The name Wilbarger appears on Texas maps in the form of Wilbarger County, in north-central Texas, as well as Wilbarger Creek, near Austin. They are named in honor of Josiah Pugh Wilbarger, a man whose experiences truly personified the thrilling and hazardous lifestyle of a pioneer on the Texas frontier. 

Wilbarger was born in the United States on September 10, 1801. He moved to Mexican Texas as part of Stephen F. Austin’s “Little Colony” in 1827 after getting married. As a married man, he was granted a title for a league of land (4,428 acres), which he located in Bastrop County at the mouth of what is now known as Wilbarger Creek. 

In August of 1833, Wilbarger rode with a group of men to survey land a few miles outside of Austin, a particularly dangerous affair for many reasons. As they stopped to rest, they were ambushed by a group of Comanche Indians. They ran for cover behind scant trees and fired back. Wilbarger first received an arrow through his calf and another wound in his hip. As he continued to fight, he was hit by an arrow in the other leg and was shot through the neck with a bullet shortly after, which temporarily paralyzed him. Two in his party were killed, two escaped, and Wilbarger was left for dead. Conscious but paralyzed, he had to watch as the two men who were killed in the attack were mutilated. Assuming he was dead, the Native American party also scalped Wilbarger.

 As night fell, Wilbarger, feeble from loss of blood and severe wounds that had quickly been infested with flies and maggots, waned in and out of consciousness. He was able to drag himself to a pool to drink water, but soon collapsed at the foot of a large Post Oak tree while attempting to make a three-quarters-of-a-mile trek to the home of Reuben Hornsby. Wilbarger claimed that while lying beneath the tree, he saw his sister approach him. She insisted he was too weak to travel and that help from friends would arrive, before she drifted off in the direction of the Hornsby home. Wilbarger later discovered that his sister had died the previous day in Missouri.

That evening, after Wilbarger was reported dead by the two men who had escaped, Mrs. Hornsby awoke from vivid dreams in which she saw Wilbarger scalped — but alive — lying underneath a tree. After falling back asleep and immediately seeing the same image, she woke Mr. Hornsby and “urged the men at the house to start to Wilbarger’s relief.” 

The tale of Josiah Wilbarger, originally told by witnesses from the Hornsbys’ home and by Wilbarger himself, spread throughout the colony, and was eventually written down by a family friend and one of Wilbarger’s brothers. The tale of Wilbarger’s survival has persisted through the years as a gruesome example of the dangers and adversity of life on the Texas frontier.

The men were indeed able to locate Wilbarger in the same state that matched Mrs. Hornsby’s visions, and he was taken to the Hornsbys’ home to be nursed back to health. Miraculously, Wilbarger survived his ordeal, but his scalp never fully healed, and a portion of his weakened skull always remained exposed. He died on April 11, 1845 after hitting his head on a low door frame. He was buried near his home, and in 1936 was reinterred at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.

Today, while traveling in air conditioned comfort on Highway 290 from Austin towards Manor, a small bridge bears a green sign which reads “Wilbarger Creek.” Below the bridge, the creek named in honor of the courageous frontiersman flows on toward the Colorado River, serving as a reminder of Texas’ frontier days.

Courtesy of the Texas General Land Office, Save Texas History blog, Apr 27, 2016, https://medium.com/save-texas-history/visions-of-survival-on-the-texas-frontier-the-story-of-josiah-wilbarger-8a2cd588d593

Maybe the souls who lived here in the distant past, even those whose names and circumstances are forgotten, haven’t receded as far from us as we think. Some people believe that the dead still go about their earthly business, or relive their darkest moments, in the same time and space we now occupy, in the old buildings where their shades have settled in like dust. Did the lives of certain of our forebears cut a groove so deep in the tapestry of time that their sighings, their smells, their very aspects have not yet faded from this earth?

Tales of ghostly hauntings are very old in Austin: One of the first, appearing in print in 1898, tells the legend of a famous Texas scout and his stolen Comanche bride, said to have died together on the grounds of the original Texas Capitol, at Eighth and Colorado. The father of the girl slew the scout in revenge for taking her from the tribe, and she in turn thrust a knife through her heart, falling over her lover’s body. For decades afterward, witnesses claimed the tragic couple still wandered the grounds at night.

Some ghost stories recall an Austin we can scarcely conceive of: a log cabin settlement reduced to desperate rations in the gloomy final days of the Civil War, when cornmeal mush was served at Texas Gov. Pendleton Murrah’s inauguration. In 1864, Murrah’s nephew came to visit at the Governor’s Mansion, where he fell rapturously in love with the niece of the governor’s wife. She laughed at his advances, so the story goes, and at midnight the house was startled awake by a gunshot. The nephew was found sprawled in a guest bedroom, a bullet through his head. As the story goes, the blood from the suicide was never even cleaned from the walls until 1870, because Murrah fled Texas shortly thereafter as Union troops advanced. That wing of the mansion was thereafter dreaded by housekeeping staff and visitors, who complained of doors opening on their own, cold breaths, and frightful moans.

