At 8 p.m., after most of Old Town Spring has closed for the night, a small crowd gathers on the sidewalk outside Kris10’s Gems, a boutique on Main Street. Over the next 90 minutes, a guide from Houston Ghost Tour leads them through the turn-of-the-century village’s most notorious addresses. It isn’t unusual, the guides say, for a guest to spot a known spirit during this journey.
Spring, around 24 miles north of downtown Houston, was home to the Orcoquiza Indigenous group before German farmers arrived by way of Galveston in the 1840s. By the early 1900s, the International–Great Northern Railroad had made the town a hub until its operations moved to Houston in 1923. Business dried up until the 1970s, when merchants revived the old town as a shopping village.
Yet history alone doesn’t quite explain why ghosts seem to have found a home here. “Old Town Spring probably wasn’t much different than the average railroad or mining town,” says Michael Sweeney, the tour’s talent director. “But maybe it’s a perfect combination of tragedy, violence, and the curse the town is said to have.”
The 8 p.m. tour is for families. It prunes the grisliest details and stops instead where the spirits are said to be harmless—even playful—such as a young girl who, according to guides, likes to play with children her own age. The Rated-R Tour at 9:30 p.m., for ages 13 and up, spares nothing.
“The tour guide doesn’t have to hold back and can get gruesome and dark,” Sweeney says. And the stories don’t end with the tour. “Many shop owners will speak of odd occurrences,” Sweeney says. “Things being moved, getting a chill down their neck, shadow figures, or [that] the actual building feels alive.”
By most accounts, Charlie Wunsche never left his bar. In 1902, he and his brother Dell opened a hotel, saloon, and brothel near the railroad tracks to serve the men who worked them. When Prohibition shut it down in 1919, the leftover whiskey was poured into Aunt Pearl’s chocolate cake, which is still on the menu at today’s Wunsche Bros. Café & Saloon. Since the building was restored after a 2015 fire, guides say, a man’s silhouette has appeared in an upstairs window. They believe it’s Charlie, sharing the second floor with the spirits of women who once worked there. Staff, meanwhile, blame him for silverware going missing, phones being yanked off the hook, faucets turning on by themselves, and music changing volume with no one near the dial.
Another Spring legend involves no ghosts. For almost a century, locals have insisted that Bonnie and Clyde robbed the Spring State Bank, a 1917 building that now houses Mallott’s Hardware. One worker claimed he used his mule to pull the couple’s car out of the sand, receiving a $5 tip for his trouble. They were, he said, “mighty nice people.”
The theory has some cause. Clyde had relatives in Conroe, and the pair were known to hide from the law under a bridge over the San Jacinto River.
“A fast trip down the 20 miles to Spring to grab a little loot would not have been out of the question,” says James Sharp, vice president of the Spring Historical Museum.
Then he checked the calendar. When the bank was robbed in May 1932, Bonnie Parker was sitting in a Kaufman jail. The day of the bank’s second recorded robbery, in January 1933, Clyde Barrow was in Dallas, where he shot and killed a deputy sheriff.
Sharp prefers the story of what really happened that January. When two bandits tried to rob the bank, teller H.D. Brown pulled his own pistol and ran them off. Then he jumped onto the running board of a friend’s car and chased them out of town, shooting at them as they fled. “No urban legend,” Sharp says. “It really happened.”
In Spring, a story need not be true to have staying power. Die-hards still swear by the Bonnie and Clyde tale, and Charlie still takes the blame for misplaced silverware. The museum, painted bright yellow, sits right on Main Street, yet visitors who stumble on it often tell Sharp they’ve been coming to Old Town Spring for years and never knew it was there.
“Without the history of the area,” he says, “it’s just an old town where you can shop and eat.”
