The Whitney

The Whitney occupies a 21,000-square-foot Romanesque Revival mansion built in 1894 for lumber baron David Whitney Jr., one of the wealthiest men in Michigan at the time, and it’s widely considered Detroit’s most reliably haunted restaurant. The house was originally meant as a home for Whitney’s first wife Flora, who died before construction even finished; he married her sister Sara the following year, and the third-floor women’s restroom is where staff say Flora’s ghost has been heard crying ever since.

After Whitney died in the house in 1900 and Sara passed in 1917, the mansion spent decades as a tuberculosis hospice under the Wayne County Medical Society before entrepreneur Richard Kughn restored it as a restaurant in 1986, naming the third-floor bar the GhostBar in a nod to the stories. The Whitney’s official paranormal investigators, Dye Paranormal, lead public dinner-and-ghost-hunt tours twice a month, including a stop at the notoriously haunted carriage house, where a tea set left by Whitney’s daughter Grace is said to trigger falling china if anyone dares move it.

On our radar as Detroit’s grandest surviving Gilded Age mansion turned genuinely upscale dinner destination, or for the GhostBar’s Witching Hour Martini if you’re only there for a drink.