The Most Haunted Places in Texas

Ranked

1. 

   1. The Driskill Austin · Haunted Hotel / Inn · Family Comfort: Moderate

   Colonel Jesse Driskill, a Tennessee cattle baron, opened this hotel on December 20, 1886, hosting Governor Sul Ross's inaugural ball less than two weeks later before drought losses forced him to sell in 1888; he died in 1890. Staff describe cigar smoke in the lobby tied to Driskill himself, and guests report children's laughter and a bouncing ball on the grand staircase, a legend linked to a girl said to have fallen there.

   9 original accounts · documented across 4 decades, 1886-1990 · retold in 5 later publications

2. 

   2. Menger Hotel San Antonio · Haunted Hotel / Inn · Family Comfort: High

   William Menger, who ran Texas's first brewery, opened this hotel on the Alamo Plaza site on February 1, 1859; Theodore Roosevelt later recruited his Rough Riders at the hotel bar in 1898. Staff describe Sallie White, a chambermaid shot by her husband in 1876, walking the Victorian Wing in her work clothes, and guests report Roosevelt seated at the bar and Richard King, who died at the hotel, entering his former suite through solid walls.

   7 original accounts · documented in 2025 · retold in 6 later publications

3. 3. Thistle Hill (Wharton-Scott House) Fort Worth · Haunted House / Historic Home · Family Comfort: Moderate

   Cattle baron W. T. Waggoner built this Georgian Revival mansion in 1903 and 1904 as a wedding gift for his daughter Electra, who sold it in 1910 to Winfield and Elizabeth Scott; the house was saved from demolition and restored in 1976. Visitors report a woman in white on the staircase landing, identified variously as Electra or Elizabeth Scott, a young man in tennis whites on the grounds, and music from the closed third-floor ballroom.

   Documented since 1903 · 9 independent sources · 3 media mentions

4. 

   4. The Alamo (Mission San Antonio de Valero) San Antonio · Battlefield / Military Site · Family Comfort: High

   Mission San Antonio de Valero, established in 1718 and relocated to its current site in 1724, became the Alamo, where Santa Anna's army ended a thirteen-day siege on March 6, 1836, by killing nearly all of the roughly 189 Texan defenders, including William Travis, Jim Bowie, and Davy Crockett. A legend with no known primary source holds that weeks later, Mexican soldiers sent to burn the chapel encountered robed, sword-wielding figures who warned them not to touch the walls and fled, and the story has circulated in Alamo lore ever since. The most substantiated tradition traces to the San Antonio Express-News, which between 1894 and 1897 reported moans, footsteps, and the sound of a marching sentry when the complex served as a police station and jail, and park staff today report a buckskin-clad figure identified with Crockett along with a cowboy apparition in the mission gardens.

   5 original accounts · documented across 8 decades, 1724-1990

5. 

   5. Miss Molly's Hotel Fort Worth · Haunted Hotel / Inn · Family Comfort: Moderate

   The building opened in 1910 as the Palace Rooms, an upstairs boarding house for cattlemen, and later operated as a Prohibition-era speakeasy and, in the 1940s, a bordello called the Gayatte Hotel before its restoration as a bed and breakfast. Guests report Miss Josie, identified with the building's last madam, appearing at the foot of beds around 3 a.m., a cowboy named Jake seen as a full apparition, and a Tipping Ghost that leaves change.

   4 original accounts · documented across 3 decades, 1910-2008 · retold in 6 later publications

6. 

   6. Walter Tips House Austin · Haunted House / Historic Home · Family Comfort: Low

   Walter Tips, a German immigrant hardware merchant and Texas state senator, built this house in 1876 and lived there until his death in 1911. When it faced demolition in 1975, the two-story structure was moved intact to its South Congress Avenue site. Psychic mediums hired by a tour company reported an older trapped-feeling woman, children near the staircase, a mustachioed man matched to photographs of Tips, and a sense that the building had been moved.

   3 original accounts · documented across 7 decades, 1876-2021 · retold in 3 later publications

7. 

   7. Victoria's Black Swan Inn San Antonio · Haunted House / Historic Home · Family Comfort: Moderate

   Built in 1867 on the site of the 1842 Battle of Salado Creek, Victoria's Black Swan Inn is a two-story Greek Revival house above Salado Creek in northeast San Antonio, where more than 80 Mexican soldiers and one Texan, Steven Jett, died fighting under Capt. John Hays and Col. Mathew Caldwell against Adrian Woll's army. The venue's own history ties that battle to three reported phenomena on the grounds: Native American figures said to chase off boys fishing in the creek, one report of a skirmish between Mexican and Texan soldiers that resembled a re-enactment, and a Confederate soldier apparition reported near the gazebo along with the sound of a bugle. Other reports describe three more figures unconnected to that history: a young woman seated on a bed in an upstairs room, a man described as stalking angrily through the house, and a mischievous child spirit that guests say acts up only when children are present.

   6 original accounts · documented across 2 decades, 1991-2015

8. 

   8. White Rock Lake Dallas · Outdoor / Natural Site · Family Comfort: High

   Dallas built White Rock Lake as a municipal water-supply reservoir in 1910 and 1911, then developed the surrounding 1,015-acre park beginning in the 1930s with the Civilian Conservation Corps. The accounts attach to the Lady of the Lake, a vanishing-hitchhiker legend published since at least 1943, in which a young woman in a soaked 1930s evening dress flags down drivers along East Lawther Drive and asks for a ride home. Drivers report picking her up only to have her vanish from the car before they arrive, leaving the seat wet, and in the oldest published versions a man at the address she gave says his daughter died at the lake years earlier.

   2 original accounts (known through later citation) · documented across 5 decades, 1927-1960 · retold in 5 later publications

9. 

   9. Granbury Opera House Granbury · Theater / Performance Venue · Family Comfort: High

   HauntBound identified two distinct published accounts at this working theater, across three kinds of published source. Six later publications retell those accounts. Reported phenomena include disembodied voices and phantom footsteps.

   2 original accounts · documented across 3 decades, 1990-2011 · retold in 6 later publications

10. 

    10. Old San Patricio Courthouse Site San Patricio · Museum / Historical Site · Family Comfort: Moderate

    San Patricio de Hibernia, founded in 1829 as an Irish Catholic colony under empresarios James McGloin and John McMullen, was where Chipita Rodriguez was tried and held in the county courthouse on circumstantial evidence in the 1863 ax murder of horse trader John Savage. She was hanged near the Nueces River on November 13, 1863, long remembered in Texas as the only woman legally executed in the state, and a witness at her burial reported hearing a groan from the coffin as it was lowered into the ground. Coastal Bend tradition, traced by the Texas State Historical Association to a 1940s poem, holds that visitors near the mesquite grove by today's historical marker report a woman with a rope around her neck, especially around the November 13 anniversary of the hanging.

    5 original accounts · documented in 1863 · retold in 4 later publications

Superlatives