You Can’t Spell “Research” Without “Search.”
Monica Ballard – Tour Guide since 2005
“There were two deaths here.”
That’s what the disembodied voice in the Orsay House said.
It was so startling I played the audio file over and over. Yup. That’s what it said, alright.
“There were two deaths here.”
Austin Ghost Tours’ latest paranormal investigation at Pioneer Farms had once again yielded intriguing evidence. We heard rumors of one body found in the house when it stood on Neches Street. Suddenly, there was a voice saying there were two.
Tempted as we might be to take a phrase like that at face value, however, it’s a core value at Austin Ghost Tours to present as much of the complete story as possible. Ghosts have been known to say things from their perspective. Spirits have been known to pass over taking their prejudices with them. So, what was the real story here? The spirits had set us on a familiar path that leads us to Newspapers.com, personal interviews, and yet another trip to the Austin History Center.
We do the deep dives because we owe the Other Side the truth. We cannot stress that enough. Research requires curiosity and patience. Undoing, searching through, and rebinding the City Directories in the Austin History Center alone will try someone’s fortitude. But so often, spirits have put “happy accidents’ in our path, and we have stumbled into dimensions of stories we could not have possibly navigated ourselves.
Case in point: when we had been telling her story wrong for ten years, Driskill Hotel’s Suicide Bride #2, Tara, found a way to introduce us to someone who was able to get her police report to us. That’s how we discovered she was not the runaway socialite her legend had made her out to be. She wanted her truth told, and she found the most astonishing way to get it to us, which to me is a much more interesting story than the mythology that surrounded her.
In another case, playing EVP’s captured at The Paramount Theatre at a school speaking engagement, a teacher revealed a surprising twist; The one word response “Gentleman” from the spirit of a deceased projectionist when a co-worker’s name is mentioned uncovered a deeper connection. Turns out, it was a common greeting between the two men in life – and cohort who passed still acknowledges their friendship and mutual respect. What if our tour guide had not accepted that speaking gig? Or what if she had told the students a different story instead of playing the audio clips? Again, they put us in the right place at the right time in front of the right people to add dimension to an already interesting story.
On another occasion, while scouring the City Directories about the Heirmann Building on 5th Street, we stumbled upon the history of the building next store where one of our part-time tour guides worked. When we told him the bar he was working in was a former funeral home, he responded, “That explains a lot!” And suddenly, we had a new stop on the tour.
One afternoon while pouring through notes at the Austin History Center, I was stonewalled when the trail went abruptly cold. I could find nothing regarding the address after a certain year. As the latest City Directory was rewrapped with string and put back on the shelf, I sighed in resignment and looked away for a moment. When my eyes refocused, they settled on a looseleaf 3 ring binder labeled, “Street Addresses Between 1897 and 1927” – where I readily found the information I needed. A moment more and I might have walked away.
When you research a property and find that a woman ran a boarding house there for 52 years, you’ve got a pretty good idea as to who might be haunting that restaurant today. The history of a place makes the ghost stories that much more believable. That’s when you tell those stories – not before, on a hunch.
As much as every bar owner in downtown Austin likes to tout that their building used to be a brothel, we KNOW that’s not the case because we’ve done the legwork, and we tell them so.
The doorman might have overheard stories about deaths in the elevator at The Speakeasy and assumes it was from the fire in 1916. But when you bother to scour the newspaper account of that incident, you find that, while there was a tragic injury, there were no deaths that fateful day. Hearsay. We really, really dislike hearsay. We prefer facts – which is strange to say when you’re dealing with ghost stories. But research helps separate fact from fantasy.
Look, bottom line is, yes, you’re likely to find us in a graveyard. Only we’re not there in the middle of the night, talking to empty air or provoking spirits. We’re there in the daylight, making notes of the people and dates we find on headstones. We’re seated on the floor with clues strewn around us, piecing together births, lives, profound incidents, relationships, and deaths. For buildings, it’s what’s there now, and what stood before, and before that, and before that, perhaps all the way back to when only Native Americans camped or wandered through our city.
We’re looking for footprints and echoes, and with help from the other side, we often find what we need. They often confirm what we only suspect. But no research starts without passion for the search.
We at the Original Austin Ghost Tours promise to bring you no ghost story that has not been thoroughly researched. But we owe much of what we tell on tour to those in the next dimension. And for that reason, we’ll tell it right. We’ll tell it true. Because there’s a saying in our business: “You’re never truly dead until the living stop telling your story.”
