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I'm Dave Carney, owner of the Wine Bin in
historic Ellicott City.
This is the original firehouse of Ellicott City, built in 1939. It has, it was a firehouse
until I think the late 90s, and then it was sold off and sat empty for a few years.
Well, we have a ghost, Shipley, Captain Shipley, of the firehouse. And when we first took over
the building, we're in renovating and there's this whole group of people standing outside
and we're like, "what is going on?" And we found out that we were on the ghost tour.
And we laughed it off, thinking, yeah, right a ghost. And slowly, little things have happened
throughout the years with us being here, to make us all believe that Shipley actually
exists.
one Thanksgiving morning, I had a couple of customers and I'm working with them and selling
wine and I grabbed the last wine out of the, out of the wooden wine box in our display
and it was the last customer, no one else was in the store. I carried the wine out to
her car. I came back in, took a deep breath and realized, I need to go stock this wine.
So I ran in the back room, grabbed the case, came out, and sitting in the middle of that
box was a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from the front part of the store.
And my first thought was, okay, what customer moved this wine. Then I realized that there
was never a customer in the store at this point. And I was with that last customer.
So I'm like, maybe it's Shipley moving my wine.
once or twice a month I would come in and there would be this weird bottle of wine sitting
somewhere with a bottle of scotch or something.
So I mentioned it to one of our ghost tour tellers and I said "What do you think?"
And, she said, maybe you should talk to him. So, I started talking to him. And said good
morning to him. And said good night. And told him, please don't move anything. And from
that point we've had no wine out of place.My favorite story, which actually freaked me
out the most, was one Saturday night, after our summer movie series, we all went back
to my house to grill. It was about eleven o'clock at night. And one of the staff comes
up from DC and he left his overnight bag in the office. And he asked me to run back to
grab it. So it was about 11:30 in the evening and I came back to the store really fast.
I ran in the door. Ran to the back room into the office area. And as I was passing, I just
happened to grab the closet door where we keep our little safe locked. And, as I grabbed
it, the door was unlocked. And when I opened the door, the air pressure in the building
moved. And it, it felt as if all of the doors in the building just opened.
I locked the closet door and went home. And as I was telling the story, Sean, who had
locked up that night, said I locked the closet door. And I said, well the closet door was
unlocked. The light was on in the closet. He goes "I shut the light off." So, I had
shut the light off, locked the door. The next morning, I came in, I unlocked the closet
door and the light was back on. And sitting in front of our safe was an empty pint glass,
that wasn't there the night before. So that was extremely freaky.
So, Chloe, my store dog, for the first five years of business she used to be here every
day, and she would sit around the store. And two or three times, she would stand here in
the corner on this rug, and she would look at the front door and you'd see her head just
totally following someone all the way to the back of the store. And then once she hit the
back of the store, she stopped, she got up, she shook her head and would go over and lay
in her chair.
Recently, actually, our, one of our owner's grandson, comes to our Saturday night movies.
And he was standing in the hallway, talking. They asked him , "Who are you talking to?"
and he goes "I'm talking to the ghost." And he turned around and said "Goodbye Mr. Ghost."
and walked out. And he's done this two or three times. And everytime we ask him, where's
the ghost, he walks to a certain section by the safe, and points to him, and says the
ghost is right there. And just walks away.
One midnight madness, which is the first Friday in December when all the stores stay open
til midnight, I had a group of friends just hanging out in the back. I call her the crazy
woman, walks in the back door and says "you have a spirit and he's standing right here."
And I said, "Oh, that's Shipley." And so all my friends all night long were taunting him.
"Hey, Shipley. Come out, Shipley. Make yourself known. Hey, Shipley, what are you doing? Want
some champagne, Shipley?" And they were just taunting and teasing him for hours. And, uh,
come midnight, we started closing up the store.
Everyone's leaving. And in the front corner of the store we had a little table set up.
And a few people were standing at the counter and the table tipped over. Just by itself.
And everyone screamed. And we're like okay, well Shipley's a little pissed off that we
were teasing him.
You learn a lesson. Be nice to him.