The Ghosts Emerge
After April 7, 1900, it was morbid curiosity that drove people to the vanished lake. Often young boys and girls, now with little to do on the hot summer nights of 1900, would take the walk along Dam Avenue just to look at what was once their lake. It was on these nights that rumors of lights shining from beneath the water began.
Ghosts In Westlake
Older residents of Westlake Hills just to the west of the city remember going at night to what is now Red Bud Island when they were kids. They would say they were going night fishing, but they were always looking for the lights coming up from the water. “We’d get real quiet after our lines were cast. We weren’t really interested in the fish. Whatever we caught we threw back in. We were looking for the lights,” One Westlake homeowner remembers, “You would see them one in ten times. Usually there was one light but sometimes two or three. The lights were round and clear, and they moved around on the surface of the water. They came from under the water.”
Similar lights have been seen around Waller Creek, south of 4th Street, at the junction where Waller and the Colorado meet. This was where the wave of water took its greatest toll.
Ghosts at the Hofheintz-Reissig building/Moonshine Patio Bar & Grill
At the corner of Third Street and Red River stands the Hofheintz-Reissig building, a testimony to the durability of German stone architecture. After the wave of water wiped out virtually all of their neighbors’ homes, the Hofheintz and Reissigs were surely a part of the team of families who cared for the homeless and grieving.
German native Henry Hofheintz purchased the property in 1854. At the time he was a widower but soon married Christiana Hinemann. What is today called the Sunday House was the first building on the property. It was used to keep the food for Hofheintz’s mules dry. His mules were paramount to his livelihood because he drove his springboard wagon to and from Mexico buying, selling and trading goods. Eventually, the Carriage House and the main structure were built, serving as store and home. During the Reconstruction Era following the War Between the States, the Sunday House was used by freed slaves who needed housing. The cellar stored wine made from grapes grown on the property, and during the hot summer months it provided a cool place to play dominoes. The Hofheintz-Reissig building was a store, biergarten and restaurant for 112 years before the family sold it in 1966.
Mrs. Hofheintz was living on the property when she died 14 years into her marriage. Henry himself passed on in 1880 while proprietor of the Hofheintz grocery store. His daughter, Catherine Louisa married Adolf Reissig, a native of Germany, and they both lived, worked and eventually died on the property. Their son Herman married Eula Petry and they lived and worked on the property, along with her family, until he died in 1961 with Eula following in 1962. Even though some may have died in a hospital or infirmary, wouldn’t their greatest attachment on this earth be to the place they all spent most of their years? That might account for the strange occurrences reported at the Hofheintz-Reissig building. Or, are the proprietors still welcoming others even as residents of the spirit world?
The current owner of the building claims that most of the strange activity in the building is reminiscent of a child or children who demand attention from the staff and customers at Moonshines Patio Bar & Grill. There was the time he was in the office upstairs trying to print something from the computer without success. He shut down the printer and computer, was leaving the office, and just as he snapped off the light, the printer tray flew halfway across the room at him. Unimpressed, the proprietor calmly chided the ghost, saying, “No, no. No more of that, now. I’m going downstairs!” And he left.
In 2009, staff members were gathered in a booth, wrapping silverware in napkins, preparing for what they hoped would be a busy Thanksgiving weekend for Moonshines. As they were chatting about how they spent their Thursday holiday, an ill-tempered spirit, perhaps upset that the restaurant was closed the previous day, yanked an entire tray of glasses from the wait station nearest them, shattering the glassware.
Glasses seem to be convenient projectiles for the ghosts of Moonshine Patio Bar & Grill. When an air-conditioning maintenance man showed up to change out the filters in the Carriage House bar in the summer of 2009, he was only at work for a few minutes when there was a commotion followed by his hasty exit. “I’m never going back in there again!” he emphatically told the owner, reporting that glasses were “throwing themselves off the bar” at him.
A few years earlier, tour guide Monica ducked in out of the February chill to get a first-hand account of an experience from one of the wait staff. As Monica warmed herself in the foyer, a mist formed between the hostess area and the bar, and began moving past her. It brushed the left side of her face, making it colder than the right, until it drifted down the hall toward the restrooms and the cellar stairs where it dissipated.
Moments later, one of the wait staff said that she and a co-worker had been on the back patio serving the lunch crowd earlier that week. Suddenly, a pitcher of water seated on a rubber mat at a wait station flew horizontally 4 feet into midair, spilling its contents everywhere as it landed. That same afternoon, the patio area experienced a common occurrence for Moonshines: mason jar glasses that suddenly break apart at an empty place setting. A guest described the incident “as though the molecules just gave up!”
One time there was only the sound of breakage without physical damage. Two patrons familiar with area ghost stories were enthusiastically discussing phenomena at another Austin location when they heard the sound of a tray being thrown against an adjacent wall five feet away. They stopped chatting, looked curiously in that direction, there was nothing there. When they changed the topic to a discussion of Moonshines’ ghosts, the activity settled down.
Who are the Ghosts
If cemetery records are accurate and there were no small children of the Hofheintz-Reissig families who died on the premises, who is the child or children having the tantrums at this popular eatery? We present this theory: Waller Creek, flowing just east of the Hofheintz-Reissig building, was once lined with homes, populated by people like Ambrosia DeLeon, Walter Carrington, Mrs. Clara Grim and most likely, their children. Could some of the spirits in what is now Moonshine Patio Bar & Grill be those of the people who drowned? In all likelihood, yes. It is the only remaining building from that era; still a place of vibrant celebratory energy. For a wandering spirit, it would be a place of comfort. No doubt they would receive a customary welcome from the Hofheintz-Reissig household whose members knew the importance of family in good times and bad.
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