Staff at the Dr Pepper Museum in Waco hold regular sessions with Shorty, the bottling plant's chief mechanic, killed by the 1953 tornado after he took a truck run that wasn't his. They say he answers. The basement is the one room nobody speaks to.
The staff at the Dr Pepper Museum in Waco, Texas hold regular sessions to talk to a man a tornado killed in 1953. They call him Shorty. The museum's own oral history calls him the chief mechanic of the bottling plant this building used to be, and Cindy Little, the parapsychologist who runs the building's paranormal experiences, says he answers. "We still think he's in the building," she told a local news crew, "and he's pretty chatty."
Shorty died over a raincoat. On May 11, 1953, a Baylor student named Bill Little was working the plant as a checker, about to drive a truck from the dock to the storage lot across the street. Shorty ran up and asked to take the run instead: Little had no raincoat, and he did. Little climbed out and headed for the back of the dock. As Shorty pulled across, lightning struck the covered area where the empty cases were stacked, and the F5 tornado that killed 114 people in downtown Waco arrived in the same instant.
They found the truck partway into the lot, driver's door standing open. The men figured he had run for the wall of the coffee warehouse. The warehouse came down on him whole, and it took several days to get his body out. "I have often wondered what would have happened had I driven the truck across to the storage lot that fateful day," Little wrote. The ghost tour tells it another way, that his own truck pinned him against the factory wall, but Little was the man who handed him the keys.
The plant lived. The Waco History archive has the tornado tearing into the Mary Street side, the repairs done in a lighter brick nobody bothered to match, so the seam sits on the wall in plain view.
Rachael Nadeau Johnson, the museum's collections manager for more than ten years, puts it plainly: "Yes, it is some sort of haunted." She says hello to them and gets on with her day. One morning she shut the third-floor office door behind her, which locks itself, and came back to find it cracked open. She heard whispering. She said out loud that nobody was supposed to be up there but her. The door slammed shut in her face, and the room behind it was empty.
Down at the soda fountain, the jerks working the counter report apron strings tugged and hair pulled, playfully. The EVP sessions there come back as a young male voice, teenaged and sassy, and the staff have decided he might be named Seth. No Seth appears anywhere in the plant's history. The name exists only on tape.
The basement is the one room the guides don't work. They tell groups that whatever is down there does not care to be bothered, and they ask it nothing. Annette Luevano, an investigator who has worked the building since 2013, got a recording down there once. It came back clear and angry: "Get the f*** out."
