The haunting of Ri Ra Irish Pub: When businesses embrace the paranormal

At Ri Ra, staffers say the spooky rumors have certainly helped bring in new clientele. And in a post-pandemic world where downtown corridors are hoping to revive foot traffic, paranormal enthusiasts argue that ghost stories can be one tool for keeping businesses afloat and bringing more life to cities. 

Scales, the Ri Ra bartender, says reports of hauntings have helped drive customers into the business.

“It definitely brings a few people in,” he said. Scales says they often have the same question for him: “What have you seen?’”

Local ghost fanatics like Jason Tapp believe that embracing the supernatural can help boost business, preserve history and build identity. 

Along with his wife Melanie, Tapp runs a website and social media platform called Spooky CLT, sharing scary stories, local history and rumors of haunted Charlotte locales to their nearly 14,000 TikTok followers. The pair are ghost lovers: They even met on a local Charlotte ghost tour. 

Tapp has lived in Charlotte for eight years. He says his curiosity about ghost stories has helped him see the rich history and tourism opportunities that the city has to offer.

“I was hearing that Charlotte has nothing to do. Charlotte has no culture, no history,” Tapp said. “Charlotte absolutely has history — you just have to put the work in to learn it.”

Tapp thinks there’s an appetite for activities that embrace the spooky spirit. He’s hosted ghost tours with the local Carolina Area Paranormal Society and put together a map for a haunted pub crawl including Ri Ra. He knows of people who’ve planned whole staycations around visiting paranormal locations.

Other cities have harnessed their “haunted” reputations to draw tourists and preserve history. Savannah, Georgia, is often cited as one of the most haunted cities in the country. Many New Orleans businesses are caked in urban legends about voodoo magic and slavery. Even Charleston, South Carolina, has tried to spur tourism through spooky tales.

There’s no reason, Tapp said, why Charlotte shouldn’t also lean into its haunted heritage.

“Charlotte has the framework for that,” he said. “We have these ghost stories. We have haunted history.”

Good paranormal tourism is about more than marketing. The best ghost stories are based on true stories and, in most cases, at least the appearance of true beliefs.

Take Rachel Weaver, a bartender at Ri Ra. She didn’t believe in ghosts when she first started working at the pub a year and a half ago.

That changed late one slow night in April, when she was working with manager Sydney Wilson. Without warning or apparent cause, a glass on the bar shattered. 

She showed security footage of the mysterious incident, which she still has saved in her phone. “Nobody came around, no one touched it, nothing happened,” she recalled. “It was the weirdest thing.”

Wilson, the manager, said she’s had her own experiences. When she used to work at the bar upstairs, the taps would turn on by themselves.

One time, she says she was in the bathroom when the lights turned off. She’s convinced the bar’s living staff are not alone.

“I think they’re just mischievous,” she said, explaining her theory on any ghosts in the building. “I definitely respect the fact that this is their home, and I’m a visitor.”

The lore around Ri Ra, which opened in 1997, is aided by its unique history.

The bar is located in what’s reportedly the second-oldest building in Charlotte. Meanwhile, the bar says much of its materials were brought over from Ireland and date back to the 19th century, according to its website. 

Among those historic materials are a Victorian Bar restored from a barracks in Dublin, a statue of St. Patrick from the mid-1800s and a collection of early 1800s ledgers from the Dublin Corporation — the allegedly haunted documents that bartenders try not to touch.

Then there’s the mysterious alcove behind the hostess desk, where patrons first walk in. Staffers say a brick wall was discovered here after a fire in 2009, only adding to the bar’s spooky mystique.

The wall has “ABC” written in chalk on it — supposedly the work of a little girl ghost practicing her alphabet. Some staffers say they’ve been unable to scrub it out despite repeated attempts.

Not all businesses embrace stories like this. A local bar once sent footage of a glass flipping on its own to Tapp, the local paranormal enthusiast. Tapp wanted to share it on Spooky CLT, but the bar balked. It didn’t want the “haunted” label.

It’s about avoiding sensationalism, Tapp says. More recently, he’s tried to focus on history over grisly backstories for his Spooky CLT content, noting that those grisly backstories often involve real people. 

Just this summer, for instance, police identified the body of a man found 40 years ago in the Dunhill Hotel’s elevator shaft — solving a mystery that has long been the source of ghost stories from local paranormal enthusiasts. But while the development gave a face and story to the person at its center, it wasn’t just a fun and scary story for relatives of Oliver Mundy, who went missing back in the 1980s.

Even still, some Charlotte businesses see benefits to embracing stories of unexplained happenings. Just up the street from Ri Ra, promoters at the historic and supposedly haunted Carolina Theatre leaned on local paranormal investigators ahead of renovations as a way to honor the theater’s history, according to Charlotte Magazine. Such stories help build a sense of community, Ri Ra staffers told Courthouse News. The ghost stories are displayed on Ri Ra’s website, and the pub regularly welcomes ghost tours, which help bring in new customers or even offer promotions.

Attendees on haunted tours “love to see the ABCs up there on the wall,” said Wilson, the bar manager. Once visitors are done taking in the sights, they often stay to eat or drink something. “It does help with the business,” she said. “Everybody’s kind of interested to come in and see if something’s going to happen.”

For proof of concept, look no further than Alvarez and Gralewski, the vacationers from Illinois. They love stories about the paranormal, Alvarez said, often watching shows about ghost hunters and other strange happenings on TV. 

At Ri Ra, they had a chance to try and experience some ghostly activities themselves. Aside from the mysterious shadow, they'd had no sightings yet. Regardless, they were staying for ciders. 

“Some of that stuff is far-fetched, but some of the stuff I do believe,” Alvarez said. “I do believe there’s things that do happen.”

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