Paranormal dinner benefits park
ZELIENOPLE — Lights dimmed around a crystal chandelier in a room packed with people as silence swept the tables. Wall candelabras, fall bouquets above a fireplace and drawn curtains surrounded guests as they sampled wine and shrimp.
Black-and-white footage cast a ghost-hunting team on screen in a pallid blaze before the room. The gleaming eyes of the investigators on screen mimicked those of their real-life counterparts hosting the Wine and Ghost Dinner Wednesday evening at Kaufman Tavern in Zelienople. All proceeds from the event benefit the Zelienople Community Park.
Then a few people gasped audibly as something dark in the background behind a team member moved.
“For us, we do fixate a lot on residential and small businesses,” paranormal investigator Josh Fries told guests before the lights dimmed.
“Everybody wants to do the big stuff. Everybody wants the penitentiaries ... because they think there’s a lot of activity,” he said, referring to paranormal activity. “What they don’t realize is that smaller places have just as much, if not more.”
Fries and other members of the Allegheny Paranormal Investigators began their group seven years ago.
A historic haunt
“I feel it connects the community, especially with the Kaufman Tavern,” said Nicole Glancy, who also leads the group.
“The Kaufman Tavern was founded in the early 1800s, so they started erecting it and building it. The Kaufman Tavern is the center of Zelienople,” she said. “I feel like it brings the community together, knowing about how the community started.”
Bar manager Teri Spencer said the site’s history had a major impact on its endurance throughout the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The tavern, which had closed because of a fire in 2011, reopened in early 2020.
This was eight weeks before COVID-19 plunged the world into lockdown.
“Because of the history of the Kaufman Building, I felt like the public was so much more willing to come and get takeout and buy gift cards and really try to help us and support us, because they were so happy that we reopened,” she said. “It would have been so awful to reopen and then have to close and go out of business.”
“We did buy-one, get-one-free meals, we were doing beer slushies and beer milkshakes,” she said, then laughed. “Anything we could do. Growler specials. ‘Come fill your growler for $10.’”
She said the tavern sold special packages for the Thanksgiving and Easter holidays, too.
A place in downtown Zelie
The reopening, of course, coincided with a chapter in which death was often on everyone’s minds — and during which many people spent long hours in isolation, confined at home.
Spencer said her organizing of the paranormal dinner at Kaufman Tavern, which Jason Eisenreich owns, stems more from her desire to help downtown Zelienople flourish, not because she’s a particular fan of paranormal activity.
“I tend to be a quite logical thinker, so the logical side of me tells me that it’s not real,” she said. “But you hear a few things in the video that kind of make you wonder.”
