The Ghost and the Devil: Area cocktail lounge may have spirit of a different kind

LORAIN — There are plenty of spirits to be found here at the Speak of the Devil cocktail lounge tucked into the old red brick building on West Fifth Street. Rows of bottles line the back of the bar, awaiting their turn to be jiggered, shaken and mixed into elixirs with names like the 5th Street Finisher. But there's another spirit here, too. Those who live and work here will tell you tales about the lights suddenly dimming, barware toppling to the floor for no reason, a sense of something — someone — with you in the dark. And every time it happens, they say the same thing: "George is at it again." *** Kurt and Page Hernon didn't know about George when they bought the building back in 2017. They were looking for a spot to open a cocktail lounge, not a shot-and-a-beer bar, with room to live onsite when they found the building at 201 W. Fifth St. Built in 1902, it had been sitting empty for more than a year, possibly two, at the time. It had housed lots of things in its lifetime, including a hardware store, an appliance store, a lumber warehouse space upstairs and finally office space for an architect. A lot of work had been done on the building, but there was so much more to do. The Hernons moved in upstairs and went to work building Speak of the Devil in the street level of the long, narrow building. Then a former tenant told the Hernons a story. The building once had an elevator, a hand-cranked contraption that ran from the basement to the second floor. Decades ago, the owners used to keep a sign on it that told anyone using it to leave it on the lower floors — in that day and age, there were no sliding doors that closed behind it when it made its way to the other floors, and so the doorway to the elevator space would just be a gaping hole. In the dark, to an unsuspecting visitor, the danger of stepping into an empty elevator shaft was on the minds of the building's owners when they hung the sign. Until the fateful night of March 30, 1944. George Kirk, a Lorain police officer, was working his beat when he stopped in the alley outside the building about 2:30 a.m. Kirk saw a door on the side of the building ajar, and stepped in to check it out. It was the elevator shaft. And for no known reason, the elevator was on the building's unoccupied second floor that night. Kirk fell into the darkness, plunging 10 feet to the basement floor. After missing two call-ins that night, other officers were sent out to look for him. Kirk was apparently killed instantly and was found facedown on the basement floor. The story is strange enough. One of only three Lorain police officers ever killed in the line of duty, Kirk is the most recent name honored on the memorial statue the Lorain Police Department erected in 2010. According to policememorialsociety.org, Kirk had served as a detective in the 1920s early in his career with the department, which started in 1919. He was 57 when he died, leaving behind a wife and grown daughter and several half-siblings. But for many, Kirk's death wasn't just a terrible accident. In some places, a footnote reads: "Unsolved." In May 1943, 10 months before his death, Kirk captured two men burglarizing the Lorain Moose Lodge. He shot one of the suspects during the arrest. Because of the elevator being out of place, the door being ajar that night, some speculate that maybe there was more to Kirk's tragedy — maybe it was a revenge plot? Someone knowing his late-night beat walks would take him that way? And maybe a slight push? The fall itself doesn't seem an unsurvivable distance, though it is possible he could have hit his head on the thick beams that held the elevator in place, and are still visible in the Devil's basement. The bathroom that was once the deadly elevator shaft is the only access to the basement, which involves puling up a trapdoor and climbing gingerly down an old ladder. "The previous owner said they noticed things went on here, and they were firm believers on it," Kurt Hernon said. "I told him 'I'm not, I'm not really buying that stuff. But I'm curious about this history of this place." The Hernons met the son of the man who had owned the building at the time of Kirk's death. "His father never got over it," he said. All went well for months, until just as the bar was finally opening. They started noticing small little signs that something was — off. At first it was one of the lights over the sink behind the bar. It would go off, or flicker. The building had been freshly rewired by a professional electrician, who assured them that nothing was wrong with the wires. Then they would notice other — small, certainly — but unusual things happening. Cocktail shakers, sitting perfectly upright and far back from the edge of the counter, would suddenly tumble to the floor or tip over when no one was near. Nothing drastic, but enough to start being noticed. "We all would just jokingly say 'Oh it's just George, letting us know he's here,'" he said. "It's enough that people who do this job, who work in bars, behind bars, think it's weird," Page Hernon said. "A lot of experiences we have are simple, but they happen all the time. They're consistent," said Jack Maple, a bartender at the Devil for five years. "I'll be hanging out in the bar before we open, and the lights will suddenly dim down darker and nobody is around. Some of the tins (metal shakers) on the bar will just plop off, or fall on the floor. It's kind of interesting," he said. "I've worked in restaurants and bars that had that whole haunted thing going for it and it's been way freakier than this. This doesn't feel like that." But. "I also have a key and if I forget my phone and I have to come back in here late at night after closing and I'm in here by myself and it's dark — the hair will stand up on my neck. Not in a creepy way, but you know there is someone in here with you. Like you could reach out and touch them. You know for sure they're here," Maple said. Page Hernon smiles. "I don't like being down here after dark," she said. "We have guests come in and tell us there is something here, but it's my nature to not want to know." A former bartender told them she could sense it, and once filmed in the basement, only to find her footage dotted with orbs. One time a photographer friend came in and took a picture of the bar, only to find it was streaked with white lights that weren't visible to anyone at the time. "I don't know. Maybe it's George. He does seem excited we're here, though," said Page Hernon. "I would think if he weren't he would try to get us to leave. He would do something scary. It's more like he is glad to have the company, he's glad we're here." They aren't scared of their ghost, if it is a ghost named George who fell — or was mysteriously pushed — to his death here in 1944. If anything, they attribute a "positive, good energy" about the place to George, and his approval of their revamping of the space. There is a whole tab devoted to the story of George on their website, though Kurt Hernon warns upfront it's all blatantly untrue, bits of lore pieced together by himself and staff members. "We built a whole story about George Kirk. It careens all over the place, but that's what we were feeling at the time," he said. That's the legend about George Kirk. This is the story, so far as anyone knows. "We honor him. We tell people about him. We're not joking about that. We respond and react when he's acting up, but we do it respectfully," Kurt Hernon said. And every March 29 when the last customer files out, Kurt Hernon prepares his annual tradition: a gin and vermouth cocktail called the End of Watch. He found the recipe in an 1880 police gazette — "it tells you how tough the job was that they would list cocktail recipes in it," he said — and he's been preparing one ever since, on the eve of the day George Kirk died in his basement. He leaves it on the bar before he turns out the lights. And he hopes it is still there come morning. Contact Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.