HARMONY — The food is great, the craft beer and spirit choices plenty, the outdoor bar is festive, and the mid-19th century architecture amazing. Maybe that’s why the ghosts don’t want to leave.

Bob McCafferty, owner, and Julian McCommons, general manager, have had many otherworldly experiences at the bar and restaurant, which seems to be peering over Mercer Street due to its two round third-floor windows and huge black mustache.

The eye-catching Italianate structure was built in 1856 as a summer residence for Austin Pearce, prominent banker and founder of the Pittsburgh, New Castle and Lake Erie Railroad.

When the railroad went bankrupt, the home was sold to the Ziegler family, who were descendants of the family who bought the borough of Harmony from its Harmonist founders.

The Zieglers turned the building into a tavern and inn and ran it successfully for many years. A handful of owners came and went before Bob and Jodi McCafferty, owners of North Country Brewing in Slippery Rock, purchased Harmony Inn in 2013.

Bob McCafferty said his first paranormal experience at the inn occurred when he was employed as a bartender there many years ago.

The haunting occurrence came as a surprise to the young McCafferty.

“I thought the previous owners made it up for publicity and marketing, but they were right,” McCafferty said. “It’s haunted.”

He explained that he heard a coin hit a wall in the bar with considerable force.

While attempting to make sense of the weird circumstance, another coin flew through the air and straight through the long ponytail he once sported.

“At that point, I knew I was being haunted,” McCafferty said.

On another occasion, McCafferty was downstairs preparing to tap a keg after business hours.

Focused wholly on his work, a strange vibe that had crept into the basement stopped McCafferty in his tracks.

The terrified bartender then saw what he described as a shimmering outline of a tall man in a hat with a large brim.

“I kept moving and got the keg done,” McCafferty said, laughing at the memory. “It’s all about the customer, right?”

Another time, McCafferty was on the phone with his wife when the TV in the bar suddenly went to a snow pattern.

At about the same time, he and his wife both heard “Get out” very plainly on the telephone line.

“I was like ‘What do I do?’” McCafferty recalled. “She said ‘Get out of there!’”

As the new owner of the business in 2013 or ’14, McCafferty, who was in the middle of a repair, decided to spread his sleeping bag in the bar and sack out overnight with his trusty dog, so he could continue the work first thing in the morning.

He awoke in the wee hours to the music system turning on and off and pots clanging in the kitchen.

“I remember thinking the prep cook must have come in a few hours early for some reason,” McCafferty said. “But nobody was here. I never stayed overnight again.”

He said many ghost-hunting teams have given Harmony Inn the once-over, and one group certified the building as haunted.

An in-depth history done by Allegheny Paranormal Investigations, McCafferty said, found that the building was used as a tuberculosis ward for children and that ill children were kept on the third floor.

The group said a child gave the disease to their nanny, both of whom are said to haunt the second floor.

In fact, a small room adjacent to the main second-floor dining room is known as “Grandma’s Room” because of the old woman’s machinations in the space.

McCommons, who participated in a few investigations of the inn with Allegheny Paranormal, said the investigators told him their research revealed that the nanny who died of TB may have been interred in the wall in the small room.

He said he was told when he started working at the inn to never latch the padlock on the door to the attic because doing so would kick up significant paranormal activity throughout the building.

McCommons said paranormal investigators told him a caretaker during the tuberculosis outbreak would lock the sick children in the attic.

Another investigation with Allegheny Paranormal saw McCommons and another guest investigator, who is descended from Austin Pearce, hear Pearce family names.

McCommons also recalled a very skeptical bartender, Jason, feel a touch on his back, only to turn around and see the image of a man standing inside the whiskey cave.

“He was white. Just absolutely horrified,” McCommons said. “Two days later, the same thing happened to me.”

Paranormal investigators asked the spirit in the bar if he was the one who touched Jason.

“Plain as day, it said ‘yes,’ then “Where’s Jason?’” McCommons said.

When told Jason had left, the same voice came over the spirit box, saying “Bring him back.”

On a day when McCommons was training to do inventory at the inn, one of the two men training him walked into the men’s room and paper towels began flying out of the dispenser.

On yet another occasion, McCommons heard joyful screaming, like someone riding a roller coaster, as he walked through the dining room.

“I heard it twice,” he said. “No one else heard it.”

Glasses on shelves in the inside bar moved forward and dropped to the floor, a large glass pitcher fell off its perch in the outside bar and hit McCommons in the back, and a red mark was left after he was touched during a recent investigation.

“It’s interesting,” McCommons said. “Certain things happen here that are not really explainable.”

He said about three customers per day ask about the hauntings, and McCafferty said some employees refuse to go upstairs to the office at night if they are in the building alone.

“We just finish closing out the next morning,” McCafferty said.

He said shadow people and an opaque figure are sometimes found on the inn’s security cameras as well.

But he doesn’t feel the spirits would ever hurt anyone.

“They’re just mischievous,” McCafferty said.