Bobby Mackey’s Music World

Bobby Mackey’s Music World stood beside the Licking River in Wilder, a few miles south of Cincinnati. Country singer Bobby Mackey bought the roadhouse in 1978 and ran it as a honky-tonk with live country music. According to Mackey and local tradition, the site had once been a slaughterhouse, and before Mackey arrived the building had operated as a roadhouse and nightclub under several names. In the 1980s and early ’90s, stories began to circulate among staff that the club was haunted, and a former caretaker, Carl Lawson, became one of the most-quoted witnesses. The stories were gathered and greatly amplified in Douglas Hensley’s book Hell’s Gate.

The most famous legend links the club to a real crime. In February 1896 the headless body of Pearl Bryan, a 22-year-old woman from Greencastle, Indiana, was found on a farm in Fort Thomas, Kentucky. She had been pregnant, and two Cincinnati dental students, Scott Jackson and Alonzo Walling, were convicted of her murder and hanged in Newport on 20 March 1897. Her head was never found. The legend ties the crime to the old slaughterhouse site, claims the killers were Satanists, and says they cursed everyone involved in their prosecution. A second legend tells of “Johanna,” a dancer at the club in the 1940s whose father was said to have killed her lover, and who is said to have taken her own life.

None of it holds up. Science writer Sharon A. Hill found no records supporting either story and no connection between the club and the Bryan murder, which took place about two and a half miles away. The Campbell County Historical and Genealogical Society has called a Pearl Bryan ghost at the club “highly unlikely,” and Andrew Young, who wrote a book on the case, suggests that such legends are a way of coping with the horror of a real woman’s death. Even the guide who led paranormal tours at the club told WCPO there was no verified evidence of contact with Bryan and traced the legend largely to Hensley’s book. A reporter who took the tour twice concluded that nothing on it showed the place was haunted.

The legends made the club a fixture of paranormal television, from talk shows in the early 1990s to Ghost Adventures, Ghost Hunters, BuzzFeed Unsolved and Portals to Hell. The club closed in March 2024, and the original building was demolished on 10 December 2024. Pearl Bryan herself is buried in the family plot at Forest Hill Cemetery in her hometown of Greencastle – a real person whose murder deserves to be remembered as history rather than a ghost story.

Staff and visitors described apparitions of a woman said to be Johanna or Pearl Bryan, a man in old-fashioned clothes, a smell of roses, music from a switched-off jukebox, voices, shoves and scratches, and a dark presence in the basement. Water stains on a basement wall were said to resemble faces.

Most stories focused on the basement – home of the club’s claimed “portal to hell” – along with the dressing rooms and the stage area. Many reports came from staff closing up late at night and from paid ghost tours.

Bobby Mackey recorded a song about Pearl Bryan, and the club appeared on The Jerry Springer Show, Geraldo, Ghost Adventures, Ghost Hunters, BuzzFeed Unsolved and Portals to Hell, as well as countless “most haunted” lists and podcasts. The Pearl Bryan case itself inspired nineteenth-century murder ballads.