Hill Country hosts some haunted locales
NEW BRAUNFELS — Make no mistake: The hills are haunted in the otherwise charming, idyllic Hill Country.
“None of our ghosts are violent or aggressive,” said McKenna Lewis, a front desk employee and events coordinator at the Faust Hotel.
Rising from South Seguin Avenue, the hotel was built in 1929 by a man named Walter Faust. He moved his family in during the Great Depression, and he passed away there in the mid-1930s.
Legend has it that his spirit remains.
“He's known as a trickster,” Lewis said. “He likes to play pranks on people; and once he's had his fun, he'll leave you alone.”
This would explain the experience of a guest who reviewed the hotel on Yelp after a stay in May.
The room key and other small goods “would go missing in our room and turn up in bizarre places,” Stephanie L. wrote.
The front desk staff told her that housekeepers weren't going into occupied rooms due to COVID protocol, but “our bed was somehow freshly made on Saturday” and “our things were still on it.”
Less playful were the nightmares that woke up her and her husband “almost every hour” in their room.
Dustin T. wrote on Yelp that he stayed on the second — and most haunted — floor of the hotel in January.
The hallways were creepy — “think ‘The Shining' ” — and about 4 a.m., he heard “what I thought was someone trying to get into our room.”
“Completely lost my (expletive),” he wrote. “Managed to convince myself that it was someone in a room adjacent to or above us. For about 30-45 minutes it sounded like furniture was being moved.”
He eventually fell back asleep only to have “weird dreams about someone coming in our room.”
The hotel has a haunted elevator as well as apparitions that sometimes like to have their photographs taken, local author and historian Michael O. Varhola said.
“It's pretty creepy. I spent a couple of nights there once, riding the elevator and just hanging out,” said Varhola, who wrote the book, “Ghost Hunting: San Antonio, Austin and Texas Hill Country.” “I wandered the halls and took pictures, and some strange things would turn up in my pictures.”
Devil’s Backbone
If Faust's trickery doesn't suffice this Halloween, venture about 13 miles north of New Braunfels into “the most haunted hills in Texas.”
The Devil's Backbone, a 23mile-long ridge in northeastern Comal County that runs along the Hays County line, earned that description from local ghost hunter Don Ford, who runs the blog, Voyage into the Paranormal Society.
To be sure, the area is known for its panoramic views of Hill Country valleys and canyons, as well as pristine hiking territory and scenic real estate.
But throughout that stunning landscape are plenty of places for things that go bump in the night to hide until the time is right.
Some say the ghosts of Native Americans, seeking vengeance for the taking of their land, will follow you if you walk down the road adjacent to the ridge late at night.
Whatever the case, the Devil's Backbone has become the center of local paranormal lore.
Ford, the ghost hunter and blogger, has described apparitions of an entire Confederate army rolling through on horseback.
“The horses' hooves sounded like thunder and shook the walls of a bunk house,” he wrote on his blog.
“Campers report smelling camp fires in places where fires are not allowed and being followed by unseen people while hiking,” he wrote. “Hunters talk about hearing footsteps at the bottom of their deer stands.”
Farm Road 32, the scenic road that winds through the ridges and along the cliffs of Devil's Backbone, has inspired lore of its own.
Dozens of memorial crosses line the road where car crashes have claimed lives, giving rise to the legend of the White Lady.
In one telling, she was a pioneer killed by Native Americans, Varhola said.
And now, she steps “into the middle of the road while people are speeding in the middle of the night.” Drivers see her and swerve.
“She'll be standing in a spot that ensures they'll speed off into a rock or tree, or off a cliff, and die,” Varhola said.