Ghost Stories From Miller’s Haunted Milwaukee Brewery

Hans is the ghost of Hans Stender, one-time proprietor of the Miller Inn which was built in 1892 on a hillside within the Miller Brewery campus in Milwaukee.

According to Beer & Beyond “Hans is one of several specters that allegedly haunt parts of the Miller brewery, spirits so attached that they cannot – or will not – move on.”

“It seems like anyone who has worked at the brewery for any amount of time has either heard stories or experienced something strange,” says Dan Scholzen, archivist at the Milwaukee brewery, which has been named one of the most haunted sites in the area.

And in addition, producing millions of barrels of beer each year Miller’s Milwaukee brewery is notorious for its ghostly happenings…

“Tales have been told for decades, going back to the early part of the 20th century. There have been rumors of disembodied voices tingling spines. Reports of inexplicable events like phones ringing for no reason, lights impossibly flickering, temperature unexpectedly dropping and a figure in black fleeing a security guard – then vanishing without a trace. Rumors of pianos playing by themselves and strange noises have frightened and disturbed employees for decades.”

So yeah, this brewery appears to be haunted.

One ghost may be a long-deceased brewery worker and his lover, who would rendezvous at the entrance of the Miller Caves, a series of cold caverns that were used to store beer for aging in the 19th century.

One day the brew hand didn’t make the regular hook-up with his lover (legend has it that he suffered an injury in the beer cave and died). His lover passed soon after, and according to many who currently work at the brewery the two can sometimes be heard and their presence felt in the caves which reopened as a museum in the 1950s.

One employee reported seeing them in an embrace before disappearing right in front of her. “She turned white as a ghost, asked to go home and stayed away for a week,” remembers Kindra Loferski, the brewery’s guest relations manager.

The ghostly lovers are just two of the apparitions have attracted the attention of local ghost hunters like Noah Leigh of Paranormal Investigators of Milwaukee, a nonprofit organization he that has made four trips to the Miller Valley since 2015.

My staff can get pretty skittish,” Loferski added. I know there are places some people just won’t go.”

But when your job is to work in haunted parts of the brewery, encountering something unfathomable may just go with the territory.

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