HAUNTED TAYLOR
Editor’s note: With Halloween fast approaching, the Taylor Press offers readers a continuing series about ghostly doings in town.
It is nighttime. A tour guide organizes his group in front of the old building that once housed Ricocos Latin Grill downtown.
As he begins his explanation of the site’s history, a little girl tugs on his arm and asks, “Who is the lady in red standing in the window?”
The guide smiles, glances back at the window and sees nothing. Later, during his second tour with an entirely new group of attendees, he overhears two women discussing the lady in the red dress spotted in the secondfloor window. Neither knew the little girl in the earlier group.
The building is a featured stop on the annual tour of downtown’s haunts hosted the final weekend in October by the Taylor Conservation and Heritage Society — and with good reason. “I think this building probably has more interesting and varied haunting experiences than any on our tour,” said guide Mike Kaspar. “It is a popular spot that ghost hunters with a knowledge of Taylor’s history want to visit.”
Who is the lady in red, and why are there are so many reports of hauntings here?
Perhaps Matt Cannon’s Truly Haunted website with its in-depth history of the building from construction through today can provide a few clues.
Built in the late 1800s, the Eanes-Prewitt Building, located at 121 E. Third St., was initially used to house employees of the International and Great Railroad Co. The first owner of the building was Dr. Robert Eanes, born July 25, 1855. He died Dec. 12, 1918. His first wife, Irene, was born June 23, 1865, and died on July 21, 1901. He remarried Aug. 11, 1903, to Florence Hill. She was born Dec. 29, 1871, and died Sept. 3, 1939.
The first floor of the twostory building had many purposes, including serving as a photo studio in the early 1900s. In 1910, it was listed in public records as a dance studio owned by a “Sallie Martinez.” It later became a general merchandise store. From 1919 to 1928, it was the Ira A. Prewitt Buick Co.
The second floor of the building had a more notorious reputation. During this time, it served as a lodge said to be a meeting place for the Ku Klux Klan. In 1942, the second floor was converted into something called the War Times Recreation Council, which was supposed to provide reading and game rooms for soldiers on leave from the war.
However, many locals have said the second floor was really a brothel.
More reputable uses of the building over the next 60 years included a barber shop, an antique store, insurance companies and eventually, in 2006, the restaurant Ricocos Latin Grill.
For more than a decade, Ricocos developed a reputation as a great little spot for Latin-inspired dishes. But continued reports by employees and customers of unusual happenings added to tales of of ghostly inhabitants.
In 2019, Cannon, founder of Truly Haunted Inc., investigated the site. Cannon said he captured several electronic voice phenomena, which are recordings of disembodied verbalizations. But even more incredible to many was the photographic evidence he collected.
On the first floor, in the restaurant itself, Cannon’s fixed camera caught an image of a shadow forming and walking from one side of the room to the other, followed in succession by several other shadow figures.
The figures were at first thought to be reflections of individuals passing by on the street, but Cannon’s team was skeptical of that notion given that the event took place at 3:51 a.m.
The team attempted to recreate the shadow images by walking past the window and recording their reflections to see if those matched what the cameras had captured. But their experiments showed a clear difference in the dark solid shadows produced by team members compared to the translucent, elongated figures captured in the original recording.
Another film capture occurred on the second floor where the mysterious “lady in red” has been witnessed from the street. Over the course of several hours, Cannon’s fixed cameras recorded a ball of light emerging from the floor, growing larger and slowly moving across the floor until it disappeared behind a piece of plywood. As it disappeared, a strange misty light rose up the wall behind it. The entire event took over two hours to unfold and is documented in a video posted on Youtube. Cannon, who is skeptical of the existence of the lady in red, is still convinced he captured good evidence for a presence in the building.
“The film we captured of that ball of light emerging on the second floor is the best piece of evidence I have seen,” Cannon said. “I am still at a loss to explain it.”
Ricocos eventually closed, but the building — and accounts of otherworldly visitations — remain today. Is Florence Hill the lady in red? Or is it Sallie Martinez? Or is she the spirit of a brothel worker reliving the loss of a beloved soldier to the horrors of war?
Until more investigations are conducted, the answers to what haunts this iconic building will have to wait.
