Up a staircase above the Star Cafe in the Fort Worth Stockyards, Miss Molly's Hotel keeps a madam who stands at the foot of the bed at 3 a.m., a cowboy who arrives as cigar smoke, and something that leaves coins in empty rooms.
Miss Molly's Hotel sits at the top of a staircase off Exchange Avenue in the Fort Worth Stockyards, eight rooms above the Star Cafe, and the people who sleep there keep waking around 3 in the morning to find a woman standing at the foot of the bed, watching them.
Paula Gowins, the innkeeper, told CBS 11 in 2017 that across her whole time running the place, "(we) only had one couple jump out of bed."
Gowins believes the woman is Josie King, the last madam, and the premier room upstairs carries her name. Ghost tour companies tell it with a different woman in the frame: Mary "Miss Molly" McAnulty, who they say ran the floor when it was called The Oasis and died in the mid-1950s. Neither name surfaces in a Tarrant County burial record or a digitized newspaper. Both women exist entirely in the telling.
The floor itself is old enough to have earned either one. The Architecture in Fort Worth survey entry for the building tracks a ground level that turned over again and again, from King's Cafe in the 1920s to a liquor store to the Black-eyed Pea to the Star Cafe today, while the second story stayed a boarding house or a hotel the whole way through. It was the Palace Rooms from 1910, then The Oasis, a speakeasy through Prohibition, then the Gayatte Hotel in the 1940s, which ran as a bordello. The Stockyards' official lodging page quotes a sign preserved at the property: "Street ladies bringing in sailors must pay for room in advance."
The madam isn't the only one on the floor. A cowboy the staff call Jake announces himself as cigar smoke in the hallways of a smoke-free building, and Gowins says she has seen him. "I saw him in full body," she told a Dallas news crew. "He walked into a room and shut the door behind him, and I went up and knocked on the door and opened the door and no one was in there."
Then there's the money. The 2005 Encyclopedia of Haunted Places quotes the owner at the time, Dawn Street-Boyd, on a housekeeper who quit: she kept finding coins in rooms that had gone unrented, cleared them away, finished up, and came back to find the coins sitting where she'd just cleaned. The staff call it the Tipping Ghost.
None of the eight rooms has a television or a telephone. Seven of them share hallway bathrooms with iron tubs and pull-chain toilets. The rooms have names instead of numbers: Miss Josie's, Miss Amelia's, Cowboy, Cattlemen's, Rodeo, Gunslinger, Railroader.
Which is the strange part about the most-repeated version of the madam's story. It puts her in room 214.
