Crystal Wise
On my way into Mineral Wells, I saw six vultures hopping beneath a road sign. Under normal, secular circumstances, that’s an evil omen. But I was hunting ghosts and was cheered.
After all, what’s so spooky about Mineral Wells? It’s a cute small town with boutique shops and cafes, though potholes are still everywhere. A local bumper sticker runs “I’m not drunk, I’m dodging potholes.” The roads are cratered like they’ve been bombarded — maybe by some of the aircraft from the closed-down Army base in town.
But in a way, it adds charm. This isn’t a town where you’ll find people putting on airs. They still wear cowboy hats and boots without a shade of irony. The pine-green welcome sign as you come in calls Mineral Wells “The Home of Crazy.” Which makes it the perfect hunting grounds for the paranormal. The town is on the cusp of full modernity. Soon, the tactile, real history will go into obscurity.
That history is still in your face as you drive through. You don’t go from chewing tobacco to bubble gum overnight. All the downtown buildings are marked 1899 at the top.
Back then, this was still the Wild West. Right next door to Cowtown, Mineral Wells caught enough of the beef boom to keep going until the finding of the mineral waters. The story goes that a crazy woman drank the water, and it restored her sanity. That’s where the Crazy Water Hotel gets its name.
That set off a resort boom. There were plenty of medicinal spas in the country, and a few in Texas, but Mineral Wells quickly became the happening place to go. The water was clean and didn’t stink, unlike other resort towns with brown water “that the hogs won't drink,” according to Judge Lynch, the discoverer of the Mineral Wells water supply.
In 1926, an entrepreneur named T.B. Baker built a swanky hotel, 14 stories high. Clashing with the cowboy countryside, the Baker Hotel lords like a ruined castle over the landscape. Before, people stayed in tents around the wells, but the Baker Hotel pivoted the customers to the rich. People made “calls” in the morning, took “drives” in the afternoon, and attended “balls” at night. That was fun in those days.
The town became a destination spot. Movie stars like Judy Garland, Clark Gable, and Marlene Dietrich stayed there and took the healing water. Even Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird stopped in. But the time for that kind of thing went fast when the Great Depression hit. People had harder things on their mind. The hotel never really recovered, but it limped along until 1963 when it closed. It reopened a couple years later and closed again, this time for good, in 1972.
Crystal Wise
An investment group has bought the hotel and has plans to reopen it again. But when you see it now, you spot it from miles off. A grim, hulking, and peeling monster. You half-expect to see post-apocalyptic cooking fires on the roof. And in a building like that, there are a lot of eerie stories.
But I wasn’t here for the Baker Hotel. I was here to find the real ghosts of Mineral Wells, the ones that have been in the hotel’s shadow since it shuttered in 1972.
I started by gumshoeing around town, picking up leads. I stopped in the Chamber of Commerce, originally a general store. The Chamber shares the space with a Texas-themed shop called the Texas General Store. Off of some advice, I was steered to Witschorke’s Antiques and Collectables.
Downtown Mineral Wells has had a face-lift. There are trendy shops, a new florist, and restaurants that anywhere else would be called a gastropub. But half the town is still shut down. The Ritz Theatre is boarded up, but you can rent its matinee sign for $100. Some buildings are storage for the shops next door, the view through the dusty windows hidden by boxes. Walking past successful businesses, the sight of a boarded-up building is jangling.
But for all that, the town was thriving. It was Saturday. Couples and families were window-shopping. A prom was going on somewhere, and kids took pictures in their tuxes and dresses. The restaurants did good business. Several times we had to step off the sidewalk to let crowds pass. I noticed that both of the undertakers were on the outskirts of town. They weren’t allowed in the square. Soon, we made it to Witschorke’s.
The owner, Mark Witschorke, was kind enough to let me and my cousin come in after-hours. My cousin is my paranormal partner. You keep stuff like this in the family. Witschorke’s is an antiques and collectibles store with baubles and bric-a-brac piled high. Axes, cassette tapes, Christmas decorations, a first-edition Faulkner — there was everything a growing boy could need. I set my cousin off to take pictures and questioned the owner.
He’d had that shop for a quarter-century and had never experienced anything paranormal. In fact, he wasn’t a big believer in ghosts. I assured him that my love of the paranormal was ironic, but I still felt a smudge of judgment. But I had a job to do.
We swept the place with our equipment. We took full-spectrum pictures and Polaroids. We turned on some communication devices and asked questions. Listening later, the audio samples sounded suspiciously like pickup trucks driving by. I decided to call it. There was no paranormal feeling in the shop, just interesting stuff. My cousin stashed a record he wanted, and we thanked Mark and carried on.
