The Driskill Hotel

The Driskill Hotel was built to be the finest hotel in Texas, and for a long time it was.

It rises four stories over Sixth Street in downtown Austin, a massive Romanesque pile of brick and limestone with arched entrances, carved stone, and a grand lobby of marble floors, stained glass and soaring columns. Over the main entrance, carved in stone, are the faces of the man who built it and his two sons. Above the other entrances are carved longhorn steers.

The hotel opened in December 1886. It has been the scene of inaugural balls for Texas governors, the first date of a future president and his wife, and countless weddings, deals and drinks at the bar. It has also been called the most haunted hotel in Texas.

The Cattle Baron

Jesse Lincoln Driskill was a cattleman who made his fortune driving herds of longhorns north from Texas to Kansas and selling beef to the Confederate Army during the Civil War. By the 1880s, he was one of the richest men in the state. He wanted a monument, and he spent a fortune on the hotel that bore his name.

It didn’t last. Within two years of the grand opening, a severe drought and a hard winter killed thousands of his cattle. Driskill lost much of his fortune. In 1888 he lost the hotel too, reportedly in a poker game, though the details are disputed. He died in 1890.

Many people believe he never left.

Staff and guests report smelling cigar smoke in the hotel’s rooms and halls, especially on the upper floors — even though the hotel is non-smoking. Some say the smell is strongest near the room where Driskill supposedly kept his own suite. Others report lights turning on and off in rooms near that floor, and a figure in nineteenth-century clothes who appears briefly and is gone. Staff call it the Colonel’s way of letting them know he’s still around.

Samantha

The most famous ghost at the Driskill, though, is a little girl.

According to the hotel’s legend, in the late 1880s, a Texas senator was staying at the Driskill with his family, including his four-year-old daughter, Samantha. During a legislative session, the senator was in a meeting downstairs when Samantha slipped away from her nanny. She was playing with a ball on the grand staircase, bouncing it down the marble steps, when she slipped and fell, tumbling down the stairs to her death.

Guests and staff since then have reported hearing a little girl giggling on the staircase, and the sound of a ball bouncing down the steps. Some say they’ve seen a small girl in an old-fashioned dress near the stairs on the second floor.

A portrait of a little girl holding flowers hangs on the fourth floor of the hotel. Many guests say that her expression seems to change as they look at her — from a smile to a frown — and that some people feel dizzy or faint when they stand before the painting. The portrait is often said to be of Samantha, though the hotel’s history suggests it was painted in the late nineteenth century and its subject may simply be an unknown child.

I have been unable to find historical records of a senator’s daughter named Samantha dying at the Driskill. The story may have grown from a real tragedy that has been lost, or from the portrait itself. Either way, she has become the hotel’s most beloved ghost.

The Brides

There is a darker legend at the Driskill, and it’s one I’ll tell carefully.

It concerns Room 525, which was closed for many years. According to the story, two different brides, decades apart, died by their own hands in the same room, each on the anniversary of their wedding or shortly after a heartbreak. The stories are vague, the details vary, and I have not been able to confirm either death in the historical record. But guests and staff say the room has an unusual, heavy atmosphere, and that people sometimes report the sound of running water in the bathroom and hear a woman crying.

The Man by the Elevator

Another resident ghost has a name: Peter J. Lawless.

According to hotel history, Lawless was a man who lived at the Driskill for decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Staff and guests report seeing a well-dressed man in old-fashioned clothes near the elevators on the fifth floor, checking his pocket watch and looking around as if waiting for someone. When they look back, he’s gone. Staff say he’s Mr. Lawless, still waiting for the elevator a century later.

Presidents and Rock Stars

The Driskill has a long history with the famous and powerful.

In 1934, a young congressional aide named Lyndon Baines Johnson had his first date with a young woman named Claudia Alta Taylor — known to everyone as Lady Bird — in the Driskill’s dining room. They married a few months later. Johnson returned to the hotel many times over the years. On election night in 1964, he waited for the returns in a suite at the Driskill, and his presidential campaign celebrated his landslide victory there.

Musicians, actors and politicians have stayed at the hotel for more than a century, and some of them have had their own encounters. Staff tell many stories of famous guests who left a little more unsettled than they arrived.

A Living Hotel

What I find charming about the Driskill is that its ghosts are, for the most part, gentle. A cattle baron who still smokes his cigars. A little girl bouncing a ball. A gentleman waiting for an elevator. They feel less like horror stories than like part of the furniture — echoes of the people who once filled this grand old hotel with life.

There is, of course, the darker story of Room 525, and stories like it remind us that hotels see sorrow as well as celebration. But mostly, the Driskill’s ghosts seem to be people who loved the place, and didn’t want to leave.

I can’t say I blame them.