Eagle House Restaurant

The story

Oziel Smith bought his way into Williamsville at an 1827 sheriff's sale: a grist mill, a sawmill, roughly a hundred acres, the quarry and the water lime works, and with them every bit of water power inside the village limits. He then built a tavern almost entirely out of his own supply chain: a two-foot-thick limestone foundation from his quarry, lumber from his own woods and mill. The first building burned to the ground before it ever opened. He rebuilt immediately, and the second attempt is the one you eat in, curved ceiling and spring-floor ballroom on the second story included, his own design.

By 1832 the Eagle House Tavern was the overnight stop on the Buffalo-to-Batavia run, taking in Conestoga freight wagons and passenger coaches; a meal cost 25 cents, a bed 10. The deed kept moving — Hopkins in 1857, Wooster in 1909, Beck in 1923, Clare in 1945 — and the Hanny family runs it now, five generations in hospitality since the 1880s. The house claims the longest continuously held liquor license in Erie County and New York State, and keeps its original 1930s liquor stamps on the premises as the receipt. Its own history holds that the tunnels beneath the building and Main Street served as an Underground Railroad station.

The ghost is a soldier in a blue coat whom local lore promotes to General Winfield Scott — who did fight on the Niagara frontier in 1814, and who was nowhere near this building, because it did not exist yet. The restaurant does own several pieces of Scott's furniture, which is the sort of detail that keeps a story alive. Nick and Tessa Groff filmed a Death Walker episode here, 'Haunted Eagle House,' broadcast October 6, 2025. None of it interrupts service: the Front Tavern, Williams Room, Main Dining Room and Bar Lounge all run a normal menu, entrees from $16 up to a $37 beef Wellington.