The Driskill in Austin turns up cigar smoke in a building that went smoke-free years ago, and a voice on a balcony once asked a security guard for a match. They think it's the cattle baron who opened the hotel in 1886 and lost it inside two years.
The Driskill Hotel in Austin, Texas gave Johnette Napolitano one night and a hit single. Wikipedia's entry on the song dates her stay to March 1991, when Concrete Blonde was opening for Sting, and something in the room started playing with her lamps.
"He kept turning the lights on and off in my room. I finally unplugged all the lamps," she told the Austin American-Statesman the following year. "Then he turned on the light in the closet and really slowly opened the closet door, just like a hand was opening it." She told it she was going to sleep, and got back what she described as amusement. To a Detroit reporter she was blunter: "The minute I took my clothes off, I felt like there was someone watching me."
She wrote "Ghost of a Texas Ladies' Man" about the night. It reached number 2 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart in March 1992, and her account ran on the front page of the Statesman that June, the earliest newspaper account of the Driskill hauntings anyone has found.
The hotel has a name for him.
Jesse Lincoln Driskill was a cattle baron who opened the place on December 20, 1886: 60 steam-heated rooms, 6 million pressed bricks, separate street entrances for men and women. Within months his general manager and half the staff were hired away by a Galveston hotel, and the Driskill closed its doors. The Handbook of Texas says a late spring freeze killed 3,000 of his cattle in 1888 and he sold the hotel when he could not meet the payments. He died of a stroke on May 3, 1890, "some said a broken man." The hotel's own timeline records that four months later it bought the life-size portrait of him that still presides over the lobby.
The building has been smoke-free for over a decade and still smells, people report, of cigar. A security guard alone on a balcony went looking for the source of it, the story goes, and a voice he could not see asked him, "Got a match?" He quit.
He is not the only one still on shift. Guests and housekeepers describe an older gentleman in dark pants and a white shirt stepping off the elevator, checking his pocket watch, nodding to the front desk and dissolving. They call him Peter Lawless, a railroad ticket agent who moved onto the fifth floor after his wife died and lived there 31 years.
Austin Ghost Tours has walked visitors through that lobby for years, and its own assessment is the oddest thing on record: "relative to hotels in general the Driskill has known very little death." The company does not credit the hauntings to anyone dying in the building. It credits them to the employees and long-term residents who spent most of their lives inside it. The Colonel built the place and lost it. Lawless lived in it three decades. Nobody there is haunting the hotel, by that reading. They are just still at work.
