Ghost Hunt at The Driskill Hotel. Part 2.

by Shelly Kneupper Tucker on August 12, 2009

We continued traipsing through the halls of the Driskill in our search for some kind of ghostly presence. In the bar, the leering steer hanging on the wall was a bit frightening. I’m not fond of hanging dead critters on the wall, but then I guess the management had to prove that this is Texas — cattle country.

Leering Steer

As I told you in Part 1, we were sniffing for cigar smoke — hoping to catch a whiff of the ghostly Jesse Driskill’s cigar. We were also listening. Especially near the stairwells. We hoped to hear the sound of a bouncing ball and a little girl giggling.

Grand Stairwell going down

It seems that, according to the ghostly lore, a U.S. Senator visited the hotel with his family (the hotel doesn’t pinpoint what year this took place). The Senator attended a function on the Mezzanine, while his four year old daughter played with a ball near the staircase. The child tripped and fell to her death at the base of the stairs.

Grand Stairwell looking up

Many people have reported hearing that bouncing ball, but we didn’t. We even tried listening at other stairwells, hoping that the ghost child had gotten fickle and gone elsewhere to play.

Another stairwell

I wondered if the hotel put this miniature furniture in the lobby for the convenience of that tiny ghost.

Tot furniture

Some folks claim to see the ghost of “Mrs. Bridges,” a former employee of the hotel, arranging unseen flowers in the lobby while dressed in a Victorian style uniform. Others claim to have seen the apparition of Mr. Peter J. Lawless, who lived in the hotel from 1886-1916, checking the time on his pocket watch near the elevator on the fifth floor.

Other hotel guests have complained of waking to the sensation of an unseen someone trying to push them out of bed at night. Guest have claimed that the furniture in their room was moved in the night. Elevator doors open without the button being pushed, and the elevators run on their own (without a living soul inside them).

A houseman, who is supposedly still employed at the Driskill, made a gruesome discovery back in the 1990s: a dead body! It seems that a Houston socialite had gotten jilted before her wedding. She came to Austin to “recuperate,” armed with a gun and her ex-fiance’s credit cards. After an extensive shopping spree, the socialite took her own life in her room. She is often seen walking the hallways in a modern wedding gown, with her gun in hand. She has also been known to leer up at women from under the stalls in the bathroom on the Mezzanine.

Keep in mind, folks that this is a different jilted bride than the one I told you about in Part 1. The Driskill has two jilted brides hanging around. This should probably serve as a cautionary tale: if you are a jilted bride, don’t check into the Driskill hotel to recuperate — you might just “check out.”

I showed you the YouTube video of the song that Concrete Blonde singer Johnette Napolitano wrote about her ghostly experience at the Driskill. She isn’t the only celebrity with a Driskill ghost tale to tell.

The Scottish singer Annie Lennox stayed at the hotel once before a concert performance. She couldn’t decide what to wear for her performance that evening, so she laid out two dresses on the bed before taking her shower. When she came out of the bathroom, one of the dresses had been put away — but she was alone in the room! Her ghostly visitor must have been a fashionista.

Exhausted from our photographic tour of the hotel, we returned to our haunted room on the fourth floor. As we opened our door, I heard giggling, and the thunderous sound of running. We stepped inside and were closing the door, as a herd of little girls (with cameras in hand) came around the corner. They stopped in their tracks as they saw our door closing, and their shoulders dropped in disappointment.

I knew why.

I opened the door again and smiled at the little girls, who ranged in age from about six to thirteen. I said, “You are ghost hunters, aren’t you?”

They all started babbling at once. The oldest girl whispered, “Do you know you are in a haunted room?”

“Yes, I do,” I said. “Do you want to see it?”

As my husband discreetly covered our dirty clothes with the bedcover, I opened the door wide for those five little girls to peer inside. One of them asked, “Have you seen anything weird happening?”

“No,” I said — as the storyteller came out in me. Mischievously, I walked to the end of the bed and put my foot in the depression in the floor (I told you about it in Part 1 — but you didn’t read it, did you?!).

“There is this strange indentation on the floor,” I said. “It’s about the size of a woman’s head. Do you think that’s where she hit her head when she fell?”

All the girls gasped and crowded around. Then, I noticed the youngest child. Her eyes were wide behind her thick glasses, and her knuckles were white as she clutched her camera. Suddenly feeling remorseful, because I don’t want to be a part of a child’s nightmare, I knelt before that little girl.

“I’m telling a story,” I said. “The woman who died in this room hanged herself. Her head never hit the floor. You aren’t scared are you?”

As the little girl solemnly shook her head, the oldest girl said, “She is the one who wanted to go on a ghost hunt!”

That tiny, sweet-faced girl looked at me and held out her camera. Her face was the image of innocence, as she said, “Wanna see my orbs?”

I stifled a snicker, hoping it would be a very long time before she uttered those words to a boy.

“Sure,” I squeaked. All of the girls then clustered around me to show the pictures on their digital cameras with “orbs,” or unexplained balls of light in them. I didn’t have my glasses on, so I couldn’t see much more than the cameras, but I played along as best I could for a blind woman.

Before their excitement had a chance to wane, I sent them on their way to the Mezzanine to check out the bathroom. They ran down the hall giggling, but I pitied their poor parents. I didn’t expect those parents would get a wink of sleep that night.

The rest of our trip was taken up by a visit to see the bats under the Congress Avenue Bridge and some shopping the next day at two intriguing shops we saw from our hotel window (a post that is still in the works). I confess that the only “unearthly” sound I heard in the night was my own snoring (and I hear that every night).

We had no ghostly experience at the Driskill. Maybe the ghosts were on vacation, too? I didn’t care, though. I had fun. I’d rather see five giggling ghost hunters, filled with the thrill of the chase, than a ghost any day.

Although, next time I want to join the folks who were taking in this luggage:

Bubbly and presents

Do you think under the influence of all that “bubbly” that they saw a “presence?” I hope that wasn’t a bridal party! The Driskoll has enough ghostly brides for any hotel!