The “spirited” hospitality of Straub Brewery lives on

By Beth L. Koop

(As previously published in The Daily Press)

According to Straub Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Public Relations, Cathy Lenze, since the Straub Visitor Center and Tap Room opened in 2019, the old home has slowly been revealing some extra-special visitors.

Lenze said there was an out-of-town salesman who would often stay in the upstairs bedroom overnight. He was one of the first people to tell of mysterious noises and getting a weird sense that he wasn’t alone. He would stay once a month over a period of about two years and he would often say he felt something paranormal with him on his overnight stays.

“It never failed. He said, ‘I get no sleep here whatsoever,’” Lenze recalled. “He was constantly hearing people walking the floor and with an old house it gets creaky. And he always felt like someone was watching him. It wasn’t a bad sense. It was just always a feeling that someone was there.

Lenze said she had some experiences of her own with strange noises in the house that couldn’t be explained, especially while she was renovating the inside of the house during the COVID-19 pandemic when no one was around.

“I could hear our CEO’s wheeled, leather chair rolling around upstairs in his office. And I thought, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that Bill (Brock) was here.’ I thought maybe he snuck in and I looked around and his car wasn’t here and his chair was exactly where it was supposed to be,” she said.

“I was standing at the sink in the house kitchen and unloading the dishwasher. The rest of the house was completely dark. There was a dining room table set up in the first room of the gift shop and I had just glanced over and all of sudden, I notice that somebody was sitting at the table looking at me,” he said.

Mohney said it was kind of a running joke among the wait staff that it was the ghost of Aunt Reggie. He said he acknowledged her presence and went on about his nightly tasks.

On another occasion, Lenze said that a former Tap Room employee was in the basement of the house at the end of the night where she was throwing laundry into the washer while Mohney was cleaning up at the bar in what used to be the garage area of the home. The employee heard what sounded like a lot of people walking and furniture moving upstairs on the first floor of the house, according to Lenze. She called Mohney on her cell phone and asked why he was making all that noise and Mohney replied that he wasn’t upstairs, but was out in the Tap Room.

“She thought someone had opened a door and had come in. She thought it was an intruder,” Lenze said. “So she grabbed a coat hanger because that’s all she could find and began creeping up the steps, only to realize there was no one there. It scared her enough so that she would not stay here by herself late at night anymore.”

“And everyday at 4 o’clock, somebody would always be here,” Lenze said. “We talk about the 150 years of hospitality and adding the house to that hospitality was just a key component because of how hospitable Tony and Reggie were.”

Many Straub family members and visitors say they also have sensed or saw something inside both the Tap Room and the Brewery.

John Schlimm, who serves on the Straub Brewery Board of Directors and is the great-great-grandson of Peter and Sabina Straub, said he had an interesting encounter of his own in the dark rooms of the brewery one night. He and his cousin Annie Koch, who is also on the Straub board, decided to take their own little ghost tour of the brewery last Halloween armed only with flashlights. They explored the brewery top to bottom hoping to find something or someone lurking in the darkness.

Schlimm added that Sabina’s connection to the property has an even stronger tie to the Brewery than the Straub family name. Sabina’s father, Francis Sorg, originally owned the Brewery before she and her husband Peter purchased it in 1878.

“So Sabina’s attachment to the property goes back much further than the Straub Brewery’s 150-year history,” he said.

Visitors have also told Schlimm tales of interesting occurrences while visiting the brewery.

“Over the years, I’ve heard stories from visitors who have been at The Eternal Tap and for no apparent reason one of the taps will just start flowing. I love this because I feel like it’s just the Straub ghosts offering up some friendly hospitality,” Schlimm said. “Plus, when something is called The Eternal Tap, we certainly can’t be surprised that some eternal forces may visit there from time to time, or perhaps even watch over it for us.”

Jason Straub, who is a fifth-generation Straub and has worked at the brewery for 30 years, said he also has had his fair share of hair-raising incidents.

Straub recalls pulling into the parking lot of the Brewery for late-night cellar shift and from the moment his foot hit the pavement outside his vehicle he sensed something was watching him.
“It felt like someone was right behind me without them literally breathing down my neck. I stopped three times between my truck and the back door of the brewery and turned around to make sure no one was there and it was maybe 40 feet,” Straub said.

On that hot, humid 80-degree night in July, Straub pulled on a sweatshirt and boots to start to walk into the Brewery cellar. He went about his duties checking that the hoses were in place before he dropped the fermenting tanks. But he continued to have the feeling that someone was watching him while he worked.

“I came out of the cellar and started up the brewhouse steps and it felt like an ice cold wind went right through me even though I was sweating buckets, I was frozen to the bone,” he said.
When the brewer came in hours later, Straub said the sensation subsided when he had a conversation with the brewer about the feeling he was having.

“He looks at me and said, ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’ I said, ’Not exactly.’ He said, ‘Oh, that just means they’re back.” I said, ‘You knew about this and you didn’t tell me?’”

On another occasion, Straub said he had again been working in the cellar amid the eight aging tanks when he heard a noise behind him.

“Here it was just a hose that had fallen off the foot of the tank and the ends were brass at the time and it hit a metal grate. It didn’t spook me. I just turned around to see what it was, but when I did, I saw a shadow pass between two tanks and go in between two other tanks,” he said.

Straub said the shadow figure appeared to be a short, stocky man, who could have been his great-great-grandfather Peter, who was also known to have had the same figure. He said he wasn’t creeped out, but called out to the shadow to come back.

Like other family members, Straub said he has always felt that whatever the presences there are, they’re simply watching over the operations of the Brewery to make sure things are running smoothly.

“It’s like they’re watching. Just checking up on us to make sure we are doing things right,” he said.

Editor’s note: This is the first of three light-hearted St. Marys “ghost” stories featured in the month of October.