A Texas Guide to Haunted Restaurants, Taverns, and Inns

by Robert Wlodarski

Ghosts can be encountered anywhere at any time by any person. Why do some people see ghosts more than others? Who knows? Perhaps as some suggest a few people are more psychic or more tuned in than others.

Genres: Nonfiction

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 25, 2001

Reviews

[Peter Keenan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well... it's fine. It's more or less a catalog, divided by city, that lists the history of the structure and then the associated ghosts and what they do. No listing is more than a page or two, which is probably inevitable giving they're trying to cover all of Texas in a single moderate-length book. The writing is fine, if a bit dry; a different author with a more engaging style might make this a lot more readable. You can see in a few places where the authors try to stick in some color ("Also, due to safety codes, the upstairs area only holds eleven people at a time, not including the ghosts!"), but it tends to fall flat for me.
The hauntings get kind of repetitive, because there's a lot of overlap and they're mostly presented in broad summary. Cold spots, electric appliances turning on when no one's there, and doors that refuse to stay open or shut come up again and again. This isn't the authors' fault, the witnesses reported what they reported, but it does make for repetitive reading.
One complaint I have is that there are many listings where something (usually the ghost's backstory) is explained, and marked with "the lore says" or "the legend says" or "according to folklore." There's never any indication of who tells these stories, how widespread they are, how consistent they are among different tellers, how old they are, how reliable they are, or if they've been verified. For instance, if "the legend" says the ghost is a young woman who was going to be married at the hotel and then went to her suite and hanged herself after the groom left her at the altar, has anyone checked the newspapers? Or the hotel records? Did the hotel ever have weddings on the premises? If something that ghastly happened, there should be some verifiable record of it, and "Young bride kills herself after being spurned at the altar" sounds awfully cliche, suspiciously like a story someone pulled out of thin air to explain the ghost. And are there any references to this "legend" that are more than ten years old? In a nonfiction book, the authors shouldn't be telling what might might be a flight of whimsy a single person came up with less than ten years ago without checking, even if they do include the disclaimer, "the story is."