profound edit: it is still happening evem 10 mins later...

does anyone know what going on? its the type of sirens that go "wheeeeeeeeeeeoooooooow" in a long aay not a "wawawawawawaa" short way. but its beem going on for 10 mins straight. whats going on around here?? im am on the south east tip of downtown. i am effectively blind.

Former clevelander massive baseball fan, and have been watching most of the games at home since they landed on weekdays and day games. But tonight they play at 7 and trying to find a good place to watch with other Guards fans!

HI y'all, I'm new to exploring Austin and cave systems seems to be Austin's specialty. i wanted to ask how can i find caves to go to and how to get accurate directions there. if you don't mind can you dm me a list of all fun cave systems in Austin please?

Saw (first, heard) these 3 helicopters in the sky. Pics taken from Burnet @ W. Anderson.

One big boi followed by two normalish but still military looking ones. At first, I thought they were going in a straight line, but it’s been 15 minutes and they’re on their 3rd lap, circling around central/north austin. Anyone have any ideas what this is about?

Unsure of legality but it’s a hazard for autonomous vehicles like them to just stop in a lane and put their hazards on to drop off passengers. Specifically on a road like E Cesar Chavez where it’s always so busy and congested and they just shut down one of the two lanes fully on their whim.

Eventually an idiot will open the door into the other lane of traffic and get the door ran through, or probably step out into traffic and get splattered.

I have no clue what kind of solution or complaint to make that happen needs to be made but figured it’s worthy of a discussion. Maybe I just have road rage?

Hey Everyone,

I noticed on Google Maps this place popped up, and from a picture somebody posted it looks like a real, purpose-built observation deck to watch planes land/take off on runway 36L at the Austin airport. But it doesn’t show up on google earth or street view. Does anyone know if this supposedly new place actually exists, and if so, where exactly it is/how to get there? Thanks.

I moved to Mueller/Windsor Park area in April. Ever since I moved into this apartment, I’ve noticed that there has been a lot of black minerals that accumulate in the toilets. It accumulated quite quickly in both toilets. I haven’t seen anything floating in the water or any issues in the sinks or shower.

Is this common in this part of town? I haven’t had any issues in any other parts of Austin that I’ve lived in? Is this actually minerals? Will it kill me to drink the water?

Note: I do drink the water from the tap unfiltered everyday

I've been going to the same woman to get my hair from black to platinum for several years, which is obviously a lot of care, effort, and trial-and-error. She seems to have disappeared entirely right before my root touch-up appointment and has suddenly stopped replying to messages. As far as I can tell, she's alive and well, just isn't replying to any business messages suddenly. We had a series of appointments leading up to my wedding, so now I'm slightly panicking about finding a new colorist in time to get my hair together before the wedding, since I know I have pretty high-effort hair (super dark, over-processed, frizzy, curly, etc.). Does any have any hairstylist recs in Austin, particularly from people who have experience going from super dark to platinum?

I've been seeing more and more people riding horses around the greenbelt lately. Like full on cowboy gear and everything. It's kinda cool but also a little unexpected you know. Anyone else noticed this trend or know what's up?

water tasting/ smelling funky

i know this happens from time to time here but was wondering if anyone else has noticed an increase of funky tasting/ smelling tap water lately. kind of like a mildewy/ moldy taste. i've noticed it in central austin, and in south austin in various settings.

My husband and I have been feeding this sweet cat (we call him Socks) for over a year now since he was an adolescent. We already have four cats so we aren’t able to take him in, and I guess his scent has started to seriously trigger one of our girl cats to the point that she freaks out and gets extremely scared of our other cats.

I’ve looked into trapping him and taking him to the shelter but the timing for intake doesn’t work for either of our schedules. Can anyone please help? He’s such a sweet little guy and deserves a home, I wish we could help more than just feeding him 🥹

I have a great artist I usually use but he's 3 hours away from me and doesnt quite "get" the vision, so I'm looking for someone closer to me. Came across ink couture tattoos and I love their style, but I'm super worried about trying a new artist. Particularly wondering: is the line work consistently good? How do their tattoos age - any bleeding etc?

