It’s a warm, fall afternoon in Oakwood Cemetery. Jeanine Plumer is walking through a forest of headstones, stepping from shadow to shadow, avoiding the intensity of the sun. She stops at one point and bends down, brushing away dry, dead leaves.
“Look at this one,” she says, pointing to a small white stone, perpendicular to the others. “In Christianity, it’s custom to bury your dead facing toward the East, where the sun rises. This one’s facing to the South — possibly a convict or someone who was not well-liked when they died.”
Plumer is the owner of Austin Promenade Tours, a company that takes new visitors to Austin and shows them around, inundating them with history and local folklore. Three years ago, the company added “Ghosts of Austin,” a three-hour tour to all of the historical haunted locations in the city. Sites include the well-known spots like the Driskill Hotel and the Paramount Theatre, but Plumer has done her research and uncovered other, smaller places yielding two other tours that have also become popular around Halloween. “Ghosts, Murder and Mayhem” is a tour that focuses primarily on the history of an Austin serial killer who murdered seven women back in 1885. The victims’ bodies are buried in a field, in unmarked graves. The third tour, “Graveyard Chronicles,” takes guests from grave to grave of many famous Texans who supposedly still live on, like Alamo survivor Susannah Dickinson and a man named Maurice Moore, the first Travis County sheriff to be killed in the line of duty.
“There are all different kinds of ghosts,” Plumer says. “Hauntings are primarily just parts of the spirit that hang around.”
She seems convinced that a parallel universe does exist, even though she has never had a sighting herself. According to Plumer, the most common type of haunting is the movement of small objects. On a few tours, many of her clients claimed to have seen or felt spirits, the cold tingling sensation along the small of one’s back, a gentle squeezing of their arm when no one is around.
“These sort of things fascinate me,” Plumer says, “What are hauntings? What do they mean? Just another unanswerable question in life.”
The unanswerable question will remain with Plumer, and she will continue to walk cemeteries and dig through the puzzles of history. Whether ghosts exist or not, she will continue to educate, to teach the history of our beloved city and the people who lived and died and lived all over again.
For reservations call Ghost Tours of Austin at 498-4686 or at http://www.austinghosttours.com. Tours will run November 13-19.
This article appears in Carol Keeton Rylander.