The ALICO Building in Waco, Texas is 22 stories of 1911 steel that rode out an F5 tornado. The guards who work it now say doors open on their own and the basement lights come on, and a tour owner says it is a guard who died down there.
The night guards at the ALICO Building in Waco, Texas say the doors open for them. A man heads down toward the basement with his hands full, and the door he would have had to set something down to reach swings back on its own. The basement lights come on by themselves, too.
Cindy Little, who owns the Waco Ghosts tour, says the guards know who is doing it. A security guard worked the building in the 1980s, well liked around downtown, and when age left him unable to do the job the way he wanted to do it, he took his own life in the basement. "We're thinking that the security guard is still around helping," she says. "He is very much a kind, friendly ghost here that haunts the Alico."
No name comes with him. No obituary, no inquest, no item in the Waco papers. The story reaches print only through the tour operator, and the tours never go inside.
The building he is said to still be working is a 22-story tower at 425 Austin Avenue, finished in August 1911 after exactly one year of construction, and it is still the oldest standing skyscraper in Texas. It was engineered to survive alone: its own power plant, its own artesian well, a foundation dug 40 feet to bedrock through a subterranean lake the crews hit on the way down.
That mattered on May 11, 1953. An F5 tornado came into downtown Waco at 4:36 in the afternoon, on a path a third of a mile wide, with winds to 260 mph. It killed 114 people. The R.T. Dennis furniture building across the street collapsed on 30 of them. The ALICO swayed several feet and held, steel where its masonry neighbors were rubble, and because it still had power when nothing else downtown did, it became the crisis center. Rescue crews worked the wreckage from its tower while medical and military officials ran the ground floor.
The ghost tours have taken the sidewalk out front for their own. US Ghost Adventures tells of the Wailing Woman, "a distressed wife mourning the death of her husband," screaming for a man the storm took, though the same page also offers her as the howls of victims whose bones were thrown in the river. Tour copy resold across booking sites adds a faceless man staring down from the upper floors and the smell of old cigar smoke, credited to "a long-departed businessman who refuses to clock out."
That same page says the 114 died inside the building. They didn't. The 114 is the toll for all of Waco, and no death has ever been recorded inside the ALICO. Not that day, not any day anyone can find.
Which leaves the one man in the basement, still getting the door.
