The Lights at the Driskill

Texas After Dark | Austin

By Darren Alsabrook, The Alliance Gazette

The Driskill Hotel’s ornate interior skylight in Austin, photographed by Carol M. Highsmith on April 19, 2014. The Lyda Hill Texas Collection of Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. LC-DIG-highsm-28296.

An old hotel does not need to be empty to unsettle you. Sometimes the stranger possibility is that it is full of ordinary life—rooms being made ready, dinner being served, travelers arriving—and that someone who belongs to another century might still be there.

At Austin’s Driskill Hotel, that possibility has acquired a name, a collection of stories and even a rock song. One of the most memorable accounts begins not with a figure in a white sheet, but with something familiar enough to overlook: lights going on and off in a guest room.

A cattleman’s monument

The Driskill opened on December 20, 1886. Architectural historian Roxanne Williamson’s account for the Texas State Historical Association describes an ambitious hotel with 60 steam-heated guest rooms and four elaborate second-floor suites. Its skylit dining room became a celebrated Austin restaurant. Legislators, lobbyists and the city’s social leaders gathered beneath its roof; inaugural balls and university occasions made the building part of the capital’s public life. [1]

It had been built for Jesse Driskill, whose fortune came from cattle. A City of Austin historic-zoning report records that his business included supplying beef to the Confederate Army and later driving cattle to Kansas railheads. Architect Jasper N. Preston designed the four-story Romanesque Revival building in pressed brick and white limestone. Family busts looked out from its principal façades, with the founder facing Sixth Street. [2]

There is something arresting about that last detail: a man putting his own likeness above a building meant to carry his name. The face belonged to the architecture before it belonged to any ghost story.

Success did not protect its owner. The city’s history describes cattle losses after drought and a hard winter, an early hotel closure and a reopening in January 1888. Driskill sold the property that year. The building outlasted his ownership, and then outlasted several more. [2]

The guest who told her story

More than a century after the opening, singer Johnette Napolitano became part of the Driskill’s other history—the one carried in personal recollections rather than architectural records.

In a 2007 Houston Press interview with Chris Gray, the Concrete Blonde singer recalled staying at the hotel while touring with Sting. She told Gray she believed a ghost was in her room because the lights kept switching on and off. The experience was connected to the band’s song “Ghost of a Texas Ladies Man.” This is Napolitano’s account of what happened, not a Gazette observation or an independently established explanation for the lights. [3]

She returned to the subject in a 2012 Culture Brats interview. There, she described feeling watched in her fifth-floor room, closing the curtains and having trouble with a brass room key that worked inconsistently. She also recalled hearing the familiar identification of the presence as Colonel Driskill. [4]

Those are two retellings by the same witness, not two separate witnesses. But they give this particular hotel story something an anonymous whisper cannot: a person willing to put her name to it.

What makes the account linger is its scale. No collapsing wall. No spectacle filling the lobby. Just the uneasy possibility that the room might contain more company than its occupant could see.

A scent with a name attached

The founder’s alleged return appears in other retellings. Writing in Austin Monthly in 2021, Tanya Estes described reports of cigar odor associated with Jesse Driskill and stories of a nineteenth-century cowboy figure. [5]

In those retellings, even a passing scent can become a sign of the cattleman whose name still hangs over the door.

The building that stayed

There was a time when the hotel itself nearly disappeared. The city’s account describes a 1969 closure and plans to replace it with a modern tower. A civic preservation effort saved the building; it reopened in 1973. [2]

Today, this is a working hotel, not an abandoned ruin. Its official website advertises guest rooms and dining at 604 Brazos Street, while its history page describes renewed guest rooms, restaurants and public spaces in 2026. An archival photograph is therefore a view of a particular moment, not a promise that every detail remains unchanged. [6][7]

That continued life may be the most compelling part of the story. The Driskill has not been left alone with its past. New guests keep arriving, carrying their own expectations into a building that already has plenty of stories.

The records can tell us who built it, who saved it and when its doors reopened. Napolitano can tell us what she remembers of her room.

What, if anything, was there when the lights changed?