared, but he has been known to turn on the TVs to welcome the staff, stomp around the building and even shake the doors now and then. “One time the lights went off and we heard stomping on the ground. We were like, ‘We have to go,’” bartender Jen Priest told us on a recent visit. Yet, despite the occasional scare, the staff is convinced their unnamed specter is good-natured. “We think he loves it here and just wants to hang out,” Priest says.