DALLAS — When progress progressed to the wild, wild west, all that history had to go somewhere.
Dallas’ Old City Park houses roughly two dozen structures from Texas’ past. However, the park isn’t just a collection of old buildings.
“Oh no, it’s haunted,” Peggy Helmick-Richardson, a tour guide at Old City Park, said. “I think it meets all the criteria.”
Helmick-Richardson has given a lot of tours at Old City Park and said she may have not believed in ghosts if she hadn’t seen them herself.
One day, alone inside the Millermore Mansion, with only one way in and out and the doors locked, Helmick-Richardson saw a woman in a brown dress go up the stairs.
“Just kind of glided up,” she said. “So I get up and go up the stairs and there was nobody there.”
Several others, credible people Helmick-Richardson said, have seen the same woman, likely the wife of the home’s namesake, William Brown Miller.
Two volunteers, a man and a young woman, even felt her while taking a promotional photo in this doorway.
“All of a sudden the two of them were pushed forcefully apart,” said Helmick-Richardson.
However, Helmick-Richardson said the ghost she knows best resides in the Sullivan House.
Multiple times, while waiting on visitors, she sat quietly when, from the opposite end of the hall, her silence was interrupted.
“There’d be a knock on the door,” she said. “And then there’d be a pounding on the door so hard, but every time I ran back there, nobody was there. It happened at least a half a dozen times.”
At least half a dozen other buildings at Old City Park have similar stories.
“In these buildings, there is a lot of attachment,” Helmick-Richardson said.
Old City Park: where the past is always present.