Flickering Lights, Strange Music and a Ghost at a Brooklyn Bar. Maybe.By CHADWICK MOORE OCT. 27, 2014

On a dark morning in September 2006, Miguel Vargas arrived for work at a Brooklyn restaurant called Sweetwater. He unlocked and lifted the security gate, took two steps inside and saw a woman in profile walking across the dining room toward a basement stairwell.

She was middle-aged with gray hair and dressed in white, like a wedding dress, he said, but not one from this century. And she appeared corporeal, “normal,” Mr. Vargas said, not nebulous or translucent like on television.

“I knew it was a ghost when I saw it. I said, ‘O.K., that’s it.’ And I walked away.” For the next half-hour he stood outside, trembling. When Mr. Vargas, a porter at the restaurant, told his bosses, they laughed.

Yet the previous porter had quit in a panic, restaurant employees said. He was napping on a table in the basement and claimed to see “the devil” standing over him. And other employees at this American bistro in Williamsburg have reported strange happenings: music turning on without explanation; lights flickering; odd patches of luminescence in the basement; and the feeling of being watched by an unseen presence.

Then there was a nerve-racking episode a few weeks ago. While digging up the dining room floor to reinforce support beams, workers unearthed a burial site containing a three-inch stone statue of the Madonna and child, a tiny gold ring, a pair of children’s brown Mary Jane shoes and bone fragments that the restaurant’s owner, Nina Brondmo, described as “probably from a small animal.”

They reburied the shoes and bones, put the statue on display behind the bar and a busboy took the ring.

“After that, all the glasses were breaking,” Wesley Ham, 35, the manager, said. “You would grab a glass and it would shatter in your hand, or you’d look over and all the glasses on the shelf would be cracked. Sometimes it would be 20 a day. I thought the ghost was not happy about its possessions being taken from the floor.”