Helen's Haunted Hospital: Ghosts of the Two Tire Tavern

In a town famous for its Bavarian facades and alpine charm, one building holds a secret that predates the gingerbread trim by more than fifty years. The Two Tire Tavern, a motorcycle-themed bar in downtown Helen, occupies a building that was once the town's hospital, and depending on whom you ask, some of the former patients have never left.

The Hospital Years

The building that now houses the Two Tire Tavern was constructed around 1913, during Helen's logging boom. At the time, the town was the center of a massive timber operation. The Byrd-Matthews Lumber Company employed hundreds of workers who felled the virgin hardwood forests of the surrounding mountains, and a lumber mill on the banks of the Chattahoochee River processed the timber into boards that were shipped out by rail. It was dangerous work. Logging injuries, sawmill accidents, and the general health hazards of early twentieth-century mountain life created a need for medical facilities.

The hospital was modest by any standard. A few beds, a doctor who also served the surrounding rural communities, and the kind of basic medical equipment that was available in rural Georgia in the early 1900s. Patients came with broken bones, infected wounds, pneumonia, and the various ailments of hard labor and mountain living. The building included a basement that served as the morgue -- a practical necessity in a community where death from logging accidents, sawmill injuries, and untreatable infections was a regular occurrence.

Not all of the hospital's patients left alive. In an era before antibiotics and modern surgical techniques, hospital mortality rates were far higher than today, and the Helen hospital saw its share of deaths over the decades it operated. The basement morgue was where the bodies were prepared and held before burial, and it is this room -- this dark, low-ceilinged space beneath the building where the dead were stored -- that many believe is the epicenter of the paranormal activity that plagues the building to this day.

From Hospital to Tavern

After the logging industry collapsed in the 1930s and Helen's population dwindled, the hospital closed. The building went through various incarnations over the following decades, serving as a residence, a storage space, and eventually a commercial establishment. When Helen reinvented itself as a Bavarian village in 1969, the building's exterior received the same alpine makeover as the rest of downtown, its true history hidden behind half-timbering and flower boxes.

The building eventually became the Two Tire Tavern, a bar popular with motorcycle riders who frequent the mountain highways around Helen. The town's alpine village is known for its winding roads that attract riders from across the Southeast. The tavern's walls are decorated with motorcycle memorabilia, and on warm weekends, the parking lot fills with Harleys and sport bikes whose riders have come to enjoy the twisting roads of the Blue Ridge. But between the chrome and the cold beer, something older seems to linger.

The Paranormal Reports

Staff and customers at the Two Tire Tavern have reported unexplained phenomena for years. The most common reports involve objects moving on their own: glasses sliding across the bar, bottles falling from shelves without being touched, and doors opening and closing when no one is near them. Some staff members have reported cold spots in specific areas of the building, particularly near what was once the hospital's patient rooms.

"I was closing up alone one night and heard what sounded like a man coughing from the back room. I checked and there was nobody there. Then I remembered this used to be a hospital, and I got out of there fast."

Paranormal investigation teams have visited the building on several occasions and claim to have captured EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) recordings, including what they describe as a male voice saying "help me" and the sound of medical equipment, specifically the rhythmic tapping that could be interpreted as a heart monitor or a surgical instrument. One team reported capturing a whispered female voice saying what sounded like a patient's name, though the recording is ambiguous enough to invite multiple interpretations. Photographs taken inside the building have produced anomalies that investigators attribute to spiritual energy -- orbs of light, shadowy figures in doorways, and strange mists in the basement morgue area -- though skeptics note that old buildings with drafts, dust, and uneven lighting are notoriously prone to producing exactly these kinds of photographic artifacts.

The most dramatic reports involve full-body apparitions. Multiple witnesses, including staff members with no particular interest in the paranormal, have described seeing a figure in what appears to be early-twentieth-century clothing standing in the hallway or sitting in one of the back rooms. The figure is typically described as a man, middle-aged, looking confused or distressed, who vanishes when approached directly. Whether this is a genuine spirit, a trick of light and expectation, or a shared hallucination fueled by the building's known history is, of course, the question that no one can definitively answer. What everyone agrees on is that the building feels different from other old structures in Helen -- heavier, somehow, as though the air itself remembers things that happened within these walls.

Helen Haunts Walking Tour

The Two Tire Tavern is one of several stops on the Helen Haunts walking tour, a guided nighttime walk through the village that explores the ghostly history lurking behind the Bavarian facades. The tour covers several allegedly haunted locations in downtown Helen, combining historical research with paranormal lore and a healthy dose of atmospheric storytelling. It is a popular activity for visitors looking for something different from the usual tubing and shopping, and it runs on weekend evenings during the warmer months.

Whether you believe in ghosts or not, the Helen Haunts tour is a genuinely interesting way to learn about the town's pre-Bavarian history. The guides are knowledgeable about the logging era, the hospital, and the various characters who have left their mark on Helen over the past century. And if you feel a cold draft on the back of your neck while standing in the old hospital building, well, it is probably just the air conditioning. Probably.

Helen's paranormal reputation extends well beyond the Two Tire Tavern. Crybaby Bridge at Stovall Mill, just four miles south in the Sautee-Nacoochee Valley, has been generating ghost stories since the 1890s, while the Corpsewood Manor ruins in Chattooga County draw paranormal investigators from across the Southeast. For those who prefer their eerie history rooted in documented fact rather than legend, the Cold War ruins at Dawson Forest provide a genuinely unsettling destination with solid historical grounding. And to understand why the hospital building predates the Bavarian facades by six decades, read the full story of how Helen reinvented itself in 1969.