And where did you get it? I got quoted at $3800 total but my dad says that the usual rate is around $2500

I was screwing around with a Chinese LLM and I got it to revise something I've been working on for a while. Yes, the story I'm about to share is partially AIslop, but I wrote most of it I swear. I think I posted a smaller versionof it a long time ago which was incomprehensible, and let's just say I used the AI to fix it. So today I'm excited to share something different than the usual history post, something based on historical facts but is partially fictional. It's a story which takes place on Halloween night in 2026.

What I originally proposed to the AI was a thought experiment, based on the real history of Oakwood Cemetery. What would happen if Death came to Austin to play the Danse Macabre?

For those who have never heard of it, in 1874, a Frenchman by the name of Camille Saint-Saens wrote the a piece of music described as a symphonic poem, known by the subtitle Danse Macabre. The premise was simple:

According to legend, Death appears at midnight every year on Halloween. Death calls forth the dead from their graves to dance for him while he plays his fiddle (here represented by a solo violin). His skeletons dance for him until the cockerel crows at dawn, when they must return to their graves until the next year.

The piece opens with a harp playing a single note, D, twelve times (the twelve strokes of midnight) which is accompanied by soft chords from the string section.

I first heard the piece when I was a little kid. Later on I got into zombie movies at a young age. Many cultures across the world have a traditional day which the dead return, from Día de Muertos to Michael Jackson's Thriller. The following is based on all of this, and a dream/nightmare I had once which has stuck with me for decades, about Austin's granddaddy of graveyards:

Danse Macabre on Congress Avenue

A Halloween story for Oakwood Cemetery, 1839 to the present

I. Tuning

It was another Halloween night in Austin and the time for trick or treating had already come and gone. Traffic was terrible as the night wore on. The usual large crowd filled 6th Street with costumed revelers.

At 11:51 p.m. on Navasota St. just west of I-35, a tall figure wearing a tattered ghooded black cloak sat down on the low wall by Oakwood Cemetery's west gate, drew a violin from inside his cloak, and did something no sensible musician does. He tuned down. The E string slackened a half step, until it sat against its neighbor in the interval medieval choirmasters called diabolus in musica: the devil in music.

"Ooh, a tritone," said a passing woman on an e-bike wearing wearing a Waterloo Records hoodie. "'Tis the season I guess." This was Austin. A cloaked man tuning a violin in a graveyard at midnight was the fourth strangest thing she had seen that week, and the other three had involved multiple people riding a single Lime scooter, a raccoon directing traffic, and a man selling kombucha out of a canoe.

Then something struck twelve. It was too far from the UT Tower to be the carillon. It seemed to be a harp. The e-biker, quickening her pace, thought it might have come from the public address speakers across the way at Disch-Falk Field. The dark figure with the violin craned his head toward the sound and bowed slightly. Twelve clear notes rolled over the hill, over the limestone and the zinc and the granite, and down toward the interstate.

The man in the black coat was heard to mumble something barely audible about the "Live Music Capital". He then lifted his bow, smiled a decayed smile with no lips involved, and began to play.

The ground magically opened up.

II. The Roll Call

The Old Grounds went first, the oldest hill, where the graves wander like they were laid out by committee in the dark. Then Section 1, then the grid, then the Annex across Comal Street, where a cast-concrete cowboy boot on one grave tipped over and a small plastic whiskey bottle rolled out of it. The boot's occupant did not wait for the note inside. He had read it. He had been looking forward to the party.

The dead of Oakwood climbed out of the ground as they always had, which is to say with opinions. Some looked restored as they had been in life, some others were more skeletonized. Most were wearing period-appropriate clothing or military uniforms. However each individual had a sort of supernatural fluorescent aura glow about them.

There were some twenty-three thousand of them: senators and sextons, bandleaders and bookmakers, enslaved and enslavers, and a mayor in a collar stiff enough to stand on its own. Many came with a name on a stone, but some came with no name at all.

Death stopped fiddling long enough to take attendance, which he did not usually do.

"Name?" he asked a man at the edge of the Old Grounds, a thin figure still in the cut of a coat from the days of the Republic.

The man stared at him. "Sir," he said, "nobody ever asked."

He had been the first of them. In 1839 he was killed on the Bastrop road on his way to the new capital, and buried on the hill. History remembers him as a single sentence: an enslaved man, owned by a man named Hamilton White, reportedly buried south of the present gate. No name. He had lain there for a hundred and eighty-seven years with a number of questions about that.

"I have had time to think on it," he said carefully, "and I would like to be called Elias. Elias Navasota. After the street. It is the only thing about the place that was ever mine."

