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,
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.”
The Original Austin Ghost Tours
This is an article that I’m posting as a throwback from the 1974 a magazine that was local to Austin called Free and Easy. It was a fun 1970s era printing of local stories.
”Yet another famous ghost was observed by only one woman.
Though the story lacked the authenticity awarded by multiple sightings, it became a legend because it involved a dashing soldier and a sweet damsel, both romantic personages in earlier days.
The duo purportedly haunted the Raymond House, the first colonial style structure in town, which was built in 1853 in the 1000 block of West 6th Street. Colonel Raymond was a state treasurer and a man remembered by for his love of horses and the kindness with which he treated his slaves. Raymond and his wife lived in the house until their deaths. Neither their lives nor the lives of later residents provided good ghost story fodder, nonetheless, this one emerged.”
(In fact, in Austin’s early, early history, not only was the Raymond House the first, but it was the only boarding house for quite a while. It was actually at the same location as the old Telegraph Building at the corner of 4th and Congress Avenue today.)
”In 1923, a woman was passing the house at twilight and looked in the window.
At the top of the stairs appeared a young girl exquisitely dressed in rose colored ruffles. She slowly descended the staircase with one hand on her heart and the other on the banister. As she neared the floor, a dark Cape swished and a sword flashed in the moonlight. A man dressed in the uniform of a Union soldier embraced her and the words ”beloved” was whispered between them.
Thereafter, the woman observed the figure of an old man sitting on the steps and recognized him as the same Union soldier wizened by the years. While walking down the street days later, she saw the old man, this time in the flesh. She approached him and recounted her apparition, He remembered the occasion, a late night meeting he had with the girl before he left for war. After returning home, he could not find his lover, but, He said, ”She is here with me now she helps me wash my dishes and sweep my floors. She loves my books and I am happy.”
Long gone, Houghton House
Recently replaced by a parking garage, the old Houghton House at 12th and Guadalupe was a ghost watchers delight. The upper floors of the stately Victorian mansion were partitioned into apartments and several tenants reported visits by a timid ghost easily startled by loud noises. The most enduring account of the Spirit’s origin is the tale of a woman and her adulterous husband who lived in the house long ago. The wife caught her husband in an untoward situation with a female neighbor. She killed them both, then returned home and committed suicide. The woman apparently took her life in the tower in the corner of the house. A resident who rented the tower in 1972 claims there was an area in the middle of the room that was always cool, call it chilling, no matter what the weather this. Phenomena is quite common in so called haunted houses
Houghton House’s capitulation to progress was particularly sad. It was not only a grand artifact of the 19th century Austin, but also the home was one of our town’s more active ghosts, who we must presume now flirts fitfully among parked cars seeking the companionship of a snoozing drunk.”
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