Tour guides say the security company that watches UT Austin's Littlefield House will not check on it unless multiple motion detectors trip, because one is always going off somewhere inside. A piano plays with nobody at it.
Everyone who works inside the Littlefield House on the University of Texas campus in Austin describes the woman the same way. A full, floor-length period dress. An upstairs hallway. Nobody has ever been able to describe her face.
"Everyone kind of unanimously knew that there was a woman in a very full period dress," Austin Ghost Tours guide Monica Ballard said of the staff. "No one could describe her face."
The piano is the other constant. It is the most-repeated thing reported in the house, and the accounts scatter by floor: students hear it upstairs at night, staff hear it during the day, some tellings put it on the second floor and some on the first. A student research project on the house puts Alice's real piano room on the ground floor, beside the main staircase.
Major George Washington Littlefield built the house for Alice in 1893, and it is the oldest building on the central campus. The red brick came from St. Louis. The same student project has the mortar mixed with crushed quartz so the facade would sparkle from the street, and the Daily Texan credits Marshall Field & Co. with furnishing the rooms. Their two children died in infancy, so the couple filled the place with about 30 nieces and nephews attending the University.
Afterward the house did ordinary campus work. During World War II it was the Naval ROTC building, with two anti-aircraft guns on the front lawn and a firing range in the attic where the bullet holes are still visible. Today the ground floor hosts University functions, the upstairs is office space, and the public is not allowed in.
The people who lock it up have things to say. Haunted ATX guide Loretta Adams says a security guard told her that when he is the last one out at night, he hears someone walking around upstairs. She also says the security company will not send anyone to check the house unless multiple motion detectors trip at once, because there is always one going off somewhere inside. In the main hall hangs a portrait whose left eye, KVUE reported, follows visitors across the room.
All of it gets pinned on Alice, through a story the ghost tours tell: that the Major locked her in the attic whenever he left town, afraid Yankees would come for her, and that she went to pieces up there. David Gracy, a Littlefield descendant, the family's historian and a professor emeritus at UT, says none of that ever happened. "There is no basis for that and it trashes the character of those people," he told the Daily Texan.
The family pressed it further. When UT posted the haunting rumors on its own website, the descendants asked for them to come down, and the University took them down. The Daily Texan reported that when its reporter asked to interview the staff who work in the house, University Events declined to make them available, so as not to encourage the rumors.
