400 Main Street
Fort Worth, Texas
Built in 1907, this building is hard to miss in the downtown Sundance Square area because of the Chisholm Trail mural depicting the years 1867 to 1875 on its south side, painted by Richard Haas. The Jett Building once served as the headquarters of Northern Texas Traction Co., which operated an interurban railway with lines to Dallas and Cleburne. Some claim that it was modeled after Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building in Buffalo, New York. A Jamba Juice store occupies the ground floor, but the story of this building and its otherworldly inhabitants is much more interesting. Over the years, four restaurants have operated here, and rumors abound that they all left because of ghosts.
One Halloween, as a bartender was closing up, the shadowy figure of a woman appeared in a mirror. But that is not all; other employees have told stories over the years, and some even quit their jobs after seeing ghosts or experiencing something unusual. The feeling of being watched or the sound of a woman walking in high heels on the upper floors was not uncommon, nor were strange lights and chills in the basement. There is also a story about a cowboy in black who was seen in the basement and a woman who roams the upper floors.
A woman who ran a bookstore in the building also had plenty of stories that she believed proved the place was haunted. She saw an apparition right before her eyes—a man dressed in black, perhaps some wayward outlaw. Falling books were not uncommon, nor were voices coming from the aisles when no one was there.
One former owner of the building, before it became a bookstore, was trapped in a room all night after the lights went out and the door to the room he was in closed and locked. He did not get out until the following day.
Of course, keep in mind that this building stands near the infamous Hell's Half Acre, so it has seen its share of rough times. There is talk of a suicide that allegedly took place here in the 1940s, but it has not been confirmed. Who knows? Perhaps some murders occurred here as well.
It is worth noting that the building stood empty for most of the 1970s before being revitalized in the 1980s, when the city sought to attract more tourists downtown by offering various activities. Perhaps the ghosts that have haunted the building for decades decided they wanted no contact with people and are trying to say, “leave us alone.”
