April Slaughter (22 page)

I wanted to test this out, so just as the sun was setting for the evening, I climbed the stairs and sat at the top of the hill. Allen and Jerry were off in another corner of the cemetery, quietly discussing different headstones and markers. I hadn’t felt anything odd since we arrived, so I saw no problem with sitting by myself as the sun slowly disappeared.

I turned my digital recorder on, but within seconds, it turned itself off. I checked the batteries, and they were not drained. They had just been replaced an hour or so earlier. Not thinking much of it, I switched the recorder on again. Ten or fifteen seconds passed and off it went again. The power to the recorder was not going to stay on. I abandoned the idea of recording any audio, and just sat there in silence.

Nothing out of the ordinary was happening—that is, until Allen and Jerry came into view walking toward the steps. A short, shrill sound quickly came and went. I put my hand out to signal to Allen and Jerry to stop where they were and not to come any closer. I slowly reached for the recorder sitting next to me on the ground, and tried turning it on again. It still refused to work. Jerry took a few photographs of me on the steps, but he saw nothing out of the ordinary in them.

Several minutes passed with the three of us being still as it got darker and darker by the second. I locked eyes with Allen as soon as I began hearing something again. This time, it was unmistakable. Someone was crying, and they sounded awfully close to me. I couldn’t tell if it was a woman or a child, as they can often sound very similar, but I knew without a doubt that I was not hearing an animal or something in the distance I could have mistaken for a human cry. My heart sank, but I did not move. A soft sobbing seemed to come closer and closer to me. It was only a matter of sixty seconds or so, and all was silent again.

I waited for a moment or two, and slowly got up to walk back down the stairs to where Allen and Jerry were standing.

“You heard that, right?” I asked them.

“Yeah, we heard it all right. It sounded like it was closer to you than it was to us,” said Allen.

“Was it a child, do you think?” asked Jerry.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Whoever or whatever it was made my heart hurt with that cry, though. It sounded so mournful.”

Allen and Jerry wanted to see if the incident would repeat itself if I stayed near the bottom of the stairs as they sat at the top of them. I sat on the ground next to the springhouse and the two of them sat where I had just been. None of us spoke and we kept as still as we could. About fifteen minutes passed by uneventfully. Suddenly, I felt as though someone was walking toward me and I instinctively looked to my right to see who it was. No one was there, but a quiet voice clearly said, “Hello.” I quickly sat up straight and looked around. Allen and Jerry were looking right at me as I pointed to my right, signaling to them that something was there. Allen shrugged his shoulders. He hadn’t heard the voice saying hello, and neither had Jerry.

They stood up and descended the steps. I sat still.

“What happened?” asked Allen.

“Someone said hello to me,” I said.

“Did you hear anything else?” asked Jerry.

“No. Just hello, but it was as if someone were standing within a foot of me,” I replied.

I handed the digital recorder to Allen and asked him to take a look at it because it seemed to be malfunctioning. He turned it on and hit record.

“Seems to be working fine now,” he said.

“Of course it is working
now
!” I replied. “Just after I really
needed
it to work!”

The daylight would be completely gone at any moment, so we decided it was time to head home. We did not have permission to be on the grounds after dark.

We passed the monument with the infamous moving angel and I waved goodbye.

“Next time angel . . . it’s your turn.”

IT HAS BEEN NEARLY A DECADE since I made my first visit to Texas. I was overwhelmed with the vastness of the state, the pride of those who called it home, and of course, food like I had never tasted before in my life. On that very first trip out, I learned that Texas would never let me down when it came to finding something new and fun to experience. I distinctly remember stopping to have dinner at the Spaghetti Warehouse in Dallas, and I loved it. Now that I am a Texas resident, you’d think the nostalgia would have long worn off—but it hasn’t.

My husband Allen, a Texas native, has lived in almost every area of the state at one time or another, and when I began looking for haunted places to research for the book, he suggested I look into the Spaghetti Warehouse in Houston.

