April Slaughter (12 page)

One woman who has worked at the Gage Hotel for thirteen years told me about an apparition seen in the hotel in the middle of a slow business day.

“It was about five years ago, and I remember that we only had one room booked out for that day,” she said. “I was in the basement when a couple of children came down to ask me who the lady upstairs was. I told them that there was no one else in the hotel at the time, so I wasn’t sure who they were talking about.

“They told me that she had long hair and she was wearing a floor-length dress. She had patted them both on their heads, but said nothing to them. The children told me that they watched as she went in and out of several of the guest rooms. I went upstairs to look around, but I found no one else there.”

I asked if she had any idea who the woman may have been, but she did not.

“One of my night auditors also mentioned to me that he believed he had a visitor on some of the evenings he was working,” she continued. “One of the leather chairs would make the sound like someone had just sat down in it, and he could even see an indention in the cushion as if someone were really sitting there.”

Several past guests of the Gage Hotel have reported that just after dark, partial and full-body apparitions are seen in the hallways and out on the patio. Personal items are often moved from one area to another while guests are sleeping, but beyond that minor inconvenience, the guests have never complained.

Perhaps on some lazy Saturday in the future, Allen and I will once again make the journey out through the west Texas plains to stay an evening at the Gage Hotel. I’ve done my research and I already know that when I get there, I’m going to personally request a night in room #10.

WHAT IS MY DREAM as a paranormal investigator? What am I really looking for? Is it all about stalking around in the dark with my digital voice recorder and camera, hoping to have something unseen scare me out of my wits? No. Honestly, I am frightened by very little when I am ghosthunting. Crazy things can and do happen, but when it comes right down to it, I am far more afraid of the living than I am of the dead. Ghosts aren’t going to mug me or steal my car. They aren’t going to be talking on their cell phones in traffic and cause a major accident. Those of us who have a pulse seem to cause far more trouble than those who don’t.

My dream is that one day, as time and our understanding of the paranormal progresses, we will be able to have real-time, two-way conversations with those on the other side without having so many obstacles to overcome. Imagine all of the mysteries
we could solve—the knowledge we could gain about life after death! Until that day comes, I’ll keep diving in head-first with the knowledge I
do
have and sharing what I know with anyone who wants to hear it.

If I could suggest any one type of location for new ghosthunters looking for practice, it would definitely be historic forts. Why? Well, forts are usually spacious with a mix of buildings and open space. They are often well preserved and contain living quarters, hospitals, working areas, and even cemeteries—all places where a lot of human emotion and experiences can imprint on the environment. Of course, not all forts are haunted, but if you can find one with a reputation for being paranormally active, it might be a fantastic place to start.

One such place in Texas is Fort Concho. If you do a little searching online, you will find all sorts of stories about the fort and theories as to who might be haunting it. I hadn’t known that ghosts resided on the fort property at the time of my first visit, but I would come to hear stories of them as my research for this project began. It has been two years now since I was introduced to Fort Concho, but the afternoon I spent there left such an impression on me that when the opportunity to write
Ghosthunting Texas
presented itself, I had to make sure this particular fort was included.

One of Allen’s high school friends had moved out to San Angelo from east Texas, and on our way out for a visit one summer afternoon, Allen suggested we stop in at Fort Concho to have a look around.

“We’ve got a little time to kill. Let’s walk around and see what the place is like,” he said.

The fort was originally established in 1867 as a small collection of tents where the Middle and North Concho rivers met. Soldiers patrolled and kept the peace in west Texas, protected settlements, and mapped out the expansive frontier. The fort’s
boundaries stretched over sixteen hundred acres of land, but in 1889 it was abandoned. In 1961, Fort Concho was deemed a National Historic Landmark. Today it stands as one of the most beautifully preserved forts in the state. Twenty-four buildings remain on the property, seventeen of them original, and all of them restored and well maintained by the city of San Angelo.

