Articles...
This submission is from the former owner of a business that was once located on Vermillion Street in Hastings. Anyone who has lived in Hastings for a while may remember some of the history touched on in this article.
Ghosts in Hastings businesses...
As you may know, putting "filberts (nuts)" into cocktails is a MN
tradition. We had two bar glasses filled with them on either end of the bar
which were filled every night. My husband and I were the only people with
keys to the building and were the last ones to leave and first ones to open
up in the morning. Every morning I was frustrated to see that the two
glasses that I had filled the previous night with nuts were empty in the
morning. Of
course we assumed it was some type of rodent and called Orkin. They set
traps - but never caught anything. They even put the glasses in the
middle of large sheets of sticky paper that were supposed to make the paws
of anything stepping on it stick to the paper. Nothing was ever stuck there
but the nuts were gone. As an experiment, we would sprinkle flour all over
the bar top and put the glasses in the middle so we could see the tracks
left by these "supposed" rodents. Again the glasses were empty but no tracks
ever seen. During that time we also installed a motion detector alarm
system. Nothing moving ever set it off - yet still the nuts disappeared.
I
finally just quit filling the glasses but to this day wonder what it was.
One of my suspicions was that it was the spirit of a former Manager of the
establishment when it was Nybos, who had died at a fairly young age.
She was the type of person who liked to snack on the nuts (so we were told)
I thought perhaps it was her??! Yes, I know it sounds crazy!!I don't know
much about the past history of the building when it was a lumber yard but it
was an intriguing place with lots of nooks, crannies, several false walls
(which took a while to find!) and even a large concrete enclosure with a
"bank vault" type door room that was originally used to store dynamite. The
culprit could have actually dated much further back - someone I never know
or heard of as the building had quite a long history.