Ghostly encounters point spooky spotlight on Burnet, Llano counties

A hidden room in a historic, renovated home in Burnet filled with the smell of cigarette smoke whenever carpenters entered. During the restoration of a mid-century home in Llano, the construction crew heard doors slamming and ladders falling in uninhabited parts of the house. Ghostly footsteps echoed on the upper-floor metal stairs of the Red Top Jail in Llano when people touring the structure were downstairs. And a spiritual presence in Llano’s Badu House moved keys from one floor to another when a restaurant staff member went looking for them. 

All these and more were experienced by two people who spoke to The Picayune Magazine about their encounters with otherworldly entities. Both refused to say definitively that they believed in ghosts, but neither could explain their encounters. 

“I’m a very spiritual person, so I take a lot of these things with a grain of salt,” said Nicole Westhoff, founder of Westicke Properties LLC of Marble Falls and Fort Worth. “But it’s difficult to share an experience with multiple people at the same time and say it was just in your head.”

Westhoff said she can almost always feel a spiritual energy in the older homes she has renovated over the past 20 years of her career. Most give positive vibes, like the “smoky” room in the Dr. Williamson House at 701 E. Vandeveer St. in Burnet.

Occasionally, Westhoff has found herself working with a more negative energy, like the presence she and others felt in a house on West Street in Llano. 

When the work began on the Llano house, Westhoff, family members, and workers often stayed overnight—at least until the bad dreams started. 

“Anyone who stayed one night there would have the strangest dreams, not the most pleasant,” she said. “They would wake up very scared and say they would not do that again.” 

Others refused to walk past any dark room because of a negative energy they felt from beyond the threshold. Westhoff kept all of the lights on in the house day and night.

Westhoff was at first undeterred by the bad feelings until one particular night, when she stayed at the house alone. She was on the phone with a friend at around 3 a.m. when something strange happened.

“I got this really odd feeling, and then I felt something punch me in the leg,” she said. “I put the phone down and yelled out, ‘Is someone here? Did you do that on purpose?’ I got a huge welt on my leg that didn’t go away for about four weeks.”

The next morning, after a few sleepless hours, she tried to start her car. All of the electrical circuits went out. When she finally got home to Marble Falls, she started to tell her kids about what happened. 

“I told them, ‘Hey, there is something really creepy happening here,’ and at that time, a mirror behind me fell off the wall,” Westhoff said. “I had just gotten home. I said, ‘Well, I don’t plan to go back there by myself again.’ That’s the creepiest thing that has ever happened to me in my life.” 

She sold the Llano house a few months later and has heard no complaints from the new owners. In fact, no buyers have ever called her to say they suspect their homes were haunted, even when she thought they might be. Some homes, she believes, settle down once renovated. For example, the smell of smoke disappeared in the hidden room on Vandeveer Street.

“You could walk in there and it would smell like someone was smoking right in your face,” Westhoff said. “That continued until we put furniture in there and it was fully renovated.” 

The smoky room was once used as an office. Westhoff enclosed it behind two sliding walls of bookshelves.

“I put a hidden room in all my renovations,” she said. “This one I thought of as a speakeasy. It goes with the time period of the home.” 

Westhoff and others also felt an “energy” in another home she renovated after it was moved from Robinson City Park to Green Street in Llano. 

“There was a real pleasantness about it,” Westhoff said. “I think the home was happy it was being moved and revamped. It had been abandoned in the park for some time.” 

Although shaken by the West Street house in Llano, Westhoff maintains a positive, happy spirit of her own, strong enough to fend off most any spooky visitation, she said. 

“When it comes to spiritual things, I’m very sensitive,” she explained. “I have a strong relationship with God. He is the creator of all spirits; the creator of everything. I shy away from anything ungodly. I am as positive a person as I can be.” 

She avoids horror movies but does love a good ghost story. In preparation for this interview, she asked social media connections to send her tales of local lore. To no one’s surprise, most of the stories involved Llano, including the Badu House, Red Top Jail, and Six Mile Cemetery. 

Ray Theiss responded with his own personal experiences as a tour guide at the Red Top Jail and a staff member at the Badu House. He has been collecting ghost stories since he was a kid growing up in Kingsland. He currently lives with his wife and their children in Palacios on the Texas Gulf Coast, where he works in nuclear security.  

“I grew up in the ’90s, and my favorite books were the ‘Goosebumps’  and ‘Are You Afraid of the Dark’ book series,” he said. “That’s when I started collecting local folklore.” 

Theiss (pronounced Teiss; the “h” is silent) plans to collect all of the stories in a book he hopes to someday publish. He has had three personal experiences with spirits of some kind, all in Llano, one as recently as last year when he and his son saw the Six Mile Cemetery ghost light. 

“The Six Mile light is a big, bright orb of light that descends from the sky and lands in the cemetery,” Theiss said. “It floats toward Six Mile Creek and vanishes. It’s seen mostly in the autumn months.” 

Which is when Theiss and his 8-year-old son, Logan, witnessed it. The pair were hunting near the cemetery when the light first appeared. 

“I thought it was a planet at first, or a star. Then, it got bigger and started moving toward the ground, so I took a picture of it,” he said. 

About 15 years ago, Theiss was giving a tour of the Red Top Jail during Llano Heritage Days. He was standing on the first floor at the entrance to the metal staircase that leads to the second-floor jail cells. From there, the stairs go up to a gallows on the third floor. He and several people in the front of the group heard footsteps coming down the stairs. He looked over his shoulder to see who it was, but no one was there.

“At the time, my group was supposed to be the only ones in the building, but given the fact that there is only one entry and exit to the top floors, I figured we would run into whoever it was sooner or later,” he said. “That didn’t happen. There was no one else in the building. Whoever was coming down those metal stairs was not visible to the naked eye.”

Also while living in Llano, where he graduated from Llano High School in 2008, Theiss believes he was the brunt of a ghostly practical joke. 

“I worked as a dishwasher at the Badu House for a couple of months in 2006, generally after school,” he said. “On nights that I worked, I would use one of the upstairs rooms to change clothes in.”

To keep track of the keys to his parents’ truck, he made sure he always left them in the pocket of his school pants when he changed into his work clothes. One night, after his shift was over, he went upstairs for his clothes and keys, and the keys were missing. 

“I looked everywhere for them and even had a couple of my coworkers looking, too,” Theiss said. “Strangely enough, where I found them was on the edge of a bathroom sink in that very same room, very neatly laid out for me. I had checked that bathroom while searching for them. Twice!”

He does not believe he was pranked by a co-worker.

“It was late, and we were all eager to get home after our shift,” he said. “I don’t think it was a trick.” 

Neither Theiss nor Westhoff has seen a ghost, and both said they didn’t necessarily believe in them, but …

“I believe there’s stuff you can’t explain, whether it’s a ghost or not, I don’t know,” Theiss said. “I’ve asked myself that question several times. It’s hard to say yes; hard to say no.” 

For Westhoff, it’s more about the history of each house. 

“My passion is to take things that once had beautiful life in it that might have gotten forgotten and breathe that life, that happiness and joy, back into it and tell its story,” she said of her renovations. “If there is some kind of negative energy, I hope that, in some way, fixing what is broken helps to heal the home as well.”

She certainly believes that’s what happened with the Dr. Williamson home on Vandeveer Street in Burnet, where visitors no longer smell cigarette smoke in the hidden room. 

“I never know what I’m going to get into when I’m walking into a building,” she said. “But nothing surprises me.” 

suzanne@thepicayune.com