DAYTON — The boys were out playing when they saw it. Inside the dark building, a shadowy figure.
Zachary Willis went to tell his mother, Shea, immediately.
"Hey, there’s something weird going on in there," she recalls him saying.
Then, the 11-year-old went back into the family’s café and let his mother go into the building across the street.
Willis wasn’t just being nosey. She had just gotten the keys to the triangular building nudged into the three-sided intersection of Main and College streets in Dayton.
Willis and her husband, Matt, plan to merge their two businesses, Ravenwood Café and Ravenwood Gallery, and move them into The Triangle Building at 233 Main St., which they are renting.
Shea Willis, a paranormal investigator with the Shenandoah Valley Paranormal Society, says the building is a hotbed of spectral activity but that’s no reason not to move in.
It is, she says, a prime location — haunted or not.
"They call it the epicenter of town," she said. "I’ve heard more than one person refer to it as that."
Dayton Mayor Judy Way shares that enthusiasm.
"It’s exciting for the town of Dayton," she said. "That’s a great building, a historic building, and it’s been sitting there, going to waste, for a number of years."
More Room, But Cozy
The Willis family opened Ravenwood Gallery, which features the work of a variety of local artists and artisans, in February.
In March, Shea says she found out the coffee shop down the block, run by her new friend Ann-Marie Alford, was going out of business, so they took that over too.
They’d been running two shops about 100 yards from each other for the past three months but hope to move to their new building by the beginning of October.
They need the space, said Shea Willis. The Ravenwood Café, which sells sandwiches, smoothies, soup, ice cream and organic, shade-grown fair trade coffee, only has room for a handful of customers.
"We’re packed in there," she said. "We don’t have room for people to sit."
The new building will have room not only for more customers, but also for an art gallery. It will not, however, have a pool table.
"My kids were clamoring for me to put a pool table in there," she said. "I said, ‘No, you all can go down the street to Jim’s Drive-In.’
"It’s going to be cozy."
A Lot Of Paint
The idea of having a cozy coffee shop in the middle of Dayton has been embraced by townsfolk, Willis said.
Greg Riddle, president of the BB&T Bank across the street, and the treasurer of the Dayton Community Development Association, has offered to help renovate.
He’s not much of a construction worker, so Riddle has offered to take up a brush in his efforts to assist in the ambitious goal of opening the building by October.
"It’s absolutely a beautiful building with those 14-foot ceilings," he said. "It’s going to need a lot of paint."
Way, the mayor, says everyone in town is looking forward to when the building is being used again. For the last eight years it’s been storage, she said, but the Willis family should change all that.
"They’re very creative, they’re very artistic and I think they’re going to do great things in there."
Willis thinks so, too, and she’s not at all worried about the ghosts she says her son saw.
"I really think it’s got such a great feeling to it," she said. "It has such potential."
Contact Martin Cizmar at 574-6277 or mcizmar@dnronline.com
