April Slaughter (24 page)

FOR TWENTY-THREE YEARS, Nell Baeten has known there are ghosts in her restaurant.

“I have never set out to convince anyone that there are spirits here, and I never will,” she said. “Strange things happen all the time and the spirits here have become part of my life. Fact is, it’s my job to run the restaurant, not to try and make anyone else believe it is haunted.”

That was how my conversation with Nell began when I made my first trip out to the Grey Moss Inn and expressed my desire to include it in a book about Texas haunts. Several of my friends had dined at the restaurant over the years, and had suggested to me that it had a resident ghost or two.

Anyone can claim to have ghosts, and I have found it is not at all uncommon for places of business to conveniently become “haunted.” Let’s face it—ghosts are intriguing, and have the
potential of drawing in a crowd. It’s a great marketing tool if you can pull it off, and I have seen it happen often. What impressed me most about Nell and the Grey Moss Inn is that she acknowledges that the resident ghosts are there but doesn’t use them to attract customers.

Texas is big state, and I had scores of locations I could have chosen to include in this book, but in the end, I wanted to bring attention to the places I most believed in. The Grey Moss Inn is one such place. The restaurant is well-known for its delectable menu and impeccable customer service, and not so much for its ghosts, but the more I got to know about the paranormal goings on there, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit and share its story.

The restaurant was built just outside of Grey Forest, Texas, in 1929 and was originally run by Mary Howell. She lived in a small cottage on the property and took great pride in serving her customers. Up until recently, little had changed in the main dining room of the restaurant over the years except for the occasional change in paint color. In early 2009, the Baetens decided it was time for a bit of an overhaul and hired contractors to remodel the restaurant.

“I knew before we even started on it that the spirits here would be disturbed,” said Nell. “I didn’t mention it to any of the men that came in to work on the remodel, but I wasn’t at all surprised when they mentioned they had seen things in the restaurant.”

“What did they see?” I asked.

“There were three or four guys sanding down some of the wood who said they saw several different people moving around as they worked. They also caught sight of a woman in the garden room who just up and disappeared.”

The contractors also noticed several people they had not seen before wandering around the restaurant, as if they were busy working on their own tasks. As soon as their attention was drawn to them they were no longer there.

“Is this place haunted?” they asked Nell.

As soon as the dining room renovation was completed, Nell began putting up her own personal touches on the walls and shelves.

“I had a beautiful plate I wanted to display on one of the shelves. It didn’t exactly go with the room’s décor, but I really liked it,” she said. “It was red and had these beautiful gold foil streaks running through it. As soon as I put it up on the shelf and made sure it was secure, I thought to myself,
I wonder how the spirits will like this plate, as it’s so different
.”

Just as the thought crossed Nell’s mind, the plate began to fall forward. She quickly reacted to grab it, but it toppled over the back of her hands and smashed to pieces on the floor.

“I guess they answered
that
question,” she remarked.

“How do the employees feel about your ghostly residents?” I asked her.

“Well, one of our servers was spooked a little one night,” Nell answered. “At the end of the day, he would walk around the restaurant to make sure everything was shut down and locked for the night before leaving. On this particular night, as he walked to the office area, he glanced back in the direction of the main dining room and noticed there was a light on. He knew he had just turned that light out moments earlier. As he walked back in to turn it off, he reached for the switch and glanced across the adjacent dining room, where he saw a face staring back at him. He moved slowly and watched as the face mirrored his movements exactly.”

“Was he seeing his own reflection in something?” I asked.

“He said the man looked nothing like him, and it was just a face—nothing more,” she replied. “He had been such a doubting Thomas before that happened. Needless to say, he believed the stories a bit more after that incident.”

More than one apparition has been seen in the restaurant,
and no one knows exactly who they are. According to one psychic who visited the Grey Moss Inn, the foundation of the building belonged originally to a church. She could see a group of people as they sat in what she described as church pews. She had the distinct impression that Mormons had once wanted to settle in the area. Though the church building was no longer there, was its faithful congregation from the past still coming here to worship?

