While tour guide Maverick was standing outside of the Wooten building with the group tonight, he mentioned that Dr. Wooten doesn’t necessarily like visitors. He called me after the tour and said “My phone started playing this song. I have never heard the song before nor knew of the band. How was it even on my phone?”
Looking at the lyrics I would say Dr. Wooten is alone and lonely and waiting for someone who has long since passed away?!
The Wooten Building is an old hospital in downtown Austin next to the local Fox TV station.
1980 Hurry Up This Way Again – The Stylistics:
Austin Ghost Tours has been in business for way over 30 years.
One of our long-time stops has always been the Wooten building. Throughout the years, it has remained mostly empty or vacant. Tenants just don’t seem to stay very long. It has been for sale, it has been for rent, and it has mostly been empty.
A few summers back. There was news of a solar flare, and the scuttlebutt online was, that any paranormal investigations held that following Friday would show promising results as that electromagnetisms hit our planet’s atmosphere.
I had the Friday night tour that week and everything and everywhere seemed charged. Entering the Driskill was like walking through a force field. But when we reached the Wooten Building, I launched into the usual stories but couldn’t help. Noticing a dog on the tour that, up until then, Had been very social and happy.
Suddenly, this dog hid behind the mistress’s leg, fearful and uneasy.
Then, in the middle of a story, he came out and stared at the door behind me. I slowly stepped to one side, urging everyone quietly to look at the dog. “Look at the dog.” The pup moved past me slowly going up the stairs, then sat as though commanded, panting happily. Then he trotted down the stairs again and took a seat right next to his mistress. Calm but tail wagging, I looked around at stunned faces and announced. “Oh, we are taking pictures tonight!
“What is a ghost?
There was a soft stream of light coming from the second floor, cascading down the staircase. One by one, my guests snapped photos through the clear section of the antique door. When the tour wrapped, the woman with the dog showed me the photo she had taken, and it so intrigued me, I had her text it to me. I immediately came back to the stoop and tried to take the same photo through the door to possibly debunk or duplicate what she had captured.
The guest had photographed the face of Doctor Thomas Dudley Wooten to the left of the stairs and almost a full bodied apparition of his son Goodall Wooten, dressed in a suit from the early 1900s, which is exactly when he would have been practicing in the building after his father’s retirement.
About four years ago, Austin was sweltering through another brutal summer with day after day of triple digit temperatures. Beaten down and weary of decision making, I somehow thought it was a good idea to park my car along 10th Street right in front of the Wooten Building, even though my tour that Saturday night started and ended at Moonshine’s on 3rd Street. Quite a walk away. That meant trudging seven blocks in Victorian dress, leading the tour, and dragging myself back to my car. About every 3rd step, I was mentally kicking myself and asking why the hell did you park on 10th street tonight? When I reached my car and paused to fumble for my keys, a security guard exited the Fox 7 headquarters and he had been waiting there to greet me. And he said, “you’re the lady who does the ghost tours, right?”
“I want to know more about the guy who fell off the roof.”
OK, I was intrigued. “Me too,” I responded “but you work for a new station and I don’t, so you gotta help me out.”
“It was about seven years ago the contractor was up on the roof of the building”
the man said, pointing to the Wooten building. “Well, he got stuck up there and didn’t have his phone on him and he was calling out to people, but I guess everyone ignored him. So, then he got the idea that if he hung on to the gutter, he could swing his way on to the balcony section. Bang on the door and someone inside the building might hear him. He was kind of a big dude, and the gutter collapsed with his weight and he fell to the sidewalk. He was killed instantly.”
“Two weeks ago during my shift. One of my motion monitors goes on. It’s the one for that camera right there, he pointed to the all seeing eye facing the sidewalk leading down toward Congress Avenue. And I see this shape like a shadow rise up from out of the pavement. Can’t make out any features or anything. And it staggers toward the stoop, goes up the stairs of the Wooten Building and disappears out of the camera view. So I left my desk thinking maybe it was a homeless person who’s hurt, but when I came out, there was no one there.
“I go back to my station and run the footage back to the moment the camera turned on. The only reason the camera went on was because there was a guy coming up the sidewalk on the other side of the street. That’s what tripped the motion sensor.
The camera never recorded what I saw with my own eyes!”
Since then, every August activity at the stoop of that building ramps up, leading me to believe that this man’s death took place at that time.
From tour guide Monica Ballard’s book True Haunted Tales of Austin and Central Texas.
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