HAUNTED TAYLOR
Louie Mueller Barbecue scares up brisket & a side of ghosts
Editor’s note: With Halloween fast approaching, the Taylor Press offers readers a continuing series about ghostly doings in town.
Louie Mueller Barbecue is already well-known as the home of some of the best barbecue in Texas. What isn’t nearly as well known is that this iconic restaurant is also said to have to ghosts.
There are plenty of witnesses willing to talk about their strange experiences within the walls of Taylor’s renowned brisket haunt.
For example, consider this episode: A restaurant employee, working alone late one night, having heard the rumors of a ghost at the establishment, decides to conduct a little experiment. He places a lit flashlight on the counter and proceeds to ask questions out loud in the middle of the empty room. To his astonishment, the flashlight begins to flicker as if responding to his questions. The employee resigned never to return.
Manager and Taylor resident Donna Jensen has seen and heard quite a bit during her time at the famed eatery, 206 W. Second St.
“One afternoon I was in here with a crew worker in this dining room,” said Jensen, who has worked there three years. “We were just talking and suddenly, I stopped because I heard something. We both heard the same thing. It was somebody talking in my ear. We were sitting at the last table in the side dining room close to that hallway where sometimes the laughter of a child can be heard. We suspect that one of the ghosts is a little boy. We don’t know what connection he has to the history of this place.”
But it doesn’t end there. “One Saturday, I was here with Wayne (Mueller), the owner, and (also with another coworker) at the register,” Jensen said. “All of us heard the back door, which is very heavy. We heard it open and close. Nobody else was here except for us. We all looked at each other and confirmed that we had heard it. It is a door that is too heavy for the wind to move. Another time … a kitchen employee was working back there, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw something white and formless floating by him. I was at the register, and I saw the same thing pass by me.”
Founder Louie Mueller arrived in Taylor in 1936. Ten years later, he opened his first barbecue pit with steel he got from a decommissioned World War I warship in Galveston.
In 1959, Louie Mueller Barbecue moved to its current location. The building was erected in 1900, and in its early years served as a gymnasium where Golden Gloves boxing matches were held. The structure has also been home to a grocery store, a cotton-processing plant, a sewing-machine factory and typewriter-repair shop.
Mueller’s son, Bobby Mueller, took over the business in 1974 and ran the restaurant until 2007 when his offspring Wayne Mueller took over.
“My father, Bobby Mueller, used to say that if you worked here overnight, you would see and hear things that you just can’t explain,” Wayne Mueller said. “He used to tell me that he would hear voices, construction sounds, hammers pounding, saws. I can say that in all this time, there has never been a single person injured or harmed in any way by these things, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t see or hear things that we can’t explain.”
Many staff members said they have experienced or heard of the many strange occurrences in the dining establishment. Twenty-two-year-old Taylor resident Natalie Allison relays an experience she witnessed just a year and a half ago.
“I remember we had a co-worker here and she was coming out of the office, and she swore that another co-worker, who was with her in the office had followed her out, because she could hear the footsteps following her. Then she turned around to talk to her and freaked out because there was nobody there,” Allison said.
The long history of disembodied voices, laughter, footsteps and other phenomena was enough for Mueller to schedule an overnight probe in May 2020 from Truly Haunted Inc., a paranormal investigation team founded by Matt Cannon.
“(Cannon) set up cameras and recording equipment. He called me shortly after midnight to tell me he was packing up to leave because they had collected so much data that their memory disks were full,” Mueller said. “He said that the place was hyperactive with kids running around, people talking to one another, somebody else was building something in here. He said they got people on tape talking back to them.”
Cannon said the overnight stay proved eye-opening.
“The Louie Mueller investigation yielded a lot of positive results,” he said. “We captured EVPs, electronic voice phenomenon, and we filmed multiple orbs throughout the evening. Not every orb is paranormal. Some can be explained as dust or insects, but the ones which move against the air flow or change directions at angles are not able to be explained as being dust or insects.”
Most of the eyewitness accounts come from staff as opposed to diners.
“The majority of experiences seem to happen between 2 and 4 in the morning,” Mueller said. “At that time, the street is quiet. There is no traffic at all. So, things can be heard that can’t have other explanations attributed to them. I believe this is why staff tend to have experiences more frequently than customers. Also, the west side dining area is only about 25 years old. It was part of the parking lot before then, so its history does not go back as far as the older section of the restaurant, but that’s not to say there haven’t been experiences on that side.”
Marleni Araujo, 22, attests to that. “It only takes one person to close down this room at night, and it is poorly lit around closing, so I get pretty scared to be here by myself,” Araujo said. “I do feel like there is a presence in this dining room area. When I first started working here three years ago, I felt like more customers knew about the hauntings because all our customers were from Taylor. But now, with Samsung (Austin Semiconductor) coming in, we have more people eating here who either aren’t from Taylor or don’t know the history of the place.”
Photo courtesy of Truly Haunted Inc.
