5 of the Most Haunted Locations in Texas

Mayfield has experienced feelings of oppressive weight and cold spots, unseen things touching her during tours. Just walking through the building makes her jittery, and she mentions hearing footsteps and faint moaning sounds. “A lot of awful things went on here,” Mayfield says. “The place freaks me out! The vibe’s not good … once you shut those doors and get in here, you forget there’s even anything beyond the hospital.”

The hospital is on private property and has been a popular spot for ghost tours since the building was acquired in part by Jo Ann Marks-Rivera, owner of Victoria’s Black Swan Inn (likewise haunted). Rivera hired Mayfield to look after the building after the departure of an earlier caretaker. The hospital offers daily walking tours for $25, photography/video shoots for $100 an hour, and overnight investigations for $500.

The hospital has had a recent problem with vandals breaking in for unauthorized ghost hunts, graffiti, or other mischief, often leaving the building’s antique furniture in bad shape. Mayfield wishes to remind everyone that this doesn’t just rile up the local ghosts, it’s also against the law and will be prosecuted as such. If you’re not there on an official tour, honor that most hallowed of haunted house signs: Keep out. –Asher Elbein

El Paso’s Plaza Theatre opened as an opulent movie palace in 1930, operating for 55 years before shutting down in 1985. The theater then remained dark for about two decades before a grand renovation took place, turning it into a performing arts center in 2006. Not surprisingly, the Plaza spent its 76 years from inception to rebirth accumulating ghost stories.

“We managed to revive this historic theater before it was too late,” says Gary L. Williams, senior program officer with the El Paso Community Foundation, the organization that saved the Plaza Theatre and then partnered with the city of El Paso to restore it to its former glory. “The dust and cobwebs may be gone, but it appears the ghosts have remained.”

Some of the Plaza’s creepy tales, concocted in abundance, feature all the usual suspects—a drifting woman in white, a materializing man in black, a vanishing child bouncing a ball. Like most ghost stories, their veracity lies in the retelling rather than the reoccurring. But a much larger share of the Plaza’s supernatural phenomena may require a ghost hunter’s skill set to resolve. Apparitions including orbs, lights, and shadows; physical manipulations like electrical components switching on without power, objects moving independently, and sounds without sources; and manifestations such as stimulation by touch, smell, and temperature have all endured, transgressing the barrier between the spiritual and the material worlds again and again. Together, they suggest something more dynamic than a mere ghost story. You might want to call this a real haunting.

“Intelligent people don’t believe in ghosts!” exclaimed 90-year-old Charles Russell, Plaza manager from 1940 to 1951, during an interview for the 2006 commemorative reopening. “While I consider myself to be intelligent, if you ever spent the night in the Plaza Theatre, you might change your mind.” –E. Dan Klepper

In 1959, Roy Simms—foreman of the meat locker in Texas A&M University’s old Animal Industries building—was performing a bit of routine butchery on a slab of bacon. As he was cutting toward himself, the knife slipped in his hand, stabbing his leg near the groin. The blade cut open his femoral artery. His assistant, who’d stepped out for a moment, returned to find him bleeding out on the floor. An ambulance was summoned, but in vain: Simms died before he could be removed from the building.

Simms’ death was a tragic accident. But it doesn’t take much for tragic accidents to take on a more ghostly cast. “In the daytime, we never thought much about any ghosts or strange occurrences,” says Jeffrey Savell, a Texas A&M professor who was an undergrad and grad student in the 1970s. “It was the nights when we were in the Meat Laboratory, conducting research, usually by ourselves, that one would hear strange noises or feel like you were not alone.”

Over the years, Savell says, students and custodians working in the bowels of the building have reported invisible footsteps, strange noises, and objects scattered far from their original resting spots. Savell attributes many of the stories to the natural spookiness of an old building and noisy machinery such as the elevator and the refrigeration compressors. A series of renovations of the building have turned the site of Simms’ accident into an office space.

Whether or not Simms’ ghost roams the hallways, Savell says, one thing keeping his memory alive is the lesson offered by his death. “It became a precautionary tale each semester as we visited with students about safety and meat cutting. It gets their attention when you tell them that someone lost their life because of a knife accident.” –A.E.

“They’re friendly,” says Cheryl Jenkines, manager of Galveston’s eclectic Hendley Market. She’s talking about the non-
corporeal habitués with whom she’s worked in Hendley Row, the oldest commercial structure in the Strand Historic District, since 1990.

It’s not surprising that Hendley Row is a hot spot for supernatural activity. Completed between 1855 and 1858 for shippers and cotton brokers, it was the town’s tallest structure during the Civil War; the roof doubled as a Confederate lookout for Union ships. Galveston and nearby barrier islands’ history have been laced with tragedy. It was the site of a bloody Civil War fight, and serial epidemics of yellow fever decimated the populace. Hurricanes blast through regularly; the 1900 storm left up to 12,000 casualties in the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. No wonder Texas writer Bryan Woolley called Galveston “an old cemetery with a beach attached.”

The resident ghosts of Hendley Row represent aspects of Galveston history. There’s the Confederate soldier seen on the roof and around the building. The bloodied, teenage “factory worker” is a vestige of the building’s cotton-grading days. “The lady in white” and the running and playing “little boy” and “little girl” are thought to be 1900 storm victims. The upper floors house apartments and offices now, but Hendley Market’s glass ceiling reveals views of stairs and landings (and perhaps apparitions). During renovations, workers reported tools mysteriously moving around.

Jenkines and staff recall other spooky experiences. Some years ago, a friend gave her an old photo—of “Dr. Wilbur,” from a house on Church Street—that’s always displayed in the shop. When Hurricane Ike inundated the building with 10 feet of water in 2008, the photo went undamaged while many other things were destroyed. Every year on Nov. 1, Jenkines constructs an elaborate Day of the Dead altar that includes the photo and lighted candles. Before closing, the staff follows a three-person backup routine to ensure the candles are completely extinguished, even dousing them with water. Yet almost every year, one or more candles are burning the next morning. And Jenkines has photos of lighted candles at night, taken by a passerby through the shop window. Perhaps Dr. Wilbur is afraid of the dark. –M.M.P.