When Union troops arrived in Austin, they camped along the banks of Shoal Creek, which flooded and created a yellow fever epidemic. The dying soldiers were boarded at a mansion still standing today at 23rd and San Gabriel, and many were buried on the grounds. The house was later purchased by Col. Andrew Neill, a Texas Revolutionary War veteran, who died there in 1883 (It’s now known as the Neill-Cochran House). Neighbors used to report that Neill could still be seen riding his horse in the yard, or even having tea with Gen. Robert E. Lee on the balcony. And on chilly nights, footsteps are said to echo in the streets near the house, perhaps the distant echoes of soldiers’ boots.

An aching melancholy for a doomed era perhaps helped popularize a vision once reported at the Raymond Mansion on West Sixth Street a few decades after the close of the Civil War: At night, a young woman in a ruffled, rose-colored gown descended the stairs into the arms of a Union soldier who galloped up to meet her. The story reported in the news was that a real-life Union sympathizer did fall in love with a woman who lived there, but he could not find her when he returned home from the war.

The palatial Driskill Hotel, opened in 1886, is said to house more ghosts than can be listed here. Sightings are reported in the hotel to the present day, including that of a former housekeeper in a long Victorian dress who appears to be still fussing with flower arrangements in the lobby, a longtime resident from the turn of the century who checks his pocket watch on the elevator, and a woman who carries shopping bags into a fourth-floor room where a wealthy Houston woman committed suicide in the early 1990s, after her fiancé canceled their wedding.

Some of the mansions of the city’s West End used to excite ghost tales as they succumbed to decay. The Glasscock home, which dated from the 1860s, was perhaps the most dreaded haunt of all. By the 1920s, when the house was torn down, its towering walls of red brick were sullen and unpainted, its windows, its portico sagging between twin broken columns that framed a darkened entrance. A woman with “sad eyes and sorrowful mien” was said to roam the rooms. Some supposed it was the wife of a Yankee carpetbagger, whose dying wish to be buried in the house’s basement was never fulfilled.

A teenage boy who dared to enter the home one evening was killed there, but not by an angry housewife. Startled by a cat, he hurtled down the stairs and caught his jacket on a baluster. He was found hanging there a few hours later: The newspaper said he died of fright. One night, a reporter with the American-Statesman had himself lashed to one of the home’s pillars so he could observe what went on there. A storm rolled in, and he, too, nearly caught his death of fear — not from apparitions, but from falling mounds of plaster.

But the most mysterious ghosts are the ones that appear unannounced, with no backstory that would anticipate their existence. Invisible footfalls that have been heard pounding up the staircase at the Speakeasy, followed by blood-curdling screams. A playful presence seems to run the elevators up and down all hours at the Driskill, where Eurythmics singer Annie Lennox once reported that an unseen hand picked out her evening wear for her. An unknown shade moves barstools and oozes mist at the Bitter End [now closed], a building whose address once placed it in the former prostitution and gambling district known as Guy Town.

503 Neches St. houses one of the most historically intriguing cases of paranormal activity. A psychic, reportedly without knowing the building’s history, once said she heard a black man laughing there, amused, she said, that he had become his own client. Records show that the building was once owned by a black undertaker named Nathan Rhambo, who opened a funeral home there around 1915 and was murdered in 1932. The murder, blamed on a young black man who police said was out to rob the wealthy Rhambo, threw the city’s black community into an uproar. Does Rhambo carry on in his old shop because he has something to say about the circumstances of his murder?

Maybe, like so many of Austin’s other shades, Rhambo just isn’t ready, or isn’t able, to let the past die away.

The hilltop south Austin St. Edward’s University is a Catholic institution whose antecedents go back to the 1870s.  In 1889 the campus was moved to its present site, where an “Old Main” style of building, designed by Galveston architect had been built. The main building was destroyed by fire 1903 and was replaced by the one that we see today.

The University is apparently riddled with ghosts, spirits, and supernatural entities. According to student lore, there are several popular spots at which to find these haunts. One is Doyle Hall, where a ghostly nun turns on the showers. Another is Mary Moody Northen Theatre, where the ghost of a young man who hanged himself using the sandbag ropes spooks witnesses. The apparition of his body has reportedly been seen and heard creaking and swinging on the ropes. At Premont Hall roams the ghost of a former resident advisor who died after slipping in the showers (his body supposedly wasn’t found for a week). This ghost makes itself known by slamming windows and doors and by turning on all the shower faucets at the same time.

