[Baltimore Sun] Who is the skeleton buried by a secret society under this Baltimore bar?
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It didn’t take long to find the body.
As he forged ahead on renovations for what would become the Bluebird Cocktail Room eight years ago, owner Paul Benkert found something unsettling beneath the floorboards.
Under three layers of linoleum, contractors unearthed a casket. Inside was a human skeleton. For nearly a decade, the Hampden bar owner kept the discovery carefully under wraps.
Benkert was not, however, surprised: When the building’s former tenants, a fraternal order known as the The Improved Order of Red Men, moved out, they told Lou Catelli, who is known around the neighborhood as “the Mayor of Hampden,” that future tenants might find more than dust and old linoleum while tearing up the floorboards.
“They said, ‘By the way, if anyone does renovations, there’s a dead man up there,’” recalled Catelli, whose real name is William Bauer, and who often helps local bars and restaurants navigate city permits and regulations before opening.
The order apparently used real human skeletons as part of its rituals.
Benkert, however, wanted to avoid the label of being a skeleton-linked establishment. “When we were first opening, we didn’t want to become the bar with the body,” Benkert said.
A complex past
The Bluebird, a literature-themed cocktail bar on Hickory Avenue, has since made its name on the neighborhood drinking scene, and Benkert is finally talking about the jarring discovery he made years ago. The bar is now a stop on a new (and sold-out) “Haunted Hampden” ghost tour, which is where the skeleton now comes in.
While the bulk of the supernatural stories deal in ghostly apparitions and possibly possessed dolls, the Bluebird’s tale is more concrete. The skeleton really does exist, and was almost certainly buried there by the building’s previous tenant, a fraternal organization that dates back more than a century.
The Bluebird’s home at 3602 Hickory Ave. was built in 1920, according to state property records, and used to be a gathering place for the fraternal order that traces its roots back to the Boston Tea Party. According to a history on the group’s website, the organization branched off from the Sons of Liberty, changing its name to the Society of Red Men after the War of 1812 and then again to the Improved Order of Red Men (IORM) in 1834.
The ghost tour takes participants on a spooky stroll through the North Baltimore neighborhood, pausing at local businesses — including Atomic Books, Rebel Rebel and Modern World — with creepy stories to tell.
The history of the IORM is more complicated. Open only to white men until the 1970s, it also adopted ceremonies and regalia that were based on an outsider’s interpretation of Native American customs. Archival photographs of the organization’s Hampden chapter, founded in 1893, show members dressed in headdresses and moccasins.
Bar manager J.R. Gilpin stands above the location where a casket with a skeleton was found under the floorboards in the Bluebird Cocktail Room when renovations were being done to the Hampden bar seven years ago. (Lloyd Fox/Staff)
Though Catelli had heard rumors about the skeleton, seeing it still came as a shock.
One day in 2016, he got a call that contractors had found something unusual inside the soon-to-be Bluebird. “I come over and they’re pulling the flooring up,” he said. “We all start freaking out, and then we see a black casket.”
Benkert also remembers that day vividly. Construction work paused as soon as the casket appeared. “We went to Griffith’s (Tavern, across the street) for a few beers, then came back and opened it up,” he said. “It was a very real skeleton.”
So who is the skeleton under the floorboards?
The bar owner says he’s consulted experts who have assured him there was likely no foul play involved. The skeleton’s bones are held together by wire, like you would see in a school biology set, and he suspects the IORM ordered the body through a catalog.
That was a common practice among secret societies about a century ago, according to Greg Hatem and Brian Henry, the owners of the Hampden curiosity shop Bazaar. Their store has its own human skeleton, also sourced from a fraternal organization, behind the cashier’s counter.
Lou Catelli is reflected on the glass of the framed skeleton photo that is on display at the Bluebird Cocktail Room. Catelli was there when the casket and skeleton were found under the floorboards of the Hampden bar while renovations were being done several years ago. (Lloyd Fox/Staff)
Some secret societies made skeletons out of papier mâché, while others ordered real ones from the same companies that supply medical schools. Hatem and Henry think the Bluebird’s skeleton was intended for medical use, based on the metal hardware linking its bones.
Fraternal organizations brought out the skeletons to symbolize death during their ceremonies, Henry said. They were also used to spark fear in new members during initiation rites.
“They were basically blindfolding the new inductees, and then there’s this small, dark room, and they open their (blindfolds), and all of a sudden there’s a real skeleton right in front of them,” Hatem said. “Not a great ethical use for a skeleton.”
Questions of ethics were less common in the early 20th century, when fraternal orders were in their heyday. Many skeletons were imported from Asia, Henry said. Some skeletons for sale cobbled together bones from more than one person.
As a result, “it’s often hard to find who the person was in particular,” Henry said.
He and Hatem believe The Bluebird’s skeleton could be that of a woman, based on its small stature and broad hips. Benkert said a historian he consulted in 2017 guessed the skeleton may have been a young man, possibly from India.
The Baltimore chapter of the IORM, which called itself the Tecumseh Tribe No. 108 and counted 350 members in 1993, had dwindled to just 25 members when it moved out of the Hickory Avenue lodge in 2013 and merged with the larger Chippewa Tribe No. 19 in Frederick.
A person who answered the phone at the Chippewa Tribe’s headquarters this week agreed to pass along a reporter’s contact information to former Baltimore members, who did not reach out by publication time.
Museums, universities and other cultural organizations have recently grappled with what to do with their collections of skulls and human remains obtained without the consent of the deceased. Some, like the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, have taken steps toward repatriating or reburying the remains.
Police likely won’t be involved
Because of the skeleton’s age, The Bluebird said it did not contact Baltimore Police to look into the discovery. The department’s policy is to investigate any deaths in Baltimore City that occur “as a result of violence, suicide, or injury,” “in any suspicious or unusual manner” or when a person dies outside of a doctor’s care or “suddenly, when in apparent good health.” The policy does not specifically address skeletal remains.
Without a record of where it was obtained, the origins of The Bluebird’s skeleton are still shrouded in mystery. Benkert and his staff have taken to affectionately referring to the skeleton as “The Elder.”
Bar manager J.R. Gilpin said coworkers told him about The Elder when he started the job two months ago. At first, he thought the stories were a prank or some “generic industry hazing.” Then Benkert confirmed the skeleton was real.
“It’s definitely a little spooky,” Gilpin said. “It gets talked about by the staff when weird things happen around the building”
Most customers, on the other hand, don’t seem to be aware of the skeleton’s story. But sharp-eyed visitors can spot a sliver of a cut-out in the floor toward the middle of the bar, under a communal table and a blue patterned rug.
Benkert said he has no plans to disturb the skeleton. He prefers to let The Elder rest in peace.
“I’m not a very superstitious person, but he’s been there for years,” he said.
Thus far The Elder hasn’t followed a fellow Baltimorean’s story about body parts under the floorboards: There have been no reports of a telltale heart beating away underfoot.
Have a news tip? Contact reporter Amanda Yeager at ayeager@baltsun.com, 443-790-1738 or @amandacyeager on X.
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