The Baker Hotel in Mineral Wells, Texas has been closed since 1972. The figure people report in its basement is only the top half of a bellboy, crushed in a service elevator in 1948. Seven floors up, something leaves lipstick on clean glasses.
In the basement of the Baker Hotel in Mineral Wells, Texas, people keep reporting a bellhop with no bottom half. Blue uniform, visible from the waist up, drifting past the doors of the service elevator.
The name attached to him is Douglas Moore. He worked the Baker as a bellboy and elevator operator, and in 1948, at 16, he was crushed to death in one of its service elevators. Accounts differ on how: one has him stepping into the car after it had already started up, another has him jumping for the moving cage. They agree on where it caught him, and it was the middle of his body. The story traces back to Fort Worth Star-Telegram archives, though nobody seems able to produce the page.
Kira Connally, who ran tours through the building, described what happened the night a visitor stood down there and taunted him. "As soon as the words left his mouth, the coldest air I've ever felt went whooshing past me, and it brought the woman next to me to her knees, as if she had literally been punched in the stomach."
The Baker opened November 9, 1929, two weeks after the Wall Street crash: 14 stories of mineral-water resort in a town that had 400 wells by 1920 and sold its water as a cure for hysteria and other mental problems. The welcome sign reads "The Home of Crazy." Clark Gable stayed here, and Judy Garland, and Jack Dempsey, and the Three Stooges.
Seven floors up, in the southeast corner suite, the hotel kept a mistress. Sources disagree about whose she was. Texas Monthly makes her the builder T.B. Baker's; FrightFind and BellaOnline say the affair was with Earl Baker, his nephew, who managed the place. Everyone agrees on the ending, which is that she went out a window. A hotel porter reported her first, in the 1950s and '60s, and the sign she leaves behind is a small domestic one: red lipstick on clean, unused glasses, in seventh-floor rooms nobody had checked into. Some tellings name her Virginia Brown and put lavender perfume in the hallway with her.
The Baker closed in 1963, opened again briefly in 1965 under the town's own leadership, and shut for good in 1972. Developers announced a $65 million restoration in 2019, and construction is underway now, with 157 guest rooms planned in a building that once held more than 450 and a reopening targeted for spring 2028. Until then the doors stay shut to the public.
They were shut in the early 1990s, too, when tellers at a bank across the street watched the hotel's windows open and close in changing patterns. No caretaker had occupied the building since it closed.
