The Whitney

David Whitney Jr. made a fortune in Michigan timber and by the 1890s was said to be the richest man in Detroit. In 1890 he commissioned the English-born architect Gordon W. Lloyd to design a mansion on Woodward Avenue, and when it was completed in 1894 the pink-stone Romanesque Revival house had some 52 rooms, 20 fireplaces, Tiffany stained glass and, reportedly, the first private elevator in a Detroit home. It cost around $400,000 to build, with more than as much again spent on its furnishings.

Whitney enjoyed it for only six years; he died in 1900. His first wife, Flora, had died in 1882, before the house was even begun, and his second wife – Flora’s sister Sara – lived there until her death in 1917. The house later served as headquarters of the Wayne County Medical Society and then of the Visiting Nurse Association, until preservationist Richard Kughn bought it in 1979, spent about $3 million restoring it, and opened it as a fine-dining restaurant in 1986. Bud Liebler bought the property in 2007 and renamed the third-floor lounge the Ghost Bar.

Detroit media have called the house haunted since its restoration. Staff and guests describe the figure of an older man in period clothes – said to be Whitney himself – on the stairs and upper floors, and the restaurant’s general manager has spoken of a ghost said to be Flora sobbing in the third-floor women’s room, mourning the house she never lived in. A tea set kept for Whitney’s daughter Grace is said to make china fall and break whenever it is moved, and some people claim to hear coughing they attribute to patients from the building’s medical years. No verifiable evidence supports the stories, but the restaurant embraces them.

Reported activity includes a man in Victorian dress on the staircase and upper floors, sobbing in the third-floor women’s restroom, dishes and glassware falling or breaking, lights flickering, unexplained coughing, and the elevator moving between floors on its own.

The grand staircase, the third floor and its Ghost Bar, the third-floor women’s restroom, and the carriage house where the tea set is kept. Reports come from staff closing up and from diners.

The Whitney is a fixture of Detroit ghost tours and local Halloween coverage, and one of the city’s grandest surviving Gilded Age mansions on the Woodward Avenue corridor.