I was sure that our next target would give us something. The Happy Days Diner, a ’50s-themed restaurant. But what gave me the notion wasn’t just the posters of Elvis and Fats Domino over the jukebox. I’d spoken with the owner, Alisha, and she told me of some experiences that people have had. See, the Happy Days Diner is right next to the Crazy Water Hotel, another hotel dating back to the early resort days of Mineral Wells.
While not as big, the Crazy Water Hotel shares the same classic, nostalgic aesthetic as the Baker Hotel except that the Crazy Water is restored and open. Its lobby looks just like the pictures that I’ve seen from back in the glory days. There are shops inside and a coffee bar. The mineral water sold from the wells today is named Crazy Water. In many ways, the Crazy Water Hotel is what the Baker hopes to be someday.
Crystal Wise
The paranormal experiences of the Happy Days Diner are usually linked to the Crazy Water Hotel. There are stories of little girl ghosts and customers in the restaurant not appearing on CCTV. A regular sat in the same booth in the back every day. One day, he is in his usual spot when something cold enters him and says, “Get out.” From that time on, he took a seat across the restaurant.
Walking into the place, you don’t feel a bad energy. There’s an ice cream parlor and a bar to order food from. The ambiance is great, the wait staff attentive, and the coffee is strong. But I had my target in mind — that back booth.
We slid into it and started our session with a device called the Onvoy. It cycles through letters until triggered by environmental changes. The thought is that it should be impossible for random words to be spelt out.
“Is there anyone here with us?” I asked to the air. A few moments of silence passed. Then a hit. J. The scroller swung around the alphabet and selected E and F. We had a name. Jeff. We ran some of our other equipment to find out who Jeff is, but whoever it was left.
Crystal Wise
Which was all right, because we had another appointment. The Haunted Hill House, built back in the 1800s, was fitting us in. It’s the hottest paranormal spot in town. In the heyday of the Baker Hotel when celebrities flew in for spa treatments, the Hill House was a brothel and speakeasy that catered to the visitors. It even had its own mineral water well in the back. It sits right at the foothills of East Mountain, just under the Welcome sign built across the mountain, like the Hollywood sign. In fact, the builder of the Mineral Wells sign sold the idea to Hollywood and retired in riches.
The Hill House is difficult to get into, but the owners agreed to show us around. They’re a friendly couple named Kathy and Sonny Estes. Kathy, a lively and calming blonde, brought us into the first room.
A doll leered at us, and an open coffin was shoved up against the wall. A plastic skeleton had been placed inside, looking like it was surprised to be there. Kathy laid on the bed and told us how just the night before, it jumped and rattled. My cousin and I passed glances at each other. This might’ve been a little more than we were expecting.
She took us into the house itself, through a room plastered with photographs of paranormal investigators and Ozzy Osbourne’s son, into a living room. Dolls sat smiling on every flat place, and a bloody red light oozed through the rooms. On the couch, a doll in a velvet dress sat with its hands on its knees. I took a closer look and got face-to-face.
“That’s Belle, one of the good spirits.” Kathy said. “Her eyes follow you around the room and, she blinks.”
“Oh, wow,” I said and made up my mind to never look at the doll again, if I could help it.
“Come on through here,” she said and opened a peeling door. My cousin insisted that I go first. Chivalry isn’t dead after all. It was another bedroom and colder than sin, bristling with more dolls. She took us into the bathroom, and we squeezed in. I leaned on the wall. “This is the site of a murder-suicide. We found the brain matter, right here on this wall.” I stood up straight. “It was confirmed by cadaver dogs.”
She showed us room after room. A poker room where over 200 people have been scratched, a scrying room shared with a cursed doll, an ax room where an angry spirit chokes and batters the sleeping.
Just when I thought we were done with the dolls, Kathy took us into a child’s room with clowns and stuffed animals dangling from the ceiling. A ventriloquist’s doll grinned on the bed. “Oh, no. That’s a lot of dolls,” I said, always quick with an idea.
Her husband, Sonny, had been milling around, not really saying anything, and Kathy passed us off to him for the upstairs tour. I learned later that she refuses to go to the second floor, and soon I’d find out why. Now, standing in a bedroom haunted by a deformed child, Sonny came alive. For the first time that afternoon, I felt something twirling a finger in my beard. A fly, I thought, and swatted at it until we were in a dark attic, sitting in gothic chairs. We were the only living people in the house, and I felt the floors vibrate and creak like someone was walking around. Something somewhere watched me. I tried not to look at the door, afraid of what I’d find peeping around the corner.
Crystal Wise
Sonny broke the news to us that this house wasn’t home to just ghosts. No, there was something insidious creeping around — an abysmal entity, diabolic, a midnight-spirit summoned by seances and rituals conducted in that very room where I sat swatting at my beard. They called him Toby, though his revealed Latin name was infernal. And it was time to make our introductions in his special room.
