Monica Ballard has been a tour guide with Austin Ghost Tours (The original and only locally owned ghost tour) for about 20 years.
She made it her mission to collect the stories that were true and that actually took place in the Driskill Hotel.
This is the story of the Vortex on the 4th floor of the Driskill on the old side and the ghosts who create it.
This is just one ghost story.
In the spring of 1991, Nadia, a young woman from Houston had her big day called off a few days before the wedding. Distraught, she tried unsuccessfully to take her own life at the Houston Hilton on the first night following the breakup with her with her fiancé. She then took her former fiancée’s sports car and drove it to Austin, Texas, and checked into the Driskill. The next day she went shopping and one of her purchases was a pistol. She returned to the Driskill, loaded it, put on the Do Not Disturb sign, and grabbed a pillow from the bed, facing herself in the bathroom mirror, she shot herself in the stomach. The sound was muffled by the pillow. The police report indicated that if the bullet had not killed her, the alcohol in her blood system would have.
In the summer of 2010, Austin Ghost Tours began hearing about the phone calls to rooms when the guests arrived iin their rooms and no one on the other end.
In January of 2010, Austin Ghost Tours founder and manager Jeanine Plumer and I were on a flight to Hollywood to be featured in the biography channels new show My Ghost Story ( we were featured 3 times) because of a photograph that a tour guest took in the Driskill lobby. In preparation for the show, we started reviewing all of the stories we knew and which spirits we could attach to which story. When we got to 19, we stopped and agreed to, if asked on the TV show about the Driskill Hotel, we would just tell the producers there’s a ”bunch of ghosts”.
We have since come to terms with the impossibility to say exactly how many spirits haunt the Driskill. It would be like asking someone at the front desk how many people are in the building at that moment. Well, they might be able to estimate the number of staff and guests, but who is at the bar? Who is in the restaurant? Who is a tourist wandering by? All we can do is review the evidence. And listen to other people’s experiencing documenting as we go and finding commonalities in the stories.