“I thought that was in Dallas,” I said.

“They have a few of them in Texas, but I know the one in
Houston is supposedly haunted,” he replied.

I looked it up, and he was right. The Spaghetti Warehouse in Houston did indeed have several ghost stories attached to it, but as with any other place, I wasn’t going to be convinced until I could visit and get a feel for it myself. Allen and I made arrangements to visit some of his family in the Houston area and put the restaurant on our list of places to stop for a bite.

The building that now houses the restaurant was originally constructed in the early 1900s as the Desel-Boettcher Warehouse, and it has served many functions over the past century. Produce, storage, cotton, and pharmaceutical businesses came and went until the building was purchased in the 1970s and renovated into the Spaghetti Warehouse restaurant. Some say that early on in the building’s history, several workers suffered unfortunate accidents that caused their deaths.

One story is particularly heartbreaking. A woman whose husband worked at the warehouse was cooking dinner and waiting for him to return home from work. He did not arrive at his usual time, and she started to worry. It was not like him to be late. A short time passed, and as she was pacing the house, she heard the front door open and the sound of footsteps coming down the hall. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a figure quickly pass by. Thinking her husband had finally returned home, she called out to him but he did not respond. After searching the home frantically for her husband in vain, the woman ran to the warehouse only to find that her husband had fallen to his death in the warehouse’s elevator shaft. As the story goes, the widow was found dead in her home on the first-year anniversary of her husband’s death. No cause of death was ever determined, but most believed she had died of a broken heart.

For years, restaurant employees have reported seeing the apparition of a woman in a long white dress on the second floor, and speculate that it is the ghost of the widow haunting the
building that claimed her husband’s life.

Did customers see the widow’s apparition too? I didn’t know, but I was hoping I would when we arrived at the restaurant for dinner one evening. The restaurant is gorgeously decorated with antiques, including a chandelier from New York’s Penn Station, a trolley car, and a hand-carved staircase removed from one of England’s castles. It didn’t look at all like the Spaghetti Warehouse I had visited in Dallas, but it had the same warmth and energy about it. I was more interested in the décor than the meal, but I ended up enjoying both a great deal. The restaurant was packed, and I didn’t have a whole lot of time to peruse as much of it as I would have liked, but it fascinated me enough to try and dig a little deeper into its haunted history.

As soon as we made it back home, I contacted Pete Haviland of Lone Star Spirits in Houston and asked him if he’d had any knowledge or experience with the Spaghetti Warehouse.

“Yes, my team and I have investigated the restaurant many times,” Pete replied. “Every time I do any work there, I get pulled aside and told the latest experience. The stories are fascinating.”

“What sorts of things have happened in the restaurant?” I asked.

“Over the years, many people have reported seeing the apparition of a woman in white on the upstairs floor,” he began. “Dishwashers have even reported looking up through the window in front of their work station and seeing a white, sullen face of a woman looking directly at them.”

Pete went on to tell me that several instances of activity seemed to center around the kitchen area.

“During one renovation, a carpenter was working near the kitchen. When he began working, the dining room had been neat and tidy—nothing out of the ordinary. Well, when he took a moment to look around again, the dining room chairs had
somehow been stacked three high! He quit working in the restaurant after that, and never came back.

“Waiters and waitresses have often complained of being tripped as they walked out of the kitchen to serve food to their customers.”

On one occasion, arguing was heard coming from the kitchen. Plates were being broken and a knife had even been thrown, all without any visible explanation.

“What have you personally experienced during your investigations?” I asked.

“Directly above the entrance to the building, there is a small dining room that sits where the old elevator used to be. I have personally witnessed the apparition of a little girl in that room, as did others who were with me during an overnight investigation. We heard the sounds of children laughing and a male-sounding moan.”

I asked Pete why he thought the spirits of children might be haunting the restaurant.