SPECIAL EDITION:👻 45 West Park Square: A Haunted Stop on Marietta Square

There are places on Marietta Square that feel older than the businesses that occupy them.

They change names. They are renovated. New owners come in, new concepts take over, and everything on the surface moves forward. But sometimes, something underneath the surface seems to stay.

For me, 45 West Park Square is one of those places.

Today, the building is home to Asher & Rose, a modern grocer and café. Before that, it was Piastra. Before that, it was La Famiglia. And before it was any of those, it was part of the long commercial life of Marietta Square itself.¹

That is the part that interests me most.

Because the stories tied to this building did not seem to belong to only one business name.

They stayed.

🌿 A Building That Outlasts Its Name

What can be documented is simple enough.

La Famiglia occupied 45 West Park Square before Piastra opened there in 2015. More recently, Piastra was transformed into Asher & Rose, with the same mother-son ownership connected to the new market and café concept.²

The address itself has a longer commercial past. City directory records show 45 West Park Square operating as retail space decades before the restaurant era, including Johnny Walker Inc., a men’s clothing store, in the 1940s.³

That does not automatically make a building haunted.

But it does remind me that places like this have layers. They hold years of people coming in and out, working late, opening doors, closing doors, hearing things, dismissing things, and sometimes remembering things they could not easily explain.

🕯️ The Stories I Was Told

Years ago, when the building was still La Famiglia, I knew the owners, a husband and wife, and their son. Their son was about thirteen at the time, the same age as my youngest son then. My youngest is thirty now, which gives some idea of how long these stories have stayed with me.

These were not stories I found online.

They were told to me directly by people connected to the building.

And they were not vague.

🚪 The Footsteps Upstairs

One of the accounts came from the female owner.

She told me that one night she was upstairs in the bathroom, alone. I do not want to overstate whether the bathroom door was open, closed, or simply unlocked, because I am going on memory. But what I remember clearly is what she described hearing.

Heavy footsteps came up the stairs.

Not a creak. Not the ordinary settling of an old building.

Footsteps.

They came up the stairs and stopped directly at the bathroom door.

There was no one there.

That kind of detail matters to me. Old buildings make noise, yes. Floors shift. Pipes knock. Wood breathes with weather and age.

But footsteps moving in a direction, coming closer, and stopping at a door feel different.

And from what I remember, it frightened her badly.

🪖 The Soldier in the Basement

Her son had his own experience in the building, and this one has always stayed with me.

He described seeing what looked like a soldier, or possibly a general, in the basement.

Not just a shadow.

A defined form.

That detail matters, especially in Marietta. The Square is not just a charming place with restaurants, shops, and old buildings. It sits inside a city with deep Civil War history. The Kennesaw House, now home to the Marietta History Center, was used as both a Confederate and later Union hospital during the Civil War, and the Marietta History Center notes that many buildings and homes in town were used as hospitals as the war moved into the area.⁴

So when a young person describes seeing a military-looking figure in the basement of an old building on the Square, I do not think that should be brushed aside as just another ghost story.

Maybe it was memory.

Maybe it was history pressing itself into the room.

Maybe it was something else entirely.

But I do not ignore it.

🌫️ The Figure by the Heater

Another account involved an employee who had gone down into the basement.

This is one of the strongest stories to me because of how specific it is.

The employee saw a shadowy figure hunched near a heater.

When the figure was noticed, it did not simply vanish.

It reacted.

It shifted into what was described as a wispy, mist-like form and moved through an iron-barred opening into the blocked space beyond.

That image has stayed with me: something low in the basement, seen near a heater, then changing form and slipping through the bars into whatever older space sat beyond them.

That is where this building becomes more than just a room with a ghost story.

Because the story does not only stay inside the room.

It moves toward what is underneath.

🕳️ What Exists Beneath the Square

I want to be careful here, because this is where stories about Marietta Square can get blended together.

I am not going to claim there is a fully mapped tunnel system running beneath every building on the Square.

What I will say is that stories about underground spaces beneath Marietta Square have been repeated for years, and I have heard them from more than one direction.

