A haunted McDonald’s served its patrons a biggie-sized dose of terror from the deep-fryer of doom.

The typical McDonald’s, like so many other fast-food joints, is housed in a mostly prefabricated building designed to be tossed up on a street corner in no time flat. That not-so-proud architectural tradition was broken when the chain located an eatery in the upstate New York resort town of Lewiston. Instead of parking yet another interchangeable french fry factory on a vacant lot with good traffic flow, the company set up shop inside a centuries-old building that formerly housed an inn and restaurant known as the Frontier House.

It was a bold, visionary move. And it’s one that more than a few employees lived to regret.

Apparently the chain’s new location came with more than just built-in atmosphere. It was also haunted. Really, really haunted. It seems that the old Frontier House is filled with ectoplasmic residue left over from the part it played in one of the nineteenth century’s most famous disappearances.

It happened in 1826, when a low-level Freemason named William Morgan decided to write a book exposing the secret social club. Back in the 1820s, this was a big deal. Freemasonry was a closed society filled with arcane rites performed behind locked doors. In many communities, almost every person of note was a member—including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. Of course, now we know that all these men did was hang around in dusty meeting halls, make up secret handshakes, and entertain each other with silly rituals. But at the time, there was a growing suspicion in America that the Freemasons were up to something.

This made Morgan’s book a potential bombshell—and a thorn in the side of the Freemasons. In September 1826, while he was still working on the manuscript, he was arrested twice—first for petty theft, then for failure to pay a small debt. While he languished in a jail cell, a group of men showed up, paid his fine, and hustled Morgan onto a coach bound for Fort Niagara. Reportedly, the party stayed overnight at the Frontier House en route. What happened after that is anybody’s guess, because Morgan was never seen again. Enemies of Freemasonry figured he’d been taken away and disposed of. No one ever knew for sure, because his body was never discovered, and the people who rode on the coach with Morgan took the secret to their graves.

Not surprisingly, locals surmised that it was Morgan the Mason who enlivened things at the Lewiston McDonald’s. In the 1970s, the restaurant’s manager complained of hearing strange, disembodied voices and seeing floating apparitions. A maintenance man quit after sighting a ghost, and a female custodian claimed that a milky-white old man regularly materialized in the pantry.

Perhaps Morgan enjoyed his stay at the Frontier House so much that, once he was relieved of his mortal form, he decided to come back as a ghost. His presence was so widely accepted that the McDonald’s served as a centerpiece for a walking tour of Lewiston’s haunted places.

Maybe his ghostly aura also helped speed the demise of the eatery, which closed its doors in 2004. It’s quite an unexpected development, given that running a McDonald’s out of business is usually harder than killing a cockroach. One wonders if the building’s bad mojo was too much even for the all-conquering Golden Arches. The hoary structure remains unoccupied.

But even though the restaurant is gone, local legend holds that you can still have a spirit encounter just by hanging around the general area. Nearby Ridge Road, which Morgan’s abductors traveled to get to the Frontier House, is said to be haunted by the sound of invisible galloping horses hauling an unseen coach. No word on if they ever tried the McDonald’s drive-through.