"Elias Navasota," Death repeated, and he seemed, for a second, to feel it was the best thing that had happened all week. He did not write it in a book. He just said it, loud, so the hill could hear, and the hill answered with a long, slow rattle of applause.

After that, everyone wanted to be introduced.

They came forward in the order they had been waiting, which was not the order they had died.

"Walter Tips," said a broad German in a good coat. "Hardware, Congress Avenue. State senator. Confederate veteran. Conductor of the Saengerrunde." He had a title for every occasion and delivered them the way he once stacked nails: by weight.

"Carl William Besserer," said the man beside him, with the posture of a person who had been taught by someone famous and wanted you to know it. "Music." "Which music?" asked Death. "Yes," said Besserer.

"Edmund Ludwig. Piano."

"Peter Mansbendel. Woodcarver. Baritone, second row."

"Andrew Jackson Zilker. Businessman," said one of the half-skeletons.

"Joe Sing," said a quiet man from the Cemetery Annex, "also Jo Feng Sheng, also Joe Hall, also Hong Lee, depending on who was asking." Death asked which he preferred. Joe Sing thought about it. "The one on the headstone."

Many other names which used to carry weight in this town were said all at once: Beryman, Kreisle, Hogg, Hamilton, Eanes,... Thousands of names of many different people. Death motioned those with musical skill to join the dark symphony, and instruments appeared in their hands. But then Death noticed there were still others who's names had yet to be called.

Up from the ground began to rise those whose names were on no stone at all, and who had been waiting longest: a drayman named Ned Tolliver, a cook called Dinah Pruitt, a woman named Remedios Ibarra who had been buried along the fence line, and hundreds more.

Death took the rest of the names in one long, grave nod, and tucked the violin back under his chin.

III. Detour Ahead

The plan, so far as Death had a plan, was simple. The dead would dance on Congress Avenue, the broad boulevard Edwin Waller had laid out for a capital that was supposed to last a thousand years. They would dance from the Capitol steps to the river, and there would be music, and Death would fiddle, and every dead Oakwood resident would dance as equals.

The plan did not account for I-35.

The procession came down 16th Street in a rattling, jostling line and ran into the interstate construction: a rolling wall of concrete barriers, orange drums, and signs that appeared to have been written by a very tired committee. LANE CLOSED. SHIFT AHEAD. LOCAL TRAFFIC ONLY. EXIT CLOSED. EXIT ALSO CLOSED.

"Is the road supposed to be in the air?" asked Abner Cook, builder of the Governor's Mansion, craning his neck at a lifted ramp. He was a carpenter, a brickmaker, and a man who had finished a mansion for the governor of Texas before the Civil War. "What is the building here?"

"No building," said Zilker, who had been reading a sign. "It is a Phase."

"How many Phases?"

"There is a Phase Three." Zilker took off his hat. "There is talk of a Four."

Cook sat down on a barrier and wept, in the way of a builder confronted with the one structure he could not finish.

Below them, it was twenty past midnight on Halloween night, and the interstate was doing what it did best, which was nothing. Four lanes of Saturday-night traffic sat bumper to bumper in the dark, brake lights running north as far as anyone could see: rideshare Waymos, a delivery van, a Cybertruck, a pickup towing a jet ski toward some lake no longer reachable by human means. Traffic apps had already marked the route red with a note about a stalled vehicle. Everyone had been sitting in the same spot for so long that they had stopped being angry and started being philosophical.

Mayor Tom Miller, who had run Austin for twenty-two years and had promoted this very road, stood at the barrier with the face of a man reading his own medical chart. "I wanted an artery," Miller said quietly. "Somebody has built a clot." He had died in 1962, before it got bad, and was now catching up on everything he had missed.

Elizabeth Johnson Williams, who in her day had put a herd on the Chisholm Trail under her own brand, and is thought to be the first woman to do it, surveyed the lanes with professional disgust. "I have moved cattle faster than this," she said. "And cattle, at least, have the decency to stampede."

So the dead began to cross. Some climbed down the embankment to the sunken road bed and moved between the stopped cars in no particular hurry, the way people move through a crowded party. The first driver to look up was a woman in a minivan, who watched a figure in a frock coat step between her bumper and the next and lift his hat to her. She did the only sensible thing. She put the minivan in park, unbuckled her seat belt, opened the door, and ran back the way she came.

