What it is
Casey Moore’s Oyster House is a two-story brick house from 1910 at the corner of 9th Street and Ash Avenue in Tempe, three blocks west of Mill, that has been a bar and restaurant since 1973 and has carried this name since 1986. William and Mary Moeur built it as their home in the new neighborhood west of the normal school and both died in it, which is where the ghost stories begin; the building spent its middle decades as a rooming house, and, depending on who is telling it, a bordello, before someone had the sense to put a bar in the parlor.
What it is now is Tempe’s neighborhood pub: an oyster bar first, with raw, Rockefeller and baked oysters as the house specialty, then an Irish pub menu, a vegan list that arrived in 2026 and is taken seriously, local taps, a whiskey shelf, and a wraparound patio under big old trees that is the best place to sit outdoors in the East Valley on a February evening. The upstairs is the quieter dining room. The kitchen runs past midnight every night. The Phoenix New Times named it the Valley’s Best Neighborhood Bar in 2025, and the award is right.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because every city has the bar its locals send you to instead of the main street, and this is Tempe’s. Mill Avenue is three blocks east and might as well be three miles. The Old Town nightlife note and the dive bar note have the Scottsdale versions of a room like this, but none of them is in a 1910 house with a patio under trees and a couple dancing in the upstairs windows after closing. Our haunted Scottsdale note sends people here as the field trip.
The practical version
Twenty minutes from Old Town: Scottsdale Road to the 202, Mill Avenue south to 9th Street, west three blocks to Ash. Street parking in the neighborhood, tight after six. Opens at four on weekdays and eleven on weekends, with the bar going until one or two. Order the oysters first and the rest later. Take the patio in any month but July, and the upstairs when the bar gets loud.
When to go
Late afternoon on a weekday, when the doors open at four, is the pub at its best: the patio in shade, the bar to yourself for an hour, oysters at the price they should be. Fall Saturdays after an ASU game fill it to the walls by five and it stays that way; good if you were at the game, otherwise a Sunday. Weekend lunch from eleven is the quieter version of the patio. October is the ghost month, when the staff lean into the stories. In summer the patio is for after dark and the upstairs is the room.
What to order
- Oysters, a dozen raw to start, then the Rockefeller or the baked ones with cheese and breadcrumbs that the regulars treat as the signature.
- The pub menu: fish and chips, the burgers, the meatball sub that the house photographs; honest and large.
- The vegan menu, launched in 2026 and better than a bar needs it to be; worth knowing about for the one person in the party who usually gets the side salad.
- Drinks: Irish standards on draft, a rotating set of Arizona taps, a deep whiskey shelf, and nothing with a sparkler in it.
The ghosts
The stories are consistent enough to be part of the fixtures: a dark-haired woman seen in the kitchen, cutlery that leaves tables, lights that come back on, and the Moeurs themselves, seen from the street dancing in the upstairs windows after the bar has closed. Travel + Leisure put the pub on a national list of haunted bars in 2015 and the New Times gave it an award for drinking with ghosts in 2020. Ask the bartender; everyone has one.
The neighborhood
Maple-Ash is the oldest residential neighborhood in Tempe, a grid of bungalows and brick cottages west of Mill that the students rent and the professors own. The walk from Mill down 9th Street is the point of arriving on foot, and Pedal Haus at 7th and Mill is the obvious first stop on the way, if a brewery before an oyster bar is your order of things.
The story
William Moeur and his wife Mary built the house in 1910, when Ash Avenue was the edge of a farm town and the normal school a few blocks east had fewer students than the pub now seats on a Saturday. The Moeur name was a large one in Tempe; Benjamin Baker Moeur, the town doctor, became governor of Arizona in 1933. William and Mary lived in the house for the rest of their lives and died in it. Afterward it was a boarding house for decades, and the bordello story attaches to the same years; nobody who tells it can prove it and nobody wants to stop telling it.
In 1973 the building was renovated and reopened as a restaurant and bar, one of the first businesses to make something of Tempe’s old houses rather than knocking them down, and in 1986 it changed hands and became Casey Moore’s Oyster House, the Irish pub with the seafood bar that it has been for forty years. The patio grew around the trees, the upstairs became the dining room, and the ghost stories, which the staff had kept to themselves, became part of the brand once the national magazines started asking. The pub was named the Valley’s Best Neighborhood Bar by the Phoenix New Times in 2025, and when its vegan menu arrived in 2026 the regulars took it as a sign that the place intended to outlive them too.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s own haunted-house bars, the ones in the haunted Scottsdale note, are adobe and ranch houses; this is the brick-and-porch version from the town that had a university first. Tempe’s old neighborhood and Scottsdale’s Old Town are twenty minutes and a river apart, and the people who live in one and drink in the other make up a fair share of the bar on a Thursday. The live music note covers the Tempe clubs a few blocks from here, for the second half of the night.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road south to the westbound 202, one exit to Mill Avenue, south through downtown to 9th Street, then west three blocks to Ash; the pub is on the corner. From North Scottsdale take the 101 to the 202. Street parking is residential and tight; the Mill Avenue garages are a six-minute walk, and the light rail at Mill and 3rd Street is ten minutes on foot. A rideshare home to Old Town is the right end to an evening here.