Ghosts of the Baker Hotel
“THOSE OF YOU THAT DON’T believe, I’m glad you’re on this tour,” Angela Morgan tells a crowd of about 150 ghost-seekers one Saturday night a couple of weekends before Halloween. “Because as long as you’re taking photos, at the very least you’re going to leave here with orbs, apparitions, fogs, mists.”
Morgan’s voice carries through the cool night with the help of a headset microphone and an amplifier attached to a pocket of her fashionably torn jeans. She’s holding a palm-sized spotlight and wears a long, colorful coat over her black “I Survived! The Baker Hotel Ghost Walk” T-shirt.
A lifelong paranormal enthusiast, Morgan got the idea to start sharing tales of the supernatural in Mineral Wells, her hometown of 15,000 about an hour west of Fort Worth, nearly seven years ago. With permission from local leaders, she’s led tours of Mineral Wells’ historic downtown most weekends year-round. “They thought I was absolutely crazy. [But] the first ghost walk had 252 people,” she says.
She speaks while standing a few steps up the stairs leading to the front entrance of the Baker Hotel, the tour’s — and the town’s — main attraction. The 14-story, 232,000-square-foot building is visible from miles away. Opened just a few weeks after the 1929 stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression, the once-luxurious Baker is a relic of the town’s past as a resort destination. For decades in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, visitors flocked here for the purported benefits of the mineral-rich waters that gave the town its name. (Many Texas grocers still sell the town’s well water, bottled and branded as Crazy