I hesitated at the threshold. The room was Bible-black and the air thick as gravy. I dived straight in.
A semicircle of chairs and a blacked-out window. I saw a white face down by my knee in the darkness, and my heart seized in mid-pump. When the face didn’t bite me, I looked closer. It was a Halloween decoration, a ghoulish child on a rocking horse. Sonny whacked the head, and the child’s eyes lit up red and eerie nursery music played. “You’ve got to hit this thing really hard, and then the eyes start up. That’s one way that we communicate.” I hated that room and turned my back on it to listen to Sonny.
He told us how, just the night before, a group stood at that threshold. They called out to Toby, and he answered with a vicious stomp right at their feet. Sonny showed us a video of the stomping, and then he showed me a photo of the devilish creature itself.
When the picture was taken, they didn’t know what they were talking to. They thought it was a child spirit, and someone snapped a picture. In the doorway, clutching the frame with a clawed and furry hand, was a beast. That’s the closest word. It looked like a werewolf, baring its fangs and twisting its face in savage hatred. That put a face to the name. The uneasy feeling of being watched blossomed into full-fledged fear for the first time.
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Sonny invited us to step into the hall, to my relief. But instead of giving us a cup of tea and some comfort, he broke out a spirit box. A spirit box is a device that sweeps through radio frequencies at a rapid pace. The idea is that spirits can speak through the white noise. A deafening chug-chug-chug rolled out of the speaker, and we went to yet another room where we could listen and see the Halloween decoration at a distance from our chairs.
Sonny was gleeful now that he had the chance to feed me to a dark spirit. “Do you want Daniel in there?” The toy’s eyes lit up and rocked back and forth before my name was all the way out of his mouth. I leaned back in my chair so I couldn’t see it. The wisdom of the ostrich. On the spirit box, a deep male voice said my name three times.
“Go in there, Daniel!” Sonny said. I’d already decided to exit by the window, so I declined his offer. A woman’s voice came through the spirit box.
“Daniel…” it said.
Sonny grinned at me. “Do some of the girls working here want Daniel?” I leaned forward in foolish hope, but the toy didn’t go off. I decided that the only way I would be leaving that room was in a pack. Sonny asked more questions, rubbing his knees with excitement. I tried to find somewhere safe to look. The entire house was charged with electricity. It felt like sitting in a thunderstorm. I could’ve bet my mother’s life that something was looking at me. It’s a shame, she’s a good mother, but that’s how certain I was.
“Do you want us to quit?” Sonny called out, and the toy lit up again. “I think they want us to quit.” A deep voice boomed out of the mechanical churning of the spirit box. “Quit.”
Leaving the room and heading downstairs, my cousin and I huddled so close, we could’ve shared a necklace. The downstairs felt fresh and airy after the floor above. My cousin and I excused ourselves for a few minutes to get some fresh air outside and try to process what happened.
We had no answers. The toy was real. It was in the other room. And as we stood outside, both of us realized that we had felt the floorboards under us tremble like someone else was walking around. It was impossible. I went back inside to use the restroom. I left the door open and refused to look in the mirror.
Kathy met us in the kitchen, a safe rest area, even though a brutal murder has happened there too. She told us about the history of the house and of Mineral Wells. But I kept getting distracted by my cousin’s ringtone.
“Put your phone on silent.”
“It is.” He looked toward the door. “I hear it too.”
“Are you hearing the voices?” Kathy asked, grinning. I could. Someone was walking around and talking upstairs. As clear as anything, someone was talking. Talking in anger, spitting out their words, and kicking things around.
Kathy carried on, but I couldn’t focus. Behind her, the CCTV showed all the rooms in the house, and I saw lights buzzing around. I thought they were bugs, but something wasn’t quite right about them and the way they flitted and hovered. I looked at the legend and saw that it was in Toby’s room, the same room that someone was talking in.
It’s the most impossible thing to explain. It’s like meeting an alien. You know it can’t be happening, but your brain runs up against a brick wall because you can hear it right there and feel the weight of footsteps above you. It’s there, but it shouldn’t be. You begin to wonder if you can trust your own senses.
We talked with Kathy and Sonny for another hour until the time came to leave. I made her mark my forehead with holy oil, and we piled into the car with our gear and drove out, waving at them. The rest of the drive was quiet. We stared ahead at the road, and I drove mechanically. A bomb could’ve dropped, and we wouldn’t have noticed. There was too much to think about. We’d gone to Mineral Wells to find the real story, the ghouls underneath. And right at the last moment, we got what we were asking for and more.
