Millett Opera House

The Millett Opera House's recurring spirit is "Priscilla," whose identity varies across the source material. Some accounts collected by Ghost City Tours, Austin Ghosts, and the Daily Texan describe her as a touring actress from the late 1800s; others as an opera singer who fell to her death from a catwalk or threw herself from the rafters in heartbreak. The variation in cause-of-death narratives is itself a marker of the lore's age - the story has been passed through generations of staff and ghost-tour itineraries and has accumulated divergent details.

The most consistent piece of the Priscilla tradition is the elevator. According to Ghost City Tours and Austin Ghosts, Austin Club staff have for decades reported the building's elevator running on its own at night, doors opening to an empty car, and sightings of a woman in a long white nineteenth-century gown either inside the elevator or stepping out of it onto the upper floor. Austin Ghosts has a published account in which an employee describes Priscilla pulling curtains out of their tiebacks and a more aggressive incident in which a plate of food was slapped from the employee's hands, the room dropped to near-freezing temperatures, and the employee was pushed and spun by an unseen force.

Additional reports cluster on the former auditorium floor: phantom applause from the now-converted ballroom, music heard from the upper rows when the room is empty, and a feeling of being watched from the upper galleries. Austin Visit Austin's tourism page and the Daily Texan student newspaper both reference the Millett as one of Austin's most consistently haunted historic buildings.

HauntBound notes that the building's private-club use limits independent verification of the on-site staff reports. Single-source dramatic incidents (the curtain-pulling, the slapped plate) are best treated as testimony from a small number of named witnesses rather than broadly corroborated phenomena.

The building is the private clubhouse of The Austin Club — appreciate the limestone exterior and Frederick Ruffini facade from the public sidewalk at 9th and Brazos. Interior access is limited to occasional Millett Opera House Foundation history tours by advance booking; do not approach the building outside scheduled programming.