WAXAHACHIE, Texas — Downtown Waxahachie has a lot of ghosts. Just don’t tell that to the guy who makes a living promoting ghosts.
“I’m the skeptic,” said Doug Reid, owner of Waxahachie Haunted History Tours. “I look at it and say, ‘you can explain this away. You can explain that.”
Reid says if any place were to make him a believer, it’d be the Rogers Hotel.
Originally built in the 1840s, it burned down twice. The current and third rendition of the hotel opened in 1913.
Although the hotel left decades ago, some guests never did.
“In a second-floor room here, there was piano music coming out of it,” Reid said.
According to Reid, those sounds came during a time decades ago when the building was empty and there was no piano inside.
Since then, Jim Lake Companies, which redeveloped much of Waxahachie, turned the Rogers Hotel into retail space and apartments and the encounters have only grown.
One time, a restaurant owner heard a loud noise, so he checked his security camera and saw a Halloween decoration fall from a shelf by itself.
Elsewhere, at the building’s barber shop, a cop was getting a haircut when his phone floated off the counter, across the room and fell to the ground.
“And the officer goes, ‘Finish me. Get me out of here. I don’t do ghosts. Let me go,’” Reid recalled.
The cause behind anything unusual, most people believe, is a little girl who reportedly drowned in the basement swimming pool, which today is off limits all dried up.
One woman even reportedly captured the little girl’s face in the bathroom mirror, in a similar location as the reported drowning.
However, the person with the most unbelievable encounter is hard to believe.
“There was a knocking on the wall in that first stall,” Reid remembered experiencing as he used the restroom. "Just a, almost a panic-type knock. That knock followed me till I got out to this wall.”
And what’s on the other side of that wall?
“The swimming pool where supposedly the little girl drowned,” Reid said. “I did not wait to see if whatever was going to come out through to this space.”
It’s got to be a ghost, right?
“As far as I’ll go is there are some things I cannot explain,” Reid laughed.