The man behind her did the same. Then the Cybertruck. Then a line of rideshare drivers, one after another, like dominoes in reflective vests. Doors opened up and down the northbound lanes like a zipper. Within three minutes people were leaving cars in all four lanes, running down the shoulder, over the barriers, up the embankment, past a man in a dinosaur costume who was running beside a woman in a bumblebee costume, both of them screaming in perfect harmony. An SUV with its engine running, abandoned entirely by its driver and in perfectly good order, went on playing a productivity podcast to no one.

In the space of twenty minutes, the dead of Oakwood accomplished what two decades of public meetings had not. They cleared Interstate 35 of every living driver, though not, it should be noted, of a single car.

Death, who had a standing reservation at every address in the world, found himself waved off the main route anyway, by a sign. The detour would take him four blocks east to go one block west. He put the violin under his chin, closed his eyes, and played a mournful minor-key arrangement of a sound the dead of Austin knew very well: a thousand engines idling at once. It took them forty minutes to cross a road they had once crossed on foot in four.

IV. Greetings From God to All Who Enter

On the far side of the interstate, a sizable group of the dead began to walk faster. They had caught sight of something familiar they had not expected in this age of wonders.

They were advancing toward 1607 San Jacinto, where Scholz Garten has been pouring beer since 1866 and is the only one of Austin's old beer gardens still in business. Next door stood the hall of the Saengerrunde, the singing society, founded in 1879 and still singing.

The living at Scholz's were in the middle of a Halloween party, and they received the dead first as costumes, then as superior costumes, then as something else. There was a scream, then a silence, then the particular sound of a hundred and forty beers being set down at once.

Walter Tips walked straight to the front of the room and picked up the nearest thing to a baton, which was a bratwurst fork. He had conducted the Saengerrunde in life and had gone a long time dead without anyone to conduct. A hundred men's voices who had never been asked to sing again rose behind him in four-part harmony. The old motto of the Saengerfest, he reminded the room, was that where men sing there are no bad men, for bad men have no song.

Ben Thompson, who had walked through Scholz's doors in life and had made them swing on more than one occasion, declined to sing. It would have put the motto in an awkward position. Carl William Besserer, who had once run the place and sold it so he could devote himself to music, looked around at the packed house and said, to no one, "And I thought I was giving up the money." Then he turned to Death, who was tuning against the sound of the crowd. "The E string," he said, "is flat."

"On purpose," said Death.

"I know," said Besserer, who had been trained in Germany by Leopold Damrosch and had never once let a thing go by. "I am still saying it."

Peter Mansbendel stopped under the walnut banner he had carved for the door, which says in German, roughly, greetings from God to all who enter. He read it with a woodcarver's critical eye. He had been dead for eighty-six years, and his greeting had never once been tested at this scale. As the dead of Oakwood filed beneath it by the thousand, it was, for the first time in its history, entirely accurate.

At the door of the Saengerrunde Hall, a woman in a dirndl held up a clipboard and called, "Members to the left, guests to the right," with such authority that the dead sorted themselves at once. It was the first time anything in Austin had gotten twenty thousand people into two lines.

V. Waller Creek Has a Master Plan Now

They rejoined the old streets near Waller Creek, and nobody recognized it. In their day it had been a ditch with a name, a thing that flooded at the worst possible moment and smelled accordingly. Now it had a lit boardwalk and landscaped banks, an elevated skywalk, an amphitheater, and what looked like a nonprofit.

"This is the creek?" asked a woman in a long dark dress, one of the old families who had lain in the good soil on the south side. She stood in the glow of an LED lamp and held her skirt out of an interpretive sign. "Our creek?"

"It has been activated," said a ghost who had picked up the vocabulary somewhere.

A small, upright Swede had stopped at a map sign. He was Swante Palm, merchant, postmaster, vice consul, and the man who had given the University of Texas thousands of books, and a park along the creek bore his name. The map said it was to be revitalized. "A park with my name on it," he said, "and a plan." He had been dead for a hundred and twenty-seven years. "I can wait. It is the thing I have always done best."

"We were here the whole time," said a grumbling voice near the back, one of the pauper dead, a drayman called Ned Tolliver who in 1893 had been buried at public expense. His body had been unloaded at the gate at the cemetery and left on the ground for the sexton. "Every big rain for a hundred and fifty years, a little more of the hill ended up down here. I didn't know there was a park to land in."

