As the air gets colder and the leaves start to crunch beneath your feet, there are many Oak Cliff haunts you may want to explore to get into the fall spirit. Maybe sneaking a peek at the haunted Suddarth Mansion, hoping to witness the black mist figure of a woman at The Texas Theatre, or walking the trail of Coombs Creek where underneath the wooden railroad track the ghostly specter of a girl riding her bicycle.
Mike Rhyner, Oak Cliff native and host of the podcast Your Dark Companion, knew of the Suddarth Mansion that lays at South Hampton and Camp Wisdom Roads growing up.
“It was said to be haunted, and there were people who said that they can see the silhouette of a woman in the window who was sitting there with a shotgun or rifle or something like that, a weapon of some kind,” he says. “And there were said to be strange noises coming from there. And the general consensus that everybody came to was, ‘Yes, that house is haunted.’ As far as I know it still stands today.”
Some other unique Oak Cliff ghost stories can no longer be seen within the former city borders.
What was once on the Miller Plantation, close to the Trinity River within Oak Cliff, was the Millermore Mansion.
Belonging to William Brown Miller, a slave owner and ferry businessman, the estate was constructed prior to the Civil War as a Greek revival home. With tall white columns that frame the entrance, the center balcony once overlooked what is today South Oak Cliff along Bonnie View Road.
Now located at the Dallas Heritage Village in Old City Park, the Millermore Mansion preserves its past life and a piece of Oak Cliff. The mansion sparked the move of over 30 historic buildings when a restraining order kept Texas Wrecking and Salvage from demolishing the building in 1966.
Some individuals claim that the ghost of William Brown Miller’s second wife, Minerva Barnes Miller, lives in the upstairs bedroom. Other oddities that occur in the former Oak Cliff residence include dramatic temperature shifts and objects moving in the mansion by themselves when no one is looking.
Although Rhyner says he has not heard of The Millermore Mansion, another haunted house he knew of was one located in Stevens Park, which has since been torn down.
“It’s said that there was a woman who lived there by herself, an old woman, and really the only substantiation that I ever got was that she lived there by herself, and she would sit there in the front window, and you would hear strange noises coming from there,” he says.
With the nickname “Granny’s House,” the home on Plymouth Road often had kids and teenagers go over and end up being chased away or in some sort of trouble.
“Reputation was that one year, some trick-or-treaters went up there, and this old woman who was almost skeletal-like came there, came to answer the door, and scared everybody off,” he says. “So it got the reputation as being haunted. But that’s really it. I mean, there wasn’t a whole lot to that, although I do remember what the house looked like, and if someone was going to set a movie or a TV show or something in a haunted house, this would have done the trick. It had the look and it had the vibe.”
Also in relation to Stevens Park is the intersection of Colorado Boulevard and Hampton Road, where a former osteopathic hospital once sat. Although Rhyner says he personally has not heard this story, in an article from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram published in October 1989 a man who formerly worked as a medic at the hospital shared his story of “the Ghost Doctor of Dallas.”
In the summer of 1983, he recalled talk from nurses of a ghost on the second floor of the hospital that was a former doctor who had died by suicide. One night, the medic received a patient who had shot himself and after several minutes was pronounced dead.
The medic and a fellow nurse later “turned and looked through the glass and saw a physician with a stethoscope around his neck,” which would’ve been common for the hospital, but the two realized that the doctor was consoling and talking to the patient he “had just brought in, the one with the gun shot.”
The medic then witnessed the two deceased mysteriously pass through a doorway they were too wide for and go up the stairwell, not realizing what he really witnessed until afterwards.
In the article, he is quoted saying that both the man and the doctor had been “distraught over family problems, money problems” and “both had shot themselves with handguns, both had shot themselves in the head and both had shot themselves in their offices” — lists of similarities that seemed to have drawn the two spirits together.
Although these stories have been passed down for generations, proof is becoming increasingly difficult because of relocation and times gone on.
“I mean, it was nothing more than just, kids’ hearsay more than anything else you know,” Rhyner says. “We were teenagers, and we were just all wanting to make something out of nothing if we possibly could.”
Many still agree that even with haunts fading away, our Oak Cliff neighborhood continues to give off that spooky season vibe.
