Six witnesses at Sons of Hermann Hall in Dallas watched a couple in Victorian clothes climb the grand staircase one afternoon. Half an hour later, every door on the second floor was locked and nobody was up there at all.
Six people inside Sons of Hermann Hall in Dallas watched a couple in Victorian clothes walk past them one afternoon and start up the grand staircase. Nobody found it strange. Glenn Marvin, one of the six, assumed a wedding party was rehearsing. About 30 minutes later the group went up after them. "Doors are all locked, nobody up here," Marvin told NBC 5. "We searched this whole place over and there was nobody here." He described the afternoon years later and said it had not loosened its grip: "To this day, it still just raises the hair on the back of my neck."
The hall is a two-story wood-frame building at 3414 Elm Street, put up in 1911 by four German fraternal lodges that pooled their money for the land. The City of Dallas calls it one of the last remaining wood frame commercial buildings downtown, and the order has kept it as its lodge hall ever since. The bar inside was carved in Germany and shipped over. There's a swing dance on Wednesdays.
One room downstairs is called the Old Bowling Alley, because that's what it was: three lanes, league play against the Houston lodges starting around 1917, abandoned in the 1960s when pin boys got scarce and commercial alleys could offer unlimited lanes. The floor is original. People report hearing the sound of bowling in there, six decades after the last ball rolled. CBS Texas reported a voice in that room too, and the people who know the building say it belongs to Louie Bernardt, the original caretaker. No lodge record seems to carry the name. The city's 1986 landmark report lists members by name, and Bernardt isn't among them.
Upstairs, the ballroom does something else. Bobby Wilbanks, the hall's board president, has heard children running across the empty floor above him. "The chairs moving, the tables moving," he said. Others hear children laughing when there are no children in the building. Doors open on their own, objects go missing, paintings come off the walls. The story attached to the staircase is that a woman fell to her death from the top of it during a dance and never stopped using the stairs, though nobody names her and no source dates the fall.
Kathy Warwick, who teaches dance lessons there, sees flashes of shadow and light after everyone else has gone home. Nobody at the hall sounds afraid of any of it. "There's a lot we don't understand about what we cannot see right in front of our face," Warwick told the camera crew. "It doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means we don't understand it yet. In the meantime, enjoy it."
The lights behind her flickered as she said it.
