During Prohibition, “Rum Runner” Joe Carey partnered with the First National Bank in Greybull to ensure that residents of Greybull, Wyoming, including local cops, the Elk’s Club, and the pharmacist, could still get their drinks. He was so successful that he was able to purchase the bank building in April 1927, preventing it from causing the Great Depression.

Carey converted the bank upstairs into a bar serving soft drinks. He had a liquor store hidden downstairs in the basement, serving his illicit whiskey using old bank vaults as liquor storage. He had a one-room hotel upstairs, which, according to local legend, was reserved for a brothel.

Today, Carey’s Greybull Hotel is still open. New owners Myles Foley and Lori Davis say they’re welcoming guests from this century and 100 years ago, when this small Wyoming town was in its heyday. Laughter was heard and voices from the past still greet today’s bosses.

“They are such happy souls,” Foley said. “We’ve never had anything like ‘The Shining’ or ‘Psycho.’ “Those were always good feelings.”

Rum Runner

Liquor was made illegal in the United States with the passage of the 18th Amendment on July 1, 1919. Over the next 13 years, alcoholic beverage consumption went “underground” and Greybull citizens became creative with their drinking habits until prohibition ended.

Canadian liquor dealers had purchased millions of gallons of U.S.-bound spirits, and transporting rum across the border back to America became a lucrative career for Carey, a young veteran of the First World War.

He had decided that delivering liquor instead of food would be a major career change, and he approached the First National Bank in Greybull to finance his business venture of selling rum from Canada. Banker George Hinman, knowing Carey’s intentions very well, gave him the loan, and nearly 50 years later, according to Carey, a partnership was formed.

Carey had many clients at Greybull; these included local doctors who were allowed to prescribe whiskey for colds, and policemen who happily accepted a case of booze in exchange for “looking the other way.”

In the fall of 1979, Carey’s niece, Jean Godden, interviewed her uncle about “imported spirits” and he told her candidly about his rum-running days, which helped boost his finances. This interview about Carey’s adventures is preserved in Tom Davis’s “Glimpses of Greybull’s Past.”

“I was carrying a Colt 45 automatic army pistol,” Carey told his nephew. This was the U.S. Army’s standard service pistol, and he wore it on his uniform.

“I would use it too if necessary. If they had pulled a gun on me, I would have used it. First of all, you cannot give up because it is not a crime. “It’s just a misdemeanor, that’s all.”

When asked if he had ever shot anyone, Carey paused and eventually said he didn’t think so. He said he didn’t hide what he did and that he would tell his own mother how he earned his money.

Chatty

After purchasing the Speakeasy in 1927, Carey left the rum to others and used his car dealership to bring the drink to his secret social club.

“They would have a truck brought in to the old Packer Nash dealership, unload it, and there was a freight elevator where they would move the alcohol down the freight elevator to the speakeasy and then put it in the bottom register.” Foley explained that he redesigned the building to retain much of its 1920s appeal.

Today, Speakeasy is more accessible to diners and ghost hunters. Foley and Davis had built a new opening into the once-secret club and opened it as the Speakeasy Restaurant.

“When we bought it, I had to open it up and put the railings in,” Foley said. “The stairs were there, but they had put a floor on top and the only way to get down was to be in the lobby. There was a white door to the left of the bank vault door, and since it was a bank, it used to be a metal walking door. You unlock that and let people go to Speakeasy. “There were gaming tables and illegal drinks there.”

Underground tunnels also led from the Speakeasy to the pharmacist across the street, who was one of Carey’s many customers.

Voices from the Past

Foley said hotel guests, especially those staying in rooms 332 and 333, complained about men and women laughing when no one was around.

EVP also took names like Delores, Toby, Lottie, Molly and Eve. Words such as girls, slave, search, love, drink have also come to the fore. The words “hopeless” and “nightmare” also appeared among the general chuckles.

This is the part of the hotel believed to have been a brothel during the Prohibition era and possibly before. The speakeasy is believed to be one of the most active parts of the hotel, where previous guests have stayed, secretly drank and gambled.

Foley enjoys the past visits and reiterates that he does not intend them to harm his present-day visitors.

A family having dinner at the speakeasy couldn’t explain why the straw started dancing on their table. The son had placed a straw inside the Sunkist box and watched in amazement as it spun in circles. His father tried to explain it scientifically, saying it was carbonation, but when they took the can out of the distillery, it stopped spinning.

Wyoming’s ghost hunters captured a recording of a man’s voice at the Speakeasy and several orbs at the brothel when a group called WASP (Wyoming Area Spirit Posse) visited. They told Foley that their investigation proved there was paranormal activity at the hotel.

“We came across six people who said there was a girl named Alice sitting in that chair when no one was there,” Foley said. “It seemed really odd to me that they all had the same name.”

The staff also had encounters that they could not explain.

“We had a cook downstairs named Rita and she saw an absolute ghost,” he said. “There was a girl running in the kitchen of the restaurant and thinking it was a person, he told her to slow down. “He realized she wasn’t a young girl, she was a ghost.”

Foley and Davis helped put the Historic Greybull Hotel on the historical record, preserving both the building and the spirits that wander its halls.

“You know how you go to some places and they don’t feel right? It’s not like that here at all,” Foley said. “It feels really good.”

The historic Greybull Hotel will remain open for business for today’s guests and yesterday’s guests.

Contact Jackie Dorothy at [email protected]

Jackie Dorothy can be reached at [email protected].