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On a dark morning in September 2006, Miguel Vargas arrived for work at a Brooklyn restaurant called Sweetwater. He unlocked and lifted the security gate, took two steps inside and saw a woman in profile walking across the dining room toward a basement stairwell.
She was middle-aged with gray hair and dressed in white, like a wedding dress, he said, but not one from this century. And she appeared corporeal, “normal,” Mr. Vargas said, not nebulous or translucent like on television.
“I knew it was a ghost when I saw it. I said, ‘O.K., that’s it.’ And I walked away.” For the next half-hour he stood outside, trembling. When Mr. Vargas, a porter at the restaurant, told his bosses, they laughed.
Yet the previous porter had quit in a panic, restaurant employees said. He was napping on a table in the basement and claimed to see “the devil” standing over him. And other employees at this American bistro in Williamsburg have reported strange happenings: music turning on without explanation; lights flickering; odd patches of luminescence in the basement; and the feeling of being watched by an unseen presence.
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Then there was a nerve-racking episode a few weeks ago. While digging up the dining room floor to reinforce support beams, workers unearthed a burial site containing a three-inch stone statue of the Madonna and child, a tiny gold ring, a pair of children’s brown Mary Jane shoes and bone fragments that the restaurant’s owner, Nina Brondmo, described as “probably from a small animal.”
They reburied the shoes and bones, put the statue on display behind the bar and a busboy took the ring.
“After that, all the glasses were breaking,” Wesley Ham, 35, the manager, said. “You would grab a glass and it would shatter in your hand, or you’d look over and all the glasses on the shelf would be cracked. Sometimes it would be 20 a day. I thought the ghost was not happy about its possessions being taken from the floor.”
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The identity of that ghost, for those who actually subscribe to the supernatural, is widely thought to be Anna Smith, eldest daughter of Charles Szyjka, also known as Willie.
The Szyjka (SHAY-ka) family purchased the building at 105 North Sixth Street in 1924 for $15,000, according to property records. They converted the boardinghouse, built in 1899, into a restaurant and bar with two apartments upstairs, where they lived for decades.
The Szyjkas, with roots in Austria and Ukraine, were part of a flood of Central European immigrants into Williamsburg from the crowded Lower East Side after the completion of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903. Antithetical to the neighborhood today, the working classes pushed out the wealthy, knocking down mansions to build tenements, according to John B. Manbeck, a former Brooklyn borough historian.
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Mr. Szyjka’s first wife, Katherine Rusyn, died while giving birth to Ms. Smith. He then married Katherine’s younger sister, Eva. She died days after giving birth to a son, Michael. These deaths likely occurred at home, Mr. Manbeck said.
After the death of Mr. Szyjka’s third wife, Jennie, in 1952, and his death in 1955, Ms. Smith inherited the business. She continued to live upstairs and operated the bar throughout the 1960s, serving free breakfast to the meatpacking workers who had supplanted the mariners. They came in for shots before their shifts, according to Peggy Ambrosio, a cousin who lives in Montauk and grew up around the restaurant.
“Anna was very well known in that neighborhood,” Ms. Ambrosio, 76, said. “Anna went to all the churches. She went to the Russian church, she went to the Polish church, she went to the Orthodox church.”
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During an economic slide in the 1970s, Ms. Smith closed down the business. The factories had shuttered and the bar was being relentlessly robbed and vandalized, her niece, Susan Sheldon, said.
“They stole her safe once,” Ms. Sheldon, 61, said. “She was coming home from church and they were rolling it down the road.”
For many years, Ms. Sheldon said, Ms. Smith was the only person who lived on the block. The family begged her to leave Williamsburg, but she refused. In the late 1980s, she finally moved to a nursing home in Manhattan but spoke endlessly of returning to North Sixth Street. She died in 2003.
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Sweetwater opened 10 years ago. On a recent Friday afternoon, the happy hour crowd sidled up to the bar and a few early birds took menus in the dining room. The dusty light that percolated through the plate windows, illuminating the tile floors and ornate tin ceiling, made it easy to picture a time when shipbuilders and longshoremen gathered there. Some of those men and their female companions are immortalized in photos on the wall.
Ms. Brondmo lives in Ms. Smith’s former apartment. She shared it with her husband, Pablo Arganaraz, the restaurant’s chef and co-owner, who died in 2013. She does not believe the building is haunted and thinks the staff is superstitious. As for the broken glasses, she said vibrations from the drilling during construction at the restaurant probably made them brittle.
Cesir Sanchez, 43, the employee who took the small gold ring, wears it squeezed on the tip of his left pinkie. He is not concerned that he may have offended an apparition.
Ms. Sheldon, who lives in Las Vegas, and Ms. Ambrosio visited Sweetwater a few years ago. Mr. Arganaraz told Ms. Sheldon how the music would switch on when he was alone at night and how the lights would flicker.
“That’s Aunt Anna,” Ms. Sheldon said. “She had tons of records. She loved music. And she loved going out to eat.”
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of years Sweetwater has been open. It is 10, not nine.