Metz Elementary was built in East Austin in 1913. In 1990, the century-old school house was demolished and replaced with a more modern building. A trucking and excavation company was contracted to do the demolition, but the process did not go smoothly. Many of the heavy machinery operators reported that their machines would unexpectedly and inexplicably turn off during operation. Constantly, workers fell from ladders and tools disappeared. Workers also began reporting children’s writings on the blackboards and ghost of children in the restrooms. A clergyman was brought in to bless the building; nevertheless, a workman was fatally injured in a wall collapse and the area was leveled. By the time the school was completely demolished, the work was six months behind schedule and more than half of the work crew had quit.

Courtesy of Kevin Fullerton, originally published in the Austin Chronicle, Jan. 26, 2001, http://www.austinchronicle.com/features/2001-01-26/80327/ 

“There’s a new fiesta in the making as we speak,” drawls a blonde, mustachioed Matthew McConaughey in 1993’s Dazed and Confused. “It’s out at the moon tower. Full kegs, everyone’s gonna be there.” 

From that point in the classic stoner comedy, a boring night shooting pool and running from a sadistic Ben Affleck is transformed into a picturesque snapshot of teenage debauchery. A gaggle of high schoolers mingle on a patch of land surrounded by a single, monolithic structure: a moonlight tower.

It’s one of those quirky and famous features of Austin that most people actually know very little about. So what is this thing? Where did it come from? Are there more?

One rumored reason for the moonlight towers’ construction is a response to the yearlong terror inflicted between Christmas of 1884-85 by the Servant Girl Annihilator, a serial killer who brutally murdered seven women and one man before disappearing completely. However, the moonlight towers were actually installed a decade after the murders ended. In fact, they weren’t constructed in the city at all.

The Fort Wayne Electric Company erected moonlight towers in Indiana, as a way to illuminate large areas of town in a time when street lamps were prohibitively expensive. In 1894, the city of Austin got in on the action and purchased 31 of them, each 165 feet tall, with a 15 foot base and weighing approximately 5,000 pounds. They were connected to electric generators at the newly completed Austin Dam, until the dam collapsed in 1900, killing dozens of residents.

The original source of light came from carbon arc lamps, which shed a blue-white light up to 3,000 feet in diameter. Later these lamps were replaced with incandescent bulbs with individual switches on each tower. World War II necessitated potential citywide blackouts, leading to the creation of a central city switch for all moonlight towers. The lights are now automated, using mercury vapor bulbs.

In the years since their installation, 15 of the 31 moonlight towers have been lost, mostly due to new construction. Still, the 17 remaining towers have since been recognized both as Texas State Landmarks (in 1970) and on the National Register of Historic Places (1976). Austin is believed the only place in the entire world where they still exist. In 1993, the moonlight towers were deconstructed and completely restored, down to the last bolt. Austin Energy celebrated this $1.3 million feat in 1995 with a citywide festival.

Though many of the moonlight towers are now gone or moved from their original locations, and even though Richard Linklater fabricated a moontower for his film so that it would conveniently be surrounded by a field large enough for an epic beer bust, the structures remain an iconic, everlasting piece of Austin history.

So next Christmas, when you’re spinning under the Zilker tree, the most famous moonlight tower of them all, remember just how lucky we are to have that rare beacon of light.

Courtesy of Austin365, 365 Things To Do In Austin, Texas, Mar. 19, 2016, http://365thingsaustin.com/2016/03/19/the-story-behind-austins-moonlight-towers/ 

Before Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of London, another midnight murderer was prowling halfway across the world. In Austin, Texas, an individual who became known as the “Servant Girl Annihilator” was responsible for the deaths of eight people between late 1884 and Christmas Eve 1885. Attacking victims in their beds and then dragging them outside to mutilate their bodies, the killer eluded police, private investigators, and mobs of civilians who took to the unpaved streets of newly settled Austin in anger and panic. He—eyewitnesses claimed it was a man—has been called America’s first serial killer, and his crimes remain unsolved to this day.

Just two decades prior to the murders, Austin was a “rustic cowtown with a population below 5000,” writes Skip Hollandsworth, a journalist at Texas Monthly and author of The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America’s First Serial Killer. By 1885, the time of the murders, the city had reached the “verge of modernity,” boasting 14,500 residents, numerous restaurants and hotels, and an under-construction capitol building. According to Hollandsworth, “Austin had all the makings of an urban paradise.” Instead, it became an urban hell.

The killer’s first victim was Mollie Smith, a young black cook discovered in the snow near her employer’s home on December 30, 1884 with a gaping ax wound in her head. Smith had also been stabbed in the chest, abdomen, legs, and arms, creating such a large pool of blood she appeared to almost be floating in it.

