Bill Murray ended up behind the taps at an Irish pub in Yonkers, New York, on Halloween weekend, helping staff pour pints of Guinness after a rib-eye dinner and a bottle of wine.
The pub is Rory Dolan’s on McLean Avenue, and it was the bar itself that put the evidence online. Its Instagram post, dated October 31, showed the 76-year-old actor working the taps and posing with owner Rory Dolan. By Thursday it had drawn more than 5,600 likes and over 100 comments, with replies such as “Legendary!”
What the bar says happened
According to Dolan, Murray arrived with two friends and sat down to eat before ending up on the staff side of the counter. The owner, who throws a Halloween party every year whatever night the holiday lands on, said the actor was easygoing with regulars, many of whom came over to tell him which of his films they loved most.
Dolan said he and Murray spent part of the night comparing golf courses around the world, Ireland’s among them. Murray also told him he had come to see the place because he had heard about its energy.
That is the whole documented record: photos supplied by the bar, the bar’s own post and the owner’s account. No statement from Murray himself appears in any of it.
The date question
One detail is fuzzier than the “Halloween” label suggests. The owner’s account places the visit on Saturday, October 31, and a photo caption gives the same date. But the bar’s post carries an October 31 date too, and one of the most-liked comments under it, with 45 likes, calls the night “Halloween eve.” Another fan wrote that they had been there “last night.” So the evening may have started on Friday the 30th and run past midnight; the bar serves food until 3 a.m. and stays open until 4. Either way, it was Halloween weekend, and the Guinness was real.
Why it fits the Murray pattern
Unannounced drop-ins are close to a second career for Murray. A 2018 documentary, The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons Learned from a Mythical Man, was built entirely around the urban legends of him turning up at strangers’ parties and ordinary venues.
The Yonkers stop also lines up with his biography in a way that makes the golf talk less random than it sounds. Murray grew up in an Irish Catholic family outside Chicago, with a grandfather from County Cork and maternal ancestors from County Galway, and he paid for his Jesuit high school by caddying at a golf course. Talking Irish golf over a pint in an Irish-American pub is about as on-brand as a night out gets for him.
Rory Dolan’s opened in 1994 and pours from more than 45 draft lines, so Murray had plenty to choose from. His career runs from Saturday Night Live in the late 1970s through Ghostbusters (1984), Groundhog Day (1993) and the Oscar-nominated turn in Lost in Translation (2003), plus ten films with Wes Anderson.
For anyone hoping to repeat the experience, the bar’s posted hours are 11 a.m. to 4 a.m. daily, at 890 McLean Avenue.
Further reading
Image: Adam Chitayat, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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