From laughable to downright creepy, these local legends make for a good yarn
The Lady of the Lake and Snuffer’s spirits are not the only ghosts that haunt the neighborhood. Some of the others are well known; others come and go. But they are out there:
• Flagpole Hill. In the 1840s and 1850s, when Dallas was nothing more than some cabins on the banks of the Trinity River, a group of white settlers are said to have massacred the inhabitants of an Indian encampment in the wilderness on Flagpole Hill. Today, the spirits of the Indians are said to roam the hill, throwing rocks and garbage at passing traffic on Northwest Highway. This story dates to the early 1980s, say researchers, and there is little documentation that the massacre occurred.
• The Crystal Chandelier. Before the Lizard Lounge at Swiss and Good-Latimer was a hipster hangout, it was a dinner theater called the Crystal Chandelier. One of its frequent visitors was a ghost, a man in a dark suit and possibly a top hat, who would walk up the steps to the stage, then disappear back stage. Researchers say some Lizard Lounge patrons claim to still see him, especially after closing, but he is never there when they search backstage.
• The haunted medieval table. In 1973, an SMU student bought a table at the Pier I at Medallion Center. Several weeks later, the student returned the table, saying that since it had been in his house, the lights and water would go on and off and that religious articles would be turned over. Pier I employees noticed hot spots in the table when it was back in the store. Eventually, reported the Dallas Morning News, a psychic discovered that a 16th-century nobleman was imprisoned in the table.
• Olla Podrida. Today, the once-popular shopping center at Coit and LBJ is gone, the site to be a Hebrew day school. But in its heyday in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was said to be home to two sets of ghosts — a husband, wife, boy and girl, dressed for travel in the style of the 1930s and 1940s, and a sad woman in black who sat in the back row of the center’s Gaslight Playhouse. The family would wander the halls at night, after the shops were closed, the man smoking a cigar. Perhaps they were looking for their flight, for Olla Podrida had once been the site of an airplane hangar. The woman, meanwhile, would vanish when anyone approached her. So far, says the official overseeing the school construction, no one at the site has noticed anything untoward.
• Prairie Avenue home. In 1972, according to the Dallas Times Herald, renters at a house on Prairie Avenue complained to their landlord about odd noses coming from inside their walls — bumping and knocking. There also seemed to be some sort of odor. Eventually, the tenants moved, terrified by the goings on, and leaving the landlord little alternative other than ripping out the walls. Nothing, said the newspaper, was found when he did.
