Robert Love was shot twice in the chest in his first-floor office at the Texas State Capitol in 1903. Tourists and state troopers describe him coming up the promenade in a top hat, and handprints keep surfacing on a Senate window in the east wing.
The Texas State Capitol in Austin has a comptroller who never went home. People describe a man in an outdated business suit and a top hat coming up the promenade toward the building, and he has startled tourists and state troopers both. Fiona Broome, a psychic and the author of *The Ghosts of Austin, Texas*, spent five years researching the city and says she saw him herself. "The Capitol is haunted day and night," she told CBS News. "If you've got a nice, misty day there, people see ghosts walking up the path to the Capitol building all the time."
They think he is Robert Marshall Love, and his last day at work is on the record with the state itself.
On June 30, 1903, Love was the State Comptroller of Texas, working out of a first-floor office. A former employee named William Hill came to see him. Love greeted him and invited him in. Hill handed him a one-page letter he had written, and shot him twice in the chest as he read it. The chief bookkeeper, J. W. Stephens, heard the shots and ran the fleeing man down; in the struggle Hill was shot as well, and died the same day. Love's second great nephew, the Austin broadcaster Dave Garland, told KVUE that Hill had been a clerk under Love, fired in 1901 the moment Love took the office. Nobody has ever printed what the letter said.
Love lived long enough to speak. The Handbook of Texas records his last words: "I have no idea why he shot me. May the Lord bless him and forgive him. I cannot say more." Whether he died in his office or hours later elsewhere in Austin depends on the teller: the Handbook has him dying several hours later in the city, while the ghost tours keep him in the room. KVUE's account of the murder notes the Comptroller's office has since moved out of the building. The sign over the door stayed.
The other one is in the east wing, and it involves a window. On foggy mornings, handprints surface in the condensation on the glass of a Senate reception room. Cleaning staff wash them off. They come back.
That room was a bedroom until February 6, 1983, when an electrical fire broke out before dawn in Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby's apartment behind the Senate chamber. Matthew Paul Hansen, 23, a horse trainer from New Caney, died of smoke inhalation. Hobby's teenage daughter and two other guests got out, and KUT's account of that night has Governor Mark White hauling oxygen tanks to stifled firefighters. By Austin Ghost Tours' telling, Hansen was in the middle bedroom and went for the window rather than the door, not knowing it had been nailed shut.
The apartment was never rebuilt as living quarters. The space became the Lieutenant Governor's Reception Room, and the window is the same one.
