Dallas is not just one thing; all of life and death is here for you to experience. The ghosts of country musicians, and the ghosts of Oilmen, the ghosts that haunt some of the 41 Universities in the megaplex city of Dallas Fort Worth. Join Dallas Terrors tonight to sample 8 or 12 of the best stories from the strange and painful history of the city of Dallas, Texas.
From the day John Neely Bryan, his dog, and a Cherokee he called Ned drove a stake into the ground at a fork in the Trinity River, Dallas has been growing. In its wake are the trampled lives of countless souls who have added their names to the long list of ghosts in this town.
For one sinister hour, hear their stories and explore the barbaric history of the Big D. From the hard life of the cowboys that still roam the streets, ten-gallon hats an’ all, to the Dallas Crime Family that rules the underworld and knows who buried the bodies!
You’ll hear about the origins of Bonnie and Clyde, the Dallas eyeball killer, the Goat Man that lives under a bridge, and the ghosts of the lost and lonely that wander the streets of Dallas.
Dare you confront the ghosts of Dallas?
Dallas has the widest selection of ghosts you can imagine; your head will spin after you come face to face with the sites of so many hauntings. Setting out after dark, walk alongside your expert local guides as you hear the tales of the real ghosts of Dallas in their larger than life glory.
The ghosts of Dallas have a vast variety of backgrounds, but it’s the same old things that cause the dead to affect the living world. We subscribe to the theory that people become ghosts for one of two reasons, unfinished business or traumatic death. Both of those are commonplace occurrences in the Big D.
Get to know the sights, sounds, history, and haunts of Dallas on your one-hour walking tour of the 8 haunted locations on the Dallas Terrors standard tour, or drill deeper into the haunted history of this fast-moving town by adding 4 more stories of ghosts and ghouls by taking the extended Dallas Terrors tour.
Join us tonight to unearth the dark and dusty ghosts of Dallas and assure yourself of a frighteningly good time!
You want to get the most out of the Big D.
If you only have a short time here in the funkiest town in Texas (Sorry Austin), you will be looking for a way to get to grips with the sprawl; you could drive around for a while and see some things, but they won’t mean much. You will probably cross Large Marge a few times, —that’s the giant, elegant bridge over the Trinity River, named after Margaret Hunt Hill, a local philanthropist. Her father, H.L. Hunt, was the real-life oil baron who was the inspiration for the fictional character, J.R. Ewing on TV’s Dallas soap opera. If you really want to get to know Dallas, you need a guide, someone to explain the origin of the Giant eyeball sculpture or why there is a sculpture of 40 cattle being herded between two skyscrapers downtown.
But even they are just dry facts. The history of Dallas comes alive through the ghosts that persist in this town. These stories of Dallas’s famous and infamous people are short cuts to a real insight into the city. Each one will bring alive an era in time, and you will get a feel for Dallas through the way the ghosts lived and died!
The sprawling megaplex of Dallas Fort Worth has a million stories. You only need a few of them to get insight into Dallas’s character and culture, and Dallas Terrors has the ones you need.
Why is Dallas so haunted?
From its early days as a trading post on the old Indian paths that ran through the area, the new city of Dallas was hardscrabble and dangerous. The Native Americans who had been living and dying here for centuries did not take kindly to their new neighbors.
Quanah Parker, a Comanche warrior chief, fought the war against white expansion, eventually losing the battle of his lifetime. Quanah finally came around and engaged with the European immigrant culture, going on a wolf hunting trip with Teddy Roosevelt. The President denied his request to create a sizeable Indian reserve but did make the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge because of the trip. Quanah’s ghost has been seen at the historic stockyard, where he often watches over the daily cattle drives.
Dallas’s ghosts really started to accumulate when the railways arrived here; three lines eventually converged here, at the Union Station. The cargo routes linked the growing cotton plantations of the south to a national market. In the early part of the 20th century, plantations within 100 miles of Dallas produced 30% of the nation’s cotton. The same thing happened with oil; Dallas became a hub of the growing industry after wildcatters discovered oil in the regions around Dallas.
In the 1910s, the booming city was in dire need of a first-class hotel. Fortunately, Adolphus Busch, the Budweiser brewer, was taken enough with Dallas to finance the building of the impressive Adolphus Hotel. It’s still in the top ten most luxurious hotels in Dallas today. It’s a great place to stay unless you stay on the 19th floor. In the late 1920s, a bride was due to be married in the impressive ballroom. On the eve of her big day, she stayed in the hotel, when she received some terrible news. Instead of going through with the wedding, she decided to end her own life. She went down to a room next to the ballroom, and she found an electrical cord, climbed on a chair, and swung from a beam. She was found early the next morning, and the wedding swiftly canceled. It wasn’t long before guests on the 19th floor started reporting seeing a fleeting glimpse of a bride running down the corridors. Some even reported the same bride playing an awful tune on an old-fashioned squeezebox. No one knows what news she received or the squeezebox connection. So perhaps see if you can change rooms if you find yourself staying on the 19th floor.
The Trinity River is straight down Commerce Street from the Adolphus. The river often flooded its banks in the early years of Dallas’s history. Many people lost their lives in the muddy floods that carried cattle, homes, tents, and people away to their deaths. These forgotten citizens were often buried in unmarked graves that come back to haunt the city. When construction workers were building the freeways that crisscross Dallas, they uncovered several skeletons.
Today Dallas is the home to several fortune 500 companies and over 7.5 million people, with over 200 arriving daily. This history of boom and bust, of untrammeled greed and human excess, makes Dallas a ripe hunting ground for ghosts of all kinds.
