Footsteps upstairs. His name being called. Those are among the experiences Dale Maurer described to writer LaRayne Topp in her 2024 feature about Hooper’s Iron Horse Saloon. The setting was thoroughly familiar to him: Topp reported that he and Carmen Maurer had bought the property in May 1994.[1]
Her story captures a place crowded with things to look at—old advertisements, movie posters, photographs and a player piano. Dale told her about unexplained sounds, a tug at his shirt and the sensation of someone kicking his bar stool. These are his recollections, recorded in a named interview, and they give Hooper a ghost story with an identifiable storyteller.[1]
The rooms behind the stories
Topp’s account also describes the work of caring for the buildings. The saloon occupied the middle of three adjoining properties; the northern building, formerly Bill’s Bar, needed a new roof, installed in 1998. Her 2024 account describes that space as holding pool and shuffleboard tables. These everyday uses give the reported after-hours sounds a more specific setting.[1]
Listening after closing
Phantasm Paranormal’s own investigation page describes repeated visits after closing, including time spent near the pool tables listening for footsteps and doors. The group presents recordings and photographs that it interprets as encounters with spirits. Its account documents what the investigators believe they experienced; the recordings’ interpretation remains a claim.[2]
A Main Street with a documented past
There is plenty of established history around the tale. Hooper’s 1980 National Register nomination describes a downtown shaped by its railroad origins, agricultural trade and substantial commercial buildings. It records how nineteenth-century fires and a brick-building requirement helped create Main Street’s closely spaced masonry storefronts. Its architectural inventory includes upper floors, cast-iron fronts and decorative cornices—the physical details that make the streetscape distinctive.[3]
The Iron Horse accounts add a different kind of record: memories of what familiar rooms felt and sounded like after hours. Read alongside the documented history of Main Street, they offer a Halloween glimpse of Hooper through the people who have spent time there.
Have an earlier newspaper mention or a firsthand account with a date? Sharing that original record would help establish how long the Iron Horse stories have circulated.