The state marker on the lawn of the Texas Governor's Mansion in Austin records a ghost story outright. A governor's nephew shot himself in an upstairs guest room in 1864, and moaning behind that door is still reported.
On the lawn of the Texas Governor's Mansion in Austin, a state historical marker tells visitors the house is haunted. The Texas Historical Commission erected it in 1969, and one sentence after recording that Sam Houston decided here in 1861 not to support the Confederacy, the bronze reads: the mansion "acquired a ghost story after the nephew of Gov. Pendleton Murrah (1863-1865) committed suicide here."
The marker doesn't give his name. Nothing does. He came to stay during Murrah's Civil War governorship, the story goes, while a young woman was also a guest in the house, and he fell for her hard enough to propose within days. She refused him. Texas Monthly puts the death in 1864 and the nephew at 19, shot by his own hand in an upstairs guest room; the ghost tours say 1865. The magazine also noted, in 2005, that 141 years later "some gubernatorial staffers consider the subject, well, ta-boo."
The tellings put the room on the north side of the second floor, where the plan repeats the first floor's four large bedrooms off a central hall. Staff refused to clean it, the story runs, and Governor Andrew J. Hamilton had the door sealed, the room opened again only during 20th-century renovation work. No state record of a sealed door exists. The Historical Commission's file doesn't mention one, and neither do the restoration histories. The chronology at least holds: Hamilton took the house as provisional governor in the summer of 1865.
What people report is a sound. Sobbing behind that bedroom door, muffled and close. Pacing on the second floor, doorknobs rattling, cold in the hall outside. He is said to be busiest on Sundays, the day he is supposed to have died, though no account gives the date to check it against.
He shares the upstairs. Sam Houston bought the mahogany four-poster that still stands in the southeast bedroom, and the accounts have him around it too, said to vanish if anyone speaks to him. In the 1980s, Governor Mark White's wife Linda switched off the light above Houston's portrait in the hallway outside their bedroom and found it burning again in the morning, with nobody admitting to the switch. The tellings say it kept happening the whole time they lived there.
On June 8, 2008, someone threw a Molotov cocktail onto the front porch while the Perrys were in Europe. Officials said another ten minutes of burning would have taken the landmark. The house was gutted, rebuilt over four years, and the first family moved back in the summer of 2012. Every telling of the nephew is written as timeless legend. Not one of them dates a sighting after the fire.
