Haunted Dallas

By Rita Cook and Russell W. Dandridge

Get to know the true spirit of Dallas with this guide to haunted houses, hotels, museums and more—includes photos!
 
Tales of the strange and supernatural echo through the streets and halls of the Big D. At the Renaissance-inspired Majestic Theater, it is rumored that the curtains are lowered by ghostly hands, and it is said that there is a sadness that lingers at the Sixth Floor Museum—in the room where Oswald aimed at JFK.
 
Travel downtown to the grand Adolphus Hotel, where guests from the turn of the century still dance to the strains of a phantom waltz, but beware of the stretch of road along White Rock Lake where a mysterious force kills the engines of unwary motorists. Local author and ghost enthusiast Rita Cook journeys into the darkest corners of the Texas heartland with this chilling collection of stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781614233961

Rita Cook

Rita Cook is a writer and editor with over 1000 articles to her credit in the past 10 years. She has also written four books.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION AND INFORMATION ABOUT DALLAS

Let me just tell you from the get-go that I am a big believer in ghosts, mainly because the home I grew up in was haunted. It was just an unobtrusive house built in the 1950s that had so many ghosts while I was growing up that it always felt extremely overcrowded. I also used to see the spirits out of the corner of my eye; I never knew what it was really, but it was movement and a certain unexplainable energy. When you’re a kid, you don’t really think about it, but nevertheless, the ghosts were happy to be there.

I have never been able to actually see ghosts in the flesh (no, I am not the ghost whisperer, and you’ll likely not find too many people who are). Maybe once, if I was lucky, I have seen a ghost or two; other than that, it has been out of the corner of my eye. However, I can feel them. As you read this book, remember if you do go to these locations searching for ghosts to consider that seeing a ghost might not be your talent. But keep your feelings and your ears and even your nose open—subtle changes will let you know what’s going on as well. Also, we aren’t all living in a television drama like, say, The Ghost Whisperer; it really isn’t as easy as they make it look—at least not for most people.

Regarding my house, I will say that I think the ghosts left with my mother when she died several years ago. Even though she was a true God-fearing woman, she was also a true ghost magnet and a believer in ghosts. Now that my brother lives in the house, I have never felt a thing; he is not a ghost magnet, if he even believes at all.

Russell and Rita in her parents’ home with several orbs in the photo. The house Rita grew up in was haunted.

There are also two stories that convince me that ghosts do exist and that we live among them, which is one of the reasons I decided to write this book. When I was in my twenties, I moved away from Dallas to Chicago and Los Angeles and did not come back for twenty years. During the time I was gone, my mom would often call me and tell me stories about the ghosts that were bumping around in my old home (she and my dad stayed in that large house in Oak Cliff (Dallas) until they both died). Once my mom called me up and said she had seen smoke coming out of her trash can in the bedroom. She smoked, and she said she thought she had accidentally put a lit cigarette in the trash can and it caught something on fire. However, she looked inside the trash can and couldn’t find anything on fire. She went back to her business, and again she saw this white, filmy smoke coming out of the trash can. She knew what it was this time, and she called me up to tell me.

I suggested she call a parapsychologist and ask what she might need to do to get rid of all these ghosts in her house. She thought about it and said she’d call, why not. The next day, she called me and told me she had spoken to the parapsychologist, and the woman had told her what she needed to do to get rid of the ghosts or spirits. My mom replied simply, You know, they’re not hurting anybody. I think I’ll just keep ’em. That was my mom.

By the way, if you do need to get rid of a ghost, the best thing to do is send it to the light. It might be a lost spirit that hasn’t crossed over, and your sending it on its way could be the best thing you have ever done.

Once when I was visiting my parents at my old childhood home during the holidays and was with a friend of mine, we were taking photos. We had just bought a digital camera and had not heard about the orb phenomena yet, but just about all of the photos in the living room near my mom had hundreds of orbs surrounding her. It was eerie. I have never taken photos of that many orbs again in my life, but my husband, who is a photographer, took quite a few images in my childhood home before my mom died, and you could always bet there were one or two orbs hanging around her.

Here’s one more story about my house (the address of which, by the way, is not listed in any of my haunted books, as my brother lives there now and he would kill me). In high school, I had a best friend whose father would drop her off in the mornings around 5:00 a.m., and she would ride to school with me. She’d often bring her laundry to do at my house in the morning. In order to get to the laundry room from my bedroom, you had to go downstairs, either taking a left through the living room and kitchen or a right down the hall into the den and the kitchen and then from either direction proceeding through our game room to the laundry room. One morning, my friend went downstairs, and about five minutes later she came running back up into my room looking like she had seen a ghost, which she said she had. She said she heard this really loud breathing and felt something looking at her in the living room. That story still gives me chills when I think of it.

When I got older, my mom did tell me that someone had died in that house. I never found out which room, but I am convinced the good spirits were my mom’s friends (she had seen a lot of death during her lifetime) looking out for her family—me and my sisters and brother and, to a point, my dad, who never believed in ghosts or saw one—that he admitted. He would have told it to go away if he had, and with my dad, that would have been that.

I do believe there is a difference between ghosts and spirits. Let me explain. While it all boils down to the same thing anyway, I believe spirits come and go and are there when we need them, like ghosts, but are the entities and souls of those we have loved and lost. With ghosts, it seems to be more involving entities who don’t want to leave a place for whatever reason, or maybe a soul who does not know he/she is even dead yet. There are also those instances of ghosts that keep repeating the same actions over and over again, just like they did when they were alive. I feel like in this case it’s merely what I call a memory trace of something that has happened that some folks are in tune enough to be able to experience.

My husband and I were in Belfast a few years ago. While we were at the location where the Titanic was built (it’s a huge hole in the dock area), I was talking with our guide and my husband was shooting photos. When he got home and began looking at the photos he had taken, he found one that he had shot into the dry dock, and there is distinctly a man down there just standing. There was nothing there that day; no one could get down there anyway. The man is wearing a yellow rain slicker and looks like a photo I had seen of the captain of the Titanic before it sank. The proof is in this photo—someone showed up in that picture (and that picture only), whether accidentally or on purpose.

HISTORICAL AND HAUNTED DALLAS

Following a timeline put out by the Dallas Historical Society, the city of Dallas was founded in 1841 by John Neely Bryan, who settled on the East Bank of the Trinity River, never realizing that someday it would end up the metropolis that it is today. In fact, at the end of 1849, Dallas had a population of a mere 163 people, but by the beginning of the 1990s, celebrating its 150th anniversary, there were over 1 million people calling Dallas home.

Bryan actually ended up in the place that would become Dallas on a survey trip finding the three forks area of the Trinity River, a place he thought would be good for a trading post for both new