I was told by a woman who worked in the courthouse that police officers had been inside underground structures during renovation work. I was also told, through a connection tied to the Marietta Museum of History and the Kennesaw House, that there are definitely underground areas beneath parts of the Square that people have physically entered.

I have also heard references to photographs of underground spaces beneath or near places such as the former Eddie’s Trick Shop area, though that is something I would still want to verify more deeply before treating it as documented history.

So I am keeping the wording honest:

Underground structures appear to exist beneath parts of Marietta Square.

Some may be sealed, barred, filled, or blocked.

Some may be connected only in limited ways.

But the idea of older spaces under the Square is not something I heard only once, and it is not something I connect only to ghost tours.

And when I think about the account of something moving through iron bars in the basement of 45 West Park Square, that underground context matters.

⚡ The Story Did Not End with La Famiglia

What makes this location stand out even more is that the activity does not seem to belong only to the La Famiglia era.

On a recent visit to Marietta Square, we went into Asher & Rose, the new business now operating in the space.

Before we could even fully ask about the haunting, one of the employees brought it up herself.

She said she knew about the ghost there.

She had not seen a figure herself, and I appreciated that she did not turn the story into something bigger than what she personally experienced.

But she did say she witnessed a piece of equipment move across the room with nobody near it.

Not shift.

Not fall.

Move.

That is a different kind of account. It is not just a feeling. It is not just a sound. It is not an old story repeated from a tour.

It is a recent physical disturbance described by someone working in the building now.

That matters.

🌿 What We Can Prove, and What We Still Believe

I know experiences like these are often called subjective.

And yes, paranormal experiences usually are.

But subjective does not mean meaningless.

There is a difference between making wild claims and honoring what people say they experienced. When different people, across different years, describe activity in the same building—footsteps, figures, movement in the basement, something tied to barred underground spaces, and now an object moving on its own—it becomes harder to dismiss everything as imagination.

Everybody cannot be delusional.

I do not say that carelessly. I say it because these stories were not all coming from strangers online. Some came from people I knew, people connected to the building, people who worked there and lived with the space day after day.

That gives the stories weight.

Not proof in the scientific sense.

But weight.

✨ What Stayed

La Famiglia is gone.

Piastra has changed.

Asher & Rose has brought something new into the space.

But the building itself has not gone anywhere, and neither have the stories tied to it.

That is what makes places like this so interesting to me.

You can walk into it on a normal day, grab something to eat or drink, and never think twice about what might have happened there before—or what might still be happening in small, unexplainable ways.

Maybe it is the structure.

Maybe it is what is beneath it.

Or maybe it is simply one of those places that continues to carry something with it.

For me, I do not ignore that.

I believe there is still paranormal activity in places like this, especially when the experiences are this specific, this consistent, and this tied to the same space over time.

And 45 West Park Square is one of those places I do not just pass by anymore.

It is one I pay attention to.

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Footnotes

¹ Asher & Rose lists its business address as 45 W Park Sq, Marietta, Georgia. Asher & Rose Grocers, official website. Source. ↩

² Public local reporting states that Piastra opened after La Famiglia and later shifted into Asher & Rose under the same mother-son ownership connected to Chef Greg Lipman and Betty Bahl. See VoyageATL, “Meet Greg Lipman of Piastra in Marietta”; Marietta.com, “Asher & Rose Grocers”; and WSB-TV, “10-year-old restaurant in Marietta Square temporarily closes.” Source 1, Source 2, Source 3. ↩

³ Historic city directory records list Johnny Walker Inc. at 45 W Park Square in the 1940s, showing the address’s earlier commercial use before its later restaurant history. Digital Library of Georgia, Marietta city directory record. Source. ↩

⁴ The Marietta History Center identifies the Kennesaw House as one of Marietta’s oldest buildings and notes its Civil War hospital use; the Center also describes Marietta as a Civil War hospital city where many buildings and homes were converted for medical use. Marietta History Center, “Kennesaw House” and “Bleeding Gray & Blue: Marietta’s Civil War Hospitals.” Source 1, Source 2. ↩