“Even when I say things are calm and uneventful here in the restaurant, they’re not,” Nell continued.

“I’ll be sitting in the office when I am the only one here,” she continued. “And I’ll feel this strange need to scoot my chair up closer to the desk. I feel this sense of someone needing to get by me and then think to myself,
wait, there isn’t anyone else here
.”

Wherever there is a good ghost story, there is a paranormal investigator hot on its trail. Eddie Hill of After Dark Paranormal in San Antonio had come to the Grey Moss Inn with his team to see what activity they could capture with their array of technical tools. During one of their investigations, they set up motion-triggered photography equipment and watched from the porch as several flashes went off inside the restaurant. Confident they had captured something anomalous on film, they reviewed the pictures and found that there was no obvious explanation for the cameras having gone off.

One of the greatest frustrations among investigators is experiencing paranormal phenomena without the ability to record it for everyone else to see. Scientific tools are invaluable, and there are indeed times when we get lucky and catch something with it, but unexplained things can and do happen that science has not yet been able to prove. Does that mean the phenomenon we’re experiencing doesn’t really exist? No. In my view, it is an indication that science needs to evolve just as our theories and perceptions have evolved since the dawn of human existence.
No one piece of equipment is the say-all-end-all answer. Everything we do in the paranormal field is purely experimental.

Why not begin creating different equations to determine what the final result will be? That is exactly what Eddie and After Dark Paranormal did. Christine Sollers is a psychic sensitive who works with the team, and on her very first visit to the Grey Moss Inn, she indicated that the energetic environment was a bit too much for her and she would not be staying. She did, however, return on other scheduled visits to the restaurant and would eventually relay some interesting impressions about the property to Nell.

As she entered the kitchen, Christine felt as though that space was occupied by a male spirit who was not very pleasant. Oddly enough, the kitchen has always been an area where a lot of freak accidents happen. Glasses sitting securely on their shelves have often flown into the air before smashing into pieces on the floor. A pot of boiling water once spilled onto a cook with no apparent explanation. Christine felt as though the presence in the kitchen was an angry spirit that didn’t like others being in his space.

In further discussions with Eddie Hill, he described a bizarre incident that happened as Nell escorted him to the wine cellar.

“The door to the wine cellar was locked,” he said, “and as Nell went to open it with her key we heard what sounded like glass hitting the ground. As she opened the door, we saw about five bottles on the floor that had broken. One of them was still intact and was rolling straight toward us.”

I imagine it would become rather frustrating for a restaurant owner to have things like this happen, not just because it indicates something paranormal may be happening, but because having to replace glasses and bottles of wine tends to add to the cost of running a business. However, Nell doesn’t seem to be fazed by the Grey Moss Inn ghosts. She is content to have them
around, and accepts that ghosts are a part of her everyday life.

A portrait of an unknown woman hangs on the wall in the main dining room. It has hung in the restaurant for years, and Nell has always thought that there might have been another portrait of someone underneath that of the woman. It would be impossible to verify without destroying it, though, so she never paid much attention to it.

One evening, a group of women seated in the dining room near the portrait mentioned to Nell that she thought she saw a man faintly standing in the background of it. Luckily, they had brought a digital camera with them and had offered to take a picture. The viewfinder clearly showed the man in the portrait just before a photograph was taken, but once the picture was stored and reviewed in the camera, he was no longer there.

When Eddie Hill and his wife came to the restaurant for dinner a short time later, Nell asked him to take another series of pictures. He snapped six consecutive shots; the first five showed nothing out of the ordinary, but the sixth was a success. The man only a few people had noticed and had been unable to photograph finally appeared in a picture. Who was he, and why was he visible only part of the time? No one has yet been able to offer an explanation.

“My physical self makes space for the spirits here. My higher self is aware of them being around as well, and I just carry on with what I need to do,” said Nell.

When in south Texas, visit the Grey Moss Inn for a wonderful dining experience, and remember—it’s what’s both on and
off
the menu that just might keep you coming back for more.