Why Earnestine and Hazel’s Bar Is One of My Favorite Haunted Places in Tennessee

Seated on the corner of South Main in Memphis, Earnestine and Hazel’s Bar looks like most dive bars. There's a familiar worn-in feel to the black-and-white tile floors, the black leather bar stools, and the shelves of liquor behind the bar. But if you step a little deeper, climbing the stairs to the second floor, it's easy to see this bar is far from the run-of-the-mill haunts. If Tennessee has one place that feels haunted in the way that cities mean when they talk about memory borne into brick, it’s this two-story dive: a salon-turned-cafe-turned-brothel-turned-bar where the city’s music, scandal, and sorrow gathered and never quite left.

The building itself dates to the late 1800s and has worn many lives: a church, a dry goods store, a pharmacy, and, famously, the beauty parlor run by namesake cousins Earnestine Mitchell and Hazel Jones. In mid-century Memphis, the space above the bar became an after-hours refuge, a place where visiting musicians and local regulars drifted upstairs to sleep, party, or find comfort. And that upstairs history, reportedly including a brothel and hard nights of drug use, is the same soil from which the bar’s ghost stories grew. 

Part of the lore that keeps people whispering is the roster of famous faces who passed through. Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and legends of the Southern soul circuit left fingerprints on the jukebox. Stories say the Rolling Stones even visited late one night and that those Memphis nights helped inspire “Honky Tonk Women.” Ray Charles, according to multiple accounts, was among the musicians who frequented the rooms upstairs with a “go-to” room where the music stopped, and other, darker routines began. Those details, told again and again, blur the line between myth and memory and feed the feeling that the building holds onto all of them.

Why call Earnestine and Hazel’s the best haunted place in Tennessee? Because its hauntings are inseparable from its identity. This isn’t a sanitized, staged spooky tour; it’s a living place where the past collides with the present every night. The two are so tightly woven together, I don't think you could have one without the other. Bartenders and regulars report footsteps where no one is, doors that open on their own, cold spots along the stairwell, and a jukebox that seems to play when no one has touched it. Those regular experiences make the hauntings feel intimate, plausible, and persistent rather than theatrical.

But not all of the bar’s mysteries are harmless. In 2019, human remains were found in the building, a grim detail that reinforced the site’s reputation for tragedy and unresolved history. That discovery, and decades of rumor about violent ends and drug-fueled nights, add a ledger of real sorrow beneath the folklore, which, for many visitors, is what makes the bar’s atmosphere genuinely chilling.

Still, the draw isn’t merely a hunger for scares. Earnestine and Hazel’s is warm, loud, and stubbornly human: neon lights, greasy “soul burgers,” a battered jukebox, and a crowd that ranges from tourists hunting the haunted to locals who’ve been coming for decades. This place is filled with the weight of jazz and heartbreak, the echo of a cigarette stubbed into a corner, the memory of a room where legends partied and where one woman might have died in a bathtub. Visiting is less about finding proof and more about stepping into a place where Tennessee music history and the uncanny have braided together tightly.

If you want to be spooked after some of the most unique experiences in town, come late and stay long enough to hear the stories from the bartender. Earnestine and Hazel’s doesn’t perform its past — it keeps it company, and that company is why, for many (including myself), it is Tennessee’s singular haunted place.

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