Gandy Dancer

The Gandy Dancer occupies Ann Arbor’s 1886 Michigan Central Railroad depot, once considered the finest station on the entire line, with heavy stone walls, arched entrances, and stained glass that made it a genuine architectural landmark decades before it became a restaurant. Presidents and celebrities passed through its doors — JFK and Nixon both made whistle-stop appearances there during the 1960 campaign — but the building’s darker reputation comes from wartime: the depot reportedly served as a temporary holding site for the remains of soldiers being shipped home during World War I.

Restaurateur Chuck Muer bought the shuttered depot in 1970 and named his new seafood restaurant after “gandy dancers,” the slang term for the railroad workers who laid and maintained the tracks. Staff and diners have long reported flickering lights, glasses moving on their own, and the occasional apparition wandering the halls — activity some attribute to the soldiers who passed through, and others tie to Muer himself, who disappeared at sea in 2005 when his boat vanished during a storm near the Bahamas and was never found.

On our radar for genuinely excellent seafood in one of the most architecturally striking dining rooms in Metro Detroit, ghost stories or not — ask for a table by the back window and you might catch a real train going by.