heraldtribune - With all the odd things he has witnessed, Justin Norton, assistant manager at the Sun House Restaurant & Bar in Bradenton Beach, almost expects that every week he will experience something at work that he cannot explain.He hears voices at night. The conversations are often so loud he steps outside his office to see if people have wandered into the restaurant after hours. And yet, no one is there and the doors are locked.
He sees shadows move. Although appearing only for a second or two, the shadows move distinctly away from where light is shining.
“After four years, I’m kind of used to it now,” Norton said. “There have been a few times I’ve been a little freaked out.”
Other employees claim to have experienced similar phenomena, such as locked doors opening on their own, burglar and fire alarms sounding for no reason and, most memorably, a strange fog enveloping the dining room.
Owner Angela Rodocker often jokes it was the ghost of “Key West Willy,” which was the name of the bar before it was leveled and replaced by the Sun House.
But the ghost stories took on a more serious tone this week.
Local paranormal author Kim Cool and internationally known psychic Rosemary Altea, both residents of Venice, toured the restaurant Tuesday to seek spiritual clues to explain the strange stories.Almost immediately, Altea said she perceived a “really disturbed energy” attached to the Sun House property.
“I think someone connected to this building killed themselves,” Altea told a group of employees gathered in the restaurant’s second-floor private dining room on Tuesday.
“There was a family who owned this place before,” she said. “I’m seeing two partners and a lot of cheating going on, a lot of issues going on.”
Altea said she was able to “transport” herself into the bar as it existed in the past, describing in some detail the furnishings, patrons and even smells inside.
The British-born psychic has used that technique during investigations into several local hauntings. She claims to have talked to the ghost of John Ringling during a recent walk through the John & Mable Ringling Museum.
Rodocker was instructed not to give away many details during Altea’s questioning. But Altea’s description of the old bar – and its owners – matched what Rodocker remembered of Key West Willy’s, which operated at least back to the 1970s.
Very few historical records exist for the property, although the history of that area of Anna Maria Island stretches back to Ponce de Leon’s arrival in the 1500s.
Betty Yanger, director of the Anna Maria Island Historical Society, said that before Key West Willy’s, the business was called The Wreck and contained a unique bar made out of silver-dollar coins.
In 2000, Rodocker and her mother purchased the bar and four adjacent apartments and an abandoned convenience store. They leveled the buildings and built the BridgeWalk Resort and Sun House restaurant in 2001.
The resort was named for its close proximity to Bradenton Beach’s bayside pier, which is what remains of a wooden bridge built in 1921 to connect Anna Maria Island to Cortez on the mainland.
Altea deduced that the property’s historical connection to the bridge and adjacent waterways may explain the problems with constantly leaky water pipes and damp conditions inside the restaurant today.
No one told Altea about any such problems beforehand. “Now you are really freaking me out,” Rodocker said.
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Shadows, Voices on the Menu at Florida Eatery