Looking back on my initial visit, I wish I would have stopped and asked someone at the fort if it had a haunted reputation. Many forts do, but it hadn’t really crossed my mind at the time. Allen and I spent an hour or so walking around and enjoying the grounds. I was particularly enthralled with the E.H. Danner Museum of Telephony, where several models of telephones from the past to the present were displayed. I remember commenting to Allen that if we could come that far in communicating with each other as living, breathing human beings, certainly we had hope of establishing a better connection with those on the “other side” someday.

Little did I know that a couple of years later, I’d be researching Fort Concho for a book about Texas haunts. The story that I first ran across was that of a little girl named Edith Claire Grierson, the daughter of Colonel Benjamin Grierson. He had been post commander and lived in Officers Quarter’s #1 (also referred to as OQ1) with his family. In 1878, at the age of thirteen, Edith became seriously ill with typhoid fever and died after thirteen agony-filled days. Apparently, she wasn’t ready to leave the house even then.

Sometime in the early part of the 1990s, B.D. Shaffer, a delivery driver assisting local florist Tom Ridgway, arrived at Fort Concho to help deliver flowers following a funeral. As B.D. entered Officer’s Quarters # 1 (the former Grierson residence), he was asked to place one bouquet in two of the upstairs bedrooms while Tom continued to work downstairs. B.D. placed one arrangement in the west bedroom and walked across the
hall to the east bedroom to place the other. He had lost his right eye in a previous accident, which helped him to develop excellent peripheral vision in his left eye. As he entered the second bedroom, he noticed a young girl sitting on the floor to his left. After putting the flowers on the dresser, he turned toward the girl, but she suddenly disappeared from sight.

When B.D. returned to the fort for their Christmas program the following December, a docent working in OQ1 approached him and they began talking about the house. After B.D. told her about his experience with the little girl in the bedroom upstairs, the docent escorted him into another room to show him a picture of Edith Grierson. The girl he had seen months earlier was the same girl in the picture.

That incident was not the only one where someone encountered the little girl’s ghost. In June 2003, the new assistant city manager for San Angelo, Harold Dominguez, and his family stayed in OQ1 as they waited for their permanent home to become available.

As reported by Perry Flippin in an August 2003 article published in the
San Angelo Standard Times
, Harold’s wife, Andrea, had come face-to-face with the specter of a little girl in OQ1. She had been busy gathering and packing the family’s things when she looked up and saw a young girl about the age of twelve descending the staircase. She was wearing a long, peach-colored dress and had long brown hair pulled back from her face. They stared at each other for a brief moment before the girl’s image disappeared. Neither Andrea nor her husband, Harold, had known about the history of OQ1 or that a girl matching the description Andrea provided had passed away in the house.

Not being a big believer in the paranormal, Andrea convinced herself that it must have been a trick of the eye, or an optical illusion produced by the afternoon sun as it shone through one of the home’s windows. It hadn’t happened in the middle of the
night, rather late in the afternoon, and so she made no mention of it to her husband until he asked her if she had experienced anything strange during their stay.

As they discussed it further, more and more strange occurrences seemed to stand out in their minds. A desk chair had been moved out of its position, and neither of them had moved it. As the couple slept one evening, both were awakened at close to midnight by the sound of a loud female voice wailing just outside the bedroom window. After just four days in OQ1, the Dominguez family decided to relocate to a motel. When Mr. Flippin presented a picture of Edith Grierson to the couple, Andrea indicated that she looked like the young girl she had seen on the staircase.

Other visitors to OQ1 have often reported feeling dramatic drops in temperature throughout various areas of the house, and attribute it to Edith’s presence trying to manifest. Even on a warm day when the air outside is still, people feel these cold spots moving around the house.

Visitor and Volunteer Services Coordinator Cory Robinson has worked at the fort for nearly nine years. When I spoke with him, I asked about the various reports of paranormal activity, and whether or not he had personally experienced anything of note.