AN EVER-CHANGING LOCAL HAUNT

Guy walks into a pub carrying two 19th-century English pistols. The place has high, angled pine ceilings and is a little bit like a cathedral, a little bit like a museum. There are bagpipes on the wall. Old fiddles. Golf bags from around the world. The guy soaks up all the little details. Finishes his pint. Pays the bill. Gives the pistols to the bartender—actual guns—and never sets foot in there again.
Different night. Different year. Different bartender. Different guy sitting at the bar. Guy says to the bartender, “You know there’s someone else behind there with you?”
There is nobody else behind the bar.
Bartender nods, says, “Yeah, I know.”

The structure at 540 16th Ave. N.W. was built in 1955, and functioned for four decades as a funeral parlour. It came into the possession of an Englishman named John Wilson, who spent the next two years hacking apart the insides until they became The Cat ’n Fiddle. The cadaver fridges became part of a beer cooler. The area for grieving families a dart room. Ancient whiskey barrels were hoisted up to where the pipe organ used to sit.
It’s not uncommon to turn a funeral home into a British-style pub—The Rose and Crown on 4th Street S.W. is another—but here there was something especially peculiar. If there was stress in the pub, for instance, say a customer threatening one of the waitresses, the pages on the jukebox would flip frantically. It wasn’t that the building had its own consciousness, it was that that consciousness seemed to have a consciousness.

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