After that was another black cook—Eliza Shelly, found on May 7, 1885. Shelly’s head was nearly split in two with an ax; the Annihilator’s choice of target, and his modus operandi, were becoming apparent. Irene Cross, a servant and the third black woman targeted by the Annihilator, was attacked on May 23; she was stabbed multiple times with a knife and practically scalped.

It was around this time that short story author O. Henry gave the killer his nickname. “Town is fearfully dull,” Henry wrote in a May 1885 letter to his friend Dave Hall, “except for the frequent raids of the Servant Girl Annihilators, who make things lively during the dead hours of the night.”

The spine-tingling moniker was perhaps a bit of a stretch, however: Only the first few to die were servant girls. The next victim, 11-year-old Mary Ramey, was dragged outside and into a washhouse, raped, and stabbed through the ear on August 30. The following two victims were a pair, sweethearts Gracie Vance and Orange Washington. On September 28, 1885, they were found with their heads bludgeoned—according to a report in the Austin Daily Statesman, Gracie was “almost beaten into a jelly.”

The Annihilator was escalating. On Christmas Eve 1885, he committed two separate crimes in entirely different locations—and unlike all of the previous victims, they were white: Susan Hancock, “described by one reporter as ‘one of the most refined ladies in Austin,’” and 17-year-old Eula Phillips, both murdered in their homes. Susan’s head was cleaved in two just before midnight on Christmas Eve, and her wounds showed that something sharp and thin had been stuck through her right ear into her brain. Eula’s life ended around an hour after Susan was discovered in the early morning of Christmas Day. Once again, her head had been crushed by an ax. A writer for the Fort Worth Gazette reported that she lay on her back, her face “turned upward in the dim moonlight with an expression of agony that death itself had not erased from the features.” She had been raped, and her arms were pinned down by timber.

Absent in every other killing, the wood pieces brought up a terrifying possibility. True, the lumber could be attributed to an opportunist Annihilator operating in a booming city filled with construction sites. Still, people wondered … What if another killer was at work? Did Austin perhaps have multiple serial killers on the loose? Until that point, no one had considered there could be more than one maniac involved. 

“Of course, at that time the phrase ‘serial killer’ had not even been coined,” Hollandsworth writes. “No one had thought of studying crime scenes to help create a psychological profile of a killer. Fingerprinting and blood-typing hadn’t been invented yet.” Police relied on dogs to track suspects, and a team of bloodhounds ran the lengths of Austin’s unpaved streets nightly, sniffing and howling. The Annihilator “boldly crisscrossed his city, hunting down women regardless of race or class, striking quickly on moonlit nights and then vanishing just as quickly,” Hollandsworth writes.

Private investigators were brought in by police, who hoped they’d be able to catch something their officers couldn’t, but their presence only whipped Austin into more of a panic…

…And then the murders stopped.

When the bell atop the First Baptist Church started clanging about 9 o’clock that Sunday night, it was not a call to worship.

It was June 11, 1865. A full moon hung over Austin, a city of some 4,000 residents.

None of the men who rushed to gather in front of the Dieterich Building at Congress and 6th Street found it particularly surprising that an emergency of some sort had arisen, but the nature of it stunned them: A body of men had broken into the Treasury Building adjacent to the Capitol.                                          

Even though Confederates under ex-Texas Ranger John Salmon “Rip” Ford had won the final battle of the Civil War at Palmetto Ranch in Cameron County on May 13, the South had lost. Most state officials, not knowing whether they would be hanged as traitors or merely told to go and sin no more, preferred not to wait around to find out. They vacated their offices as well as Texas. Not only did Texas have no state government, little or no local law enforcement existed.

“Confederate soldiers, without officers or orders, are coming in every hour, and there is nothing but plunder and sack going on—and the citizens are as bad as the soldiers,” 35-year-old Austinite Amelia Barr wrote in her diary on May 25. 

On June 2, Confederate Gen. E. Kirby Smith surrendered aboard a U.S. warship in Galveston Bay. The same day, Mrs. Barr wrote: “Everything in confusion. Everyone suspicious and watchful, and there is no law.” 

George R. Freeman, a Confederate cavalry captain who had recently returned to Austin, a few weeks before had taken it upon himself to organize a company of volunteers to help preserve the peace. 

Somehow, Nathan G. Shelley, who had served as state attorney general before going into Confederate military service, got wind of the burglary of the unguarded treasury. Shelley found Freeman and the two men walked toward the Capitol. Soon both could hear the banging of metal on metal coming from the Treasury, where a faint flicker of candlelight could be seen through the upstairs windows. Freeman ran to the nearby First Baptist Church, roused the pastor and asked him to start ringing the church bell to sound the alarm.