Wabasha Street Caves

The Wabasha Street Caves are not natural caverns but tunnels dug into the soft St. Peter sandstone of the Mississippi River bluffs on St. Paul’s West Side, beginning in the 1840s. Miners extracted silica sand for glassmaking, and later the damp, constant-temperature caves were used to grow mushrooms – so many that the area was nicknamed “Mushroom Valley.”

On 26 October 1933, as Prohibition was ending, Josie and William Lehmann opened the Castle Royal, a nightclub and restaurant built into the face of the caves, with a castle-like façade, a dance floor, big bands and a fireplace carved into the rock. St. Paul in that era was notorious as a haven for criminals under the so-called “O’Connor layover” arrangement with the police, and tour guides say gangsters such as John Dillinger and the Barkers drank there – claims that rest on legend rather than documented evidence. The club closed during the Second World War, the caves went back to mushrooms, and in the 1970s a disco called Castle Royal 2 briefly revived them.

The ghost story centres on an alleged gangland shooting around 1934. According to the version told on tours, a waitress saw several men gunned down at a card table, but when police arrived there were no bodies and no blood – only, guides say, bullet holes that can still be seen in the fireplace stones. The venue’s promotional history, carried by Explore Minnesota, says newspapers reported an unsolved gangland murder at the casino, but no such report has been identified, and the legend that the victims were buried somewhere in the caves rests on the tours alone. Staff and guides describe footsteps, whistling, flickering chandeliers, stones tossed in dark corners and men in 1930s clothes walking through walls. A former co-owner told the Minnesota Daily in 2021 that the caves are “definitely haunted,” while a guide summed up the tours as “letting legends live on.”

The caves are now an event venue with weekly swing-dance nights and historic, gangster and “Lost Souls” ghost tours. Other caves along the bluffs are not safe: several people have died in unauthorised caves in the area, and the city has sealed entrances – visit only the official venue.

Reports include footsteps and whistling in empty caves, flickering chandeliers, stones thrown in dark corners, a man in 1930s dress seen at the bar or walking through a wall, a gangster at a card table, and the sound of big-band music when no one is playing.

The main ballroom and bar area of the former Castle Royal, the fireplace with its supposed bullet holes, and the back passages. Ghost activity is said to increase in October.

The caves have been named Minnesota’s scariest or most haunted place by several media outlets, featured on Ask This Old House, and appear in Chad Lewis and Terry Fisk’s Minnesota Road Guide to Haunted Locations. Swing Night has been a local institution for decades.