"A hundred and fifty years of topsoil," Death mused, and glanced back up the hill, where the dirt really had been sliding toward Waller Creek since Reconstruction. "Some of you have been arriving gradually."

A woman jogging along the creek trail with a Boston terrier took one look at several thousand figures in assorted shrouds and wool and fell into the creek. The terrier remained calm.

"DOGS," boomed a voice from the back.

A figure in a starched white coat and white collar pushed to the front. He was Sexton Ambrose Pell, who in 1908 had been issued the city's ordinance for cemetery conduct, which required white coats, forbade dogs entirely, and said no person should ride or drive faster than a walk. He had been dead for decades and still found all three sound policy.

"No dogs on the grounds was always my rule," he said, quite gently, to the Boston terrier, which wagged its tail at him. "No motor...," he trailed off as a golden cybercab went by with no rider, which the dead found, on the whole, more upsetting than anything else that night.

VI. Congress Avenue

And there, at the top of the avenue, was the Capitol, pink granite and a dome taller than the national one, and at the bottom the river, and the bridge, and the bats.

Congress Avenue on Halloween night was already a carnival. Nobody had to explain a skeleton here. Thousands of people in costumes were already doing a thing on Sixth Street that the dead understood only as a lesser form of their own business, and a small army of pedicabs and uber drivers idled at the curb, lit like funeral coaches in a very strange parade.

Walter Tips stopped at 710 Congress, where the building he put up in 1876 still stood, his name on a state plaque by the door. "Still here," he said, tapping the limestone. "The nails, I'm told, went elsewhere."

Death climbed onto the median, tucked the violin under his jaw, and set the case open at his feet. A man in a quarter-zip dropped in a dollar. "Venmo?" he asked.

"I accept all payments," said Death, "eventually."

Then he began. The first measures were as the old piece has them: a skeletal waltz, played on a string that should not have worked, with a kind of cruel, giddy rhythm. Wherever the dead walked, the lights seemed to dim a little and the music lean in. Somewhere in the dark a xylophone began, to anyone who knew the piece, though it was only the clacking of bones.

From the back of the crowd, Gene Ramey, who had played bass with Lester Young and Charlie Parker, tilted his head at the flat E string and grinned. "That's a flatted fifth," he told nobody. "We were doing that in Kansas City before you were out of the ground."

John A. Lomax Sr., who had once hauled a recording machine across the South in the trunk of a car, set a portable one on the median and held the microphone out to Death like a man asking permission. He had brought an empty chair for his son. Alan Lomax's name is on a marker at Oakwood, but the marker is a cenotaph, and its owner was elsewhere.

The living looked up, and Austin did what Austin does.

"Whoa, great costumes," said a man outside a bar, raising his phone. "Didn't I see you at ACL?" "It's a brand activation," said another, in a quarter-zip, to nobody. "Who's the brand? I need to know who the brand is."

"That's a really good skeleton," said a third, and he was talking to Ben Thompson. Thompson, once the elected marshal of Austin, and the man who shot Jack Harris, looked down at himself. His coat had held up. His bones had held up. Nobody had called him a legend in a hundred and forty years.

"Thank you," said Ben Thompson, and bowed.

Then a skeleton in a frock coat stepped up to the man with the phone and, very politely, lost its jaw into his hands.

It stopped being a costume.

VII. Who You Gonna Call?

What followed was, for the next several hours, the most thoroughly documented event in the history of Austin, and the least believed.

6th Street, Hoek's Death Metal Pizza.

A ghost in a pine-box coat, who had last eaten in 1893, ordered a slice with everything. The vendor assembled it with the calm of a man who had fed the worst of Austin at 2 a.m. for ten years. The pizza slice fell straight through the ribcage and onto the sidewalk. The ghost looked at it, looked at the vendor, and ordered another. By the sixth, the vendor had abandoned his tongs, the storefront and his dignity, and was running up Brazos with the cash box under his arm, screaming. The dead ate everything. "Such a variety of meats!," said the ghost, reverently, to the empty street. "In 1893 we had nothing like this!"

A cold brew on Congress.

