Thistle Hill, a cattle baron's mansion in Fort Worth, keeps a woman on its horseshoe staircase who asks after her husband and has no feet below the knee. Staff once greeted her by name every morning. The site manager says nobody ever died in the house.
The woman on the horseshoe staircase at Thistle Hill, the mansion at 1509 Pennsylvania Avenue in Fort Worth, Texas, is said to ask one question. In a 1989 account collected by the directory Texas Haunted Houses, a security guard watched her come down the oak stairs and heard her ask, "have you seen my husband?" Then he looked down at where her feet should have been. "No feet," he said. "Her legs just faded into nothing."
She has been on those stairs since the restoration crews arrived. When work began on the shuttered house in the 1970s, workers reported two figures: a woman in a white gown on the landing, and a man in tennis clothes with a handlebar moustache. They also reported orchestra music coming out of the third-floor ballroom, which was closed off, and where the original owners had thrown their themed dances.
Those owners were A. B. Wharton and his bride Electra Waggoner, daughter of the rancher W. T. Waggoner. The firm of Sanguinet & Staats built the house for them in 1903 and 1904, and Electra named it for the thistles blanketing the pasture around it. She died in New York City in 1925, at 43. The cattleman Winfield Scott bought the place, poured roughly another $100,000 into remodeling it, and died in 1911 without ever living there.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram put the ghosts in print on February 17, 1981. The article itself was never digitized, but UTA's Special Collections still holds staff photographer Gene Gordon's illustration for it: a ghost-like woman in a long dark dress, walking up the horseshoe staircase. Renovation workers quoted in that piece described a man in 1940s attire, black-and-white wing-tipped shoes and a grey sweater, strolling down the same stairs. Architect Larry Hoskins said he never saw an apparition. He did say the heavy cardboard boxes, too awkward to shift, never stayed where anyone put them, and one turned up with its contents emptied out.
Crystal Williams, who says she worked there in the summer of 1997, described the same house from the inside. "We often heard footsteps and music that was unexplained," she wrote, "all of us busily working in the office, with no tours on the grounds." There was a pocket of cold air on the main landing where no vent fed it. Lights went off behind them. Doors closed. And the staff, she wrote, "all had a habit of greeting Electra upon entering the house each morning."
Site manager Mark Rhodes spent nine years turning ghost hunters away. "I've never seen or heard anything," he said, and he traced the whole business to a Boy Scout Halloween fundraiser staged in the basement in the 1970s. His flattest point is the one that lands hardest: nobody has ever died in this house. Electra died in New York. Scott died before he moved in. Whoever stands on that landing asking after her husband, she did not lose him here.
