Casey Moore’s Oyster House — Tempe / Phoenix, Arizona

The Kind of Haunt That Still Takes Reservations.

Phoenix doesn’t do haunted castles or foggy forests — it does sunlight, stucco, and denial. Which makes Casey Moore’s Oyster House an anomaly. The place has survived decades of college drunks, professors, and hangovers, but ask any employee who’s stayed after close, and they’ll tell you the same thing: the bar doesn’t like being empty.

The story goes that a young woman was murdered upstairs decades ago, back when the place doubled as a boarding house. But the evidence isn’t neat — just fragments of testimony, whispered jokes, and the occasional guest who felt a hand on their shoulder when the room was vacant. Glasses clink. Chairs drag. Light fixtures sway. Nothing cinematic. Just small, mechanical signals that something upstairs hasn’t accepted the end of its shift.

I’ve been to Casey’s. It feels normal, which is exactly the problem. The air is too still, the rooms too symmetrical. There’s a faint pressure, as if the walls are listening. Staff claim to hear arguments after midnight — quiet but deliberate, like a couple revisiting the same fight on loop. Some say it’s residual energy. Others say it’s the house keeping conversation alive. Both theories underestimate how patient the dead can be when they have tenure.

The best stories aren’t the violent ones. They’re the places that simply refuse to stop functioning. Casey’s doesn’t want attention. It wants participation — new voices, new movements, anything to keep the sequence unbroken. A haunting disguised as continuity. And that’s what makes it dangerous: it feels welcoming right up until it starts answering back.

New haunted hometowns every Wednesday.
Comment your city — maybe your ghosts want to be seen.
Never assume the living run the establishment. —F.