History
Austin was a capital before it was much of a town, and within three years, it nearly stopped being one.
A Capital on the Frontier
In 1839, Texas was its own country, the three-year-old Republic of Texas, and it wanted a permanent capital. A commission was appointed to choose the site. The Republic’s president, Mirabeau Lamar, sent it to look at a hamlet on the Colorado River called Waterloo, where four families lived near a log stockade. The commission chose it, and the city laid out there was named Austin, after Stephen F. Austin, the founder of Anglo-American Texas. The site was on the western frontier, far from other towns and open to attack, and plenty of Texans hated it. Sam Houston, who was president before and after Lamar, called it “the most unfortunate site on earth for a seat of government.”
Houston became president again in 1841. He refused to live in the president’s house in Austin and took a room at Angelina Eberly’s boarding house instead. In March 1842, Mexican troops captured San Antonio, and Houston ordered the Republic’s archives moved to the city of Houston for safekeeping. Austinites saw that as choosing a new capital and refused to let the records go. So Houston moved the government without them, first to the city of Houston and then to Washington-on-the-Brazos.
In December 1842, Houston sent a company of rangers to take the archives. They had three wagons loaded when Eberly spotted them and fired a cannon to raise the town. Vigilantes caught the wagons at Brushy Creek, just north of Austin, and brought the papers back. Texans call it the Archives War.
Austin had kept the archives but lost the government, and between 1842 and 1845, its population fell below 200. The government returned in 1845. That summer, a convention meeting in Austin voted for Texas to join the United States, and in February 1846, Austin became the capital of the new state.
Guy Town and the Servant Girl Murders
The railroad reached Austin on Christmas Day 1871, and the population more than doubled in five years. A red-light district grew with it. Guy Town filled eight square blocks with saloons, gambling houses, dance halls, and brothels from about 1870 until the city shut it down in 1913.
Then came the murders. Between the last days of 1884 and Christmas Eve 1885, eight people were killed in Austin: Mollie Smith, Eliza Shelley, Irene Cross, Mary Ramey, Orange Washington, Gracie Vance, Susan Hancock, and Eula Phillips. Mary Ramey was 11. Most of the victims were young Black women who worked as servants, and Austin called the unknown killer the Servant Girl Annihilator. The case was never solved.
A legend grew out of the case: that the killer sailed for London and became Jack the Ripper. Historian Lauren Henley told the University of Texas podcast 15 Minute History that it’s “a nice story, but does not seem to fit the crimes.”
Moonlight Towers and Floods
In 1893, Austin finished a 60-foot dam across the Colorado River to power factories that never came. The dam’s generators did light the city. In 1894 and 1895, Austin raised 31 “moonlight towers,” tall lattice towers topped with arc lamps, each lighting a circle 3,000 feet across. Another legend says the towers went up to stop the Servant Girl Annihilator. The podcast 99% Invisible took the question to University of Texas professor Bruce Hunt and reported that the murders “were all over with years before talk of the moonlight towers ever came up.” A city marker counted 17 towers still standing in 1993.
The dam lasted seven years. It collapsed on April 7, 1900, and the flood that followed killed dozens of people. A man quoted in the newspaper at the time blamed Austin’s “reign of wickedness.” The floods kept coming. In April 1915, a flash flood on Shoal and Waller creeks, which run through downtown, killed about 35 people. Floods killed 13 more in 1935 and another 13 in 1981.
Why Is Austin Haunted?
“That is one haunted city,” ghost hunter Fiona Broome, who wrote The Ghosts of Austin, Texas, told CBS News in 2008. The city’s ghost stories come out of its government buildings, its old red-light district, its floods, and its graves. One ghost tour guide puts some of it down to the parties.
The Capital
Broome had a reason ready: “If Austin had not been the capital city, I’m not sure it would have been as haunted as it is.” The government’s own buildings carry many of the stories, and fire has been through several of them. The house the Republic of Texas built for its president burned in 1847, and the Omni hotel stands on its block now. The old limestone Capitol burned on November 9, 1881, while the board planning its replacement was meeting inside. Across the street from the granite Texas State Capitol that replaced it, an arsonist set fire to the Texas Governor’s Mansion in 2008.
In 1922, a painter named Ed Wheeler fell about 160 feet from the Capitol’s dome. The Austin American, one of the city’s daily papers, reported the next morning that he crashed through the Rotunda’s glass floor to the basement and died at Seton Infirmary more than half an hour later. A popular legend says the crack in the Rotunda floor marks where he landed. The State Preservation Board, which runs the building, says today’s floor wasn’t laid until 1936 and the crack came from the building settling.
Fire came back to the Capitol in February 1983. It badly damaged the east wing and killed Matt Hansen, a 23-year-old horse trainer who was staying the night in the lieutenant governor’s apartment. On foggy mornings, handprints are said to appear in the condensation on a Senate reception room window that was once in his bedroom, however often the glass is cleaned.
Brothels
In 1880, Guy Town had about 100 prostitutes, one in 20 of the city’s women between 18 and 44. The district closed in 1913, but stories of brothels, and the ghosts that go with them, still cling to some of Austin’s oldest bars. The Tavern‘s own history says it was rumored to hide a bar, a casino, and a brothel upstairs during Prohibition. Footsteps when no one’s there, TVs that turn on by themselves, and things that go missing and turn up on another floor are generally put down to its resident ghost, Emily. The building that now holds the Clay Pit restaurant is said to have had tunnels leading to brothels, and one to the Capitol. Among the ghosts said to haunt it is a murdered prostitute.
Floods
Austin’s floods left ghost stories too. The Original Austin Ghost Tours, a local ghost tour company, tells of an air-conditioning repairman who fled Moonshine Grill in 2009 because glasses were “throwing themselves off the bar” at him. The company’s theory is that some of the restaurant’s ghosts are people who drowned when floodwater swept away the homes along Waller Creek, just east of the building.
Cemeteries
The State Lunatic Asylum, now Austin State Hospital, opened in 1861. It buried patients nobody claimed on its own grounds. In 1882, the burial ground was moved to a far corner of the property, where the other patients wouldn’t see it. By 2009, the plot list kept by the hospital’s maintenance director ran to 2,699 numbered graves. John Neely Bryan, the founder of Dallas, is buried there too, and nobody knows exactly where.
Not all of Austin’s dead went to a cemetery. Soldiers under George Custer camped on Shoal Creek after the Civil War, and some died of cholera and were buried nearby. The Texas Legislature’s own research library tells that history and adds, “Perhaps their spirits still remain.”
Oakwood Cemetery goes back further, to 1839, when Austin began burying its dead there. Its first reported burial was of an enslaved person. Ghost City Tours passes on a rumor that medical professors once stole freshly buried bodies from Oakwood’s unmarked graves for their students’ experiments. The company says the spirits of those disturbed dead still wander the grounds.
Parties
Monica Ballard, an Austin ghost tour guide, had a lighter theory when she spoke to the Texas Observer magazine in 2013: “Austin is so haunted because of its life, because of its party atmosphere.” Bill Green, the state’s historian from 1986 to 1989, told CBS News he never met a Capitol ghost on the job: “People tend to be skittish at night and their imagination probably works on them.” Then he added, “I’m not particularly one of them, although I do believe in ghosts. I live in a haunted house, but that’s another story.”