A man in a fleece vest, holding a seven-dollar cold brew, discovered that the glowing fellow in antique clothes he had just complimented was holding a block of ice in tongs. He dropped the cup. Andrew Jackson Zilker, who had made his fortune in ice, picked it up off the pavement, read the label, and looked at the young man with the sorrow of a great artist before a shoddy copy. "Seven dollars," he said. "For ice." He turned it over in his partially-skeletonized hand. "And I understand people pay to enter my park? For a concert? I sold that land to the city to be a park." A woman in a Zilker Trail of Lights sweatshirt began to cry.

A CapMetro bus.

A late-night bus pulled up at a stop on Congress and opened its doors to a skeleton in a frock coat, holding out the exact fare in coins not minted in a hundred and thirty years. The driver, eleven years on the night shift, looked at the coins, then at the skeleton. "Sorry sir," she said. "the machine can't handle that." Four of her six passengers left by the back door, at speed. The other two were asleep.

A comedy club.

Outside a certain club on East Sixth, four men in black hoodies and flat-brimmed caps, one of whom had a podcast, as did the other three, came face to face with a skeleton in a frock coat. "Bro," said the largest, "that is a legit skeleton." "Jamie, pull that up," said another, to nobody; there was no Jamie, and there was nothing to pull up. "Have you ever tried a cold plunge?" the third asked the skeleton, out of pure muscle memory. "Sir," said the skeleton, "I have been in the ground since 1887." The fourth was already explaining, at a dead run, that this proved something about the simulation.

An IRL streamer.

A young man with a phone on a gimbal and a backpack rig walked backward down Congress Avenue, narrating. "Chat. Chat. Chat, are you seeing this? Chat says it's AI." In the corner of his screen, 11000 viewers were typing FAKE and AI and WALK UP TO IT. A donation chimed, and a synthetic voice read, "I'LL GIVE FIFTY DOLLARS IF YOU TOUCH IT." The streamer, whose entire career had been built on walking up to things, approached a skeleton and extended a trembling hand. The skeleton shook it, with a cold, dry, wholly authentic grip. The scream cracked his microphone. "Hello, chat," said the skeleton, into the lens, and chat, unanimous, typed W STREAM and CLIP IT.

A driverless car.

A woman in the back of a driverless car locked the doors and begged it to take her home. The car, after a thoughtful pause, asked the dead in the road, politely, for permission to proceed.

The mail.

Albert Burleson, who had run the entire United States Post Office as postmaster general, stopped a delivery rider on an electric bike with four insulated bags. "You carry the mail?" he asked. "I carry pad thai," said the rider. Burleson saluted. The rider did not salute back. He did not stop at all.

A photographer.

Harvey Marks, who spent a career persuading Austin sitters to hold still for a long exposure, found a street full of people pointing glowing rectangles at him and was moved to professional tears. "Chin down," he told a young woman mid-selfie. "You are losing the jaw." She took the best photograph of her life, posted it, and was told by four million strangers that it was AI.

The laundry.

Joe Sing, whose Hong Lee Laundry had cleaned the collars of bankers and legislators along Congress Avenue, watched a line of fleece vests go by. "My customers wore collars you could cut bread with," he said. "Why is everyone dressed to go camping?"

311.

A man dialed 311, was informed of an estimated hold time, and stood in the street with the phone to his ear while the dead of Austin danced past him. By the time anyone picked up, the skeletons were halfway to the river.

The Frost Bank Tower.

Former Mayors Tom Miller and Samuel Haynie were halfheartedly dancing a jig in time with the music while strolling casually down the avenue. Miller glanced upward with astonishment at the modern skyline and turned toward Wooldridge, remarking "Look at that one, Sam! My god man, is that an owl?".

VIII. The Guests

A grey robot with glowing blue eyes wearing a cowboy hat, with #RIZZBOT printed on its chest, walked around aimlessly, its programming struggling to account for the sudden lack of humans. It stopped politely in front of Ben Thompson. He stared at it. The sensor array stared back, uncertain how to regard the glowing figure in front of it. The robot waited, flashing its little lights in a gentle, patient, vaguely apologetic way.

"I have killed a man over a card game," said Ben Thompson, in a thin voice, "and I have never been yielded to by something with no soul." He took off his hat to it and bowed slightly.

The robot's programming took that as a sign of disinterest and moved on in search of input, oblivious to the supernatural spectacle around it.

John Henry Faulk, the humorist, fell naturally into the role of master of ceremonies, though nobody had asked him. He perched on a bench with the loose limbs of a man who had told stories on porches all his life, and for the first time in thirty-six years he had a crowd.

