Guides at Millermore in Dallas keep seeing a woman in a long brown dress rise up the main staircase and stand in the upstairs window beside the nursery. She gets named for two of the builder's wives. Neither of them died in the house.
Guides at Millermore, the antebellum mansion at the heart of Old City Park in Dallas, keep seeing a woman in a long brown dress on the main staircase. She doesn't climb it so much as rise, and by the time anyone reaches the landing she is gone. Peggy Helmick-Richardson, a historian and tour guide at the park, watched it happen while she was alone in the house with the doors locked and one way in or out. "Just kind of glided up," she said. "So I get up and go up the stairs and there was nobody there."
Other people put the same woman in the front foyer, and in the middle upstairs window, the one beside the nursery. Evelyn Montgomery, who ran collections at the park for 18 years, has fielded the reports for most of that time. "A lot of people claim they have seen a mysterious ghostly woman in the primary bedroom in the window," she said. Security guards have described feeling a presence coming out of that room toward the nursery. Montgomery is careful about what it adds up to: "We don't know if anyone ever died in there." She has never experienced anything herself.
The nursery holds the strangest story on the tour, and it comes from the ghost-tour outfit Dallas Terrors. A longtime guide and a male colleague heard shrieking from upstairs, like an infant. They went up and found the crib empty. The crying started again as they headed back down, so they climbed a second time, and the crib had moved across the hall into the master bedroom with scratch marks on the floor behind it. They left it where it was, and the crying stopped.
Who she is depends on who is telling it. CBS News names Emma, the third wife of builder William Brown Miller. Dallas Terrors names Minerva, the second, and has both women dying inside the house. The records disagree. Minerva Barnes Miller died in 1856, while the house was going up; the Dallas Terrors account itself describes a build that ran seven years on hand-cut cedar and post oak hauled by oxen, and a state marker dates the work 1855 to 1862. Emma's Find a Grave memorial puts her death in 1899 at Mineral Wells, out in Palo Pinto County. Helmick-Richardson will only say the woman is likely the wife of the home's namesake.
And the staircase she rises is not where she would have known it. In 1966 the house was slated for demolition in Oak Cliff. A local history of the heritage village has a group of women led by Mrs. Sawnie Aldredge putting themselves in front of the bulldozers, and the Founders Garden Club then raising the money to take Millermore apart, store it, and rebuild it downtown in City Park. Saving the house is what created the museum around it. Whatever goes up those stairs followed the cedar and the post oak to an address the Millers never lived at.
