Written by Monica Ballard

Man, I miss the Bitter End.

When I first moved to Austin and worked for a marketing firm, we would sometimes have client lunches there. How long ago was that?  Well, as you can see from the photo, phone booths were still around.

It was there that I tasted calamari for the first time, learned the difference between a hefeweizen and a pilsner, but I never learned the ghost stories until a few years later. By then, a troublesome ne’er do well had broken into the building on August 25, 2005, and inadvertently started a small fire that grew into something uncontrollable.

For years, all that remained of The Bitter End was a shell of a building and a lot of speculation if it would be rebuilt and renovated. Its untimely bitter end is that it’s now a parking garage at the bottom floor of a building full of high-priced lofts at the corner of 3rd & Colorado Streets, in Austin’s Warehouse District. The bar next door to it, The B-Side still unobtrusively huddles downstairs, as though trying to not attract the attention of developers. And around the next corner at 4th St is the former high-dollar eatery The Capitol Grill. Before that, though, it was the Austin’s haunted Spaghetti Warehouse. The Bitter End’s massive bar ended up at a nearby wine bar. Some of her bricks, I hear, were used in the “W” Hotel décor. Makes me wonder if some of the ghosts attached themselves to anything that left the building before its demolition.

Guytown

The Bitter End, even after its doors were closed and locked, awaiting its fate, gave us some of the most varied and unique stories of poltergeist activity we had ever heard in our quarter century. Keep in mind, that these warehouses were part of “Guy Town”, Austin’s red light district from the 1870’s until 1914 (legally), and for years after that illegally.

The manager of the Bitter End often stayed well past closing, reconciling the receipts. He said he always had the oppressive sense of being observed. And even though, the doors were locked, he could hear items being moved around. One night, his patience at an end, he got up from his seat at one end of the bar, and shouted to the empty air, “Alright, enough!  You want to get my attention? REALLY do something to get my attention!”  With that, the bar stool at the other end of the bar tipped on its side and rocketed toward him like a bowling ball. The manager jumped out of the way, called it a night, and headed home, shaken up over what had occurred.