"Folks," he told the skeletons, "I have been dead since 1990. Do you know how many people have asked me to do radio?"

"How many?" said a ghost.

"A podcaster got within 10 feet of my grave in 2019!"

Susanna Dickinson Hannig had survived the fall of the Alamo and carried the news to Sam Houston, and she was not impressed by anything on Congress Avenue. She was impressed, narrowly, by a pretzel. She walked past a drunk man dressed as a gorilla, who at that moment began a long, private conversation with his life choices, and past a woman in a T-shirt that said ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE.

She read the shirt. She read it again.

"They serve beer at the Alamo?" she said.

"It's a movie theater," offered a bystander.

"With nachos," said a second, helpfully.

She thought about that for a moment, with the weight of a woman who had seen the real thing.

"Tell them," she said at last, "that I'd like a refund on my husband."

Dr. John Gordon Chalmers, once Secretary of the Treasury of the Republic of Texas, who in 1847 had been stabbed on a downtown street by a friend who drew a knife from a walking cane, stood at the corner of Sixth watching a hiker with two trekking poles. He took a careful step backward.

"I don't care for the canes," he told a ghost beside him.

"That's a hiking pole."

"Is it hollow?"

Doña Remedios Ibarra, buried along the fence line with the rest of the city's Mexican families because the city had put them there, came up Congress Avenue and walked straight into the middle of it. She stood on the center stripe under the traffic light and did not move. "A hundred and forty years on the edge," she told the passing dead, "Finally I am taking the middle lane."

The sparse car traffic made a collective, respectful decision to go around.

Behind her, a gentleman who had bought a lot in the old cemetery for twenty-five dollars, back when the cap was twenty-five dollars, in the years before a private association's prices climbed to a hundred and a Supreme Court case, looked at the glass towers going up on Congress and the number on a leasing banner, and stopped.

"They took us to court over a hundred and fifty dollars," he said, stunned. "This is a rectangle, and they want—"

"It has a view," said a young leasing agent faintly.

"So does my current address," said the dead man. "It's a view of of Disch-Falk Field."

Alexander Penn Wooldridge, mayor of Austin from 1909 to 1919 and president of a bank besides, cleared his throat. "I did propose," he said to a nearby skeleton, "setting aside two percent of the city's property taxes to beautify the cemetery."

"And then?" said the dead man.

"And then," said the mayor, "there were sprinklers."

George Washington Littlefield, the cattleman and Confederate major whose monument still sits on the hill's best ground and who gave a fortune and forty years of his attention to the University of Texas, marched down Congress with a face like a closed door. He was shown a sign for a coffee shop near the campus and began, in the way of a man with a memorial in the record, to speak.

"I gave that institution forty years of my attention—"

"I got that institution put here," said Jacob Fontaine, born into slavery, founder of a church and a newspaper and the loudest Black voice in Austin on the subject of the university. He did not look up from the bridge railing. "You gave it money. I gave it a location."

"Fair," said Littlefield, after the most expensive silence of his life.

Col. Augustus Prewitt, a rich man of the 1880s who had been buried beneath a monument the size of a small barn, arrived on the Capitol lawn in great dignity and walked up to the nearest stranger.

"Sir. Kindly read my epitaph."

The stranger leaned in toward an imaginary pillar. "There's nothing—"

"I paid four hundred dollars for eleven lines."

"I think the sprinklers took it," said Dinah Pruitt, politely. She had been the Colonel's cook, and the sexton's book had called her "servant of Col. Prewitt" and nothing else, which had suited the Colonel perfectly and her not at all. Her own grave had never had a stone, so it had never had a sprinkler problem. "They've been at it since 1971."

The Colonel, late of the Confederate service, drew himself up. He was a man who gave toasts, and he gave one now, to the dome. "Death, Dinah, is the great equalizer. Look about you. Banker and pauper, general and cook, all called up out of the ground to dance. We were not summoned to take up again the quarrels of our day. Whatever was done in our era, let us leave in our era."

Dinah considered him. She considered, for a long moment, the stone back at Oakwood that no longer said his name.

"Colonel," she said, "in my experience the equalizer is the Parks Department. Death only took the credit. I will dance with you, if that's what we're for." She smiled a very small smile. "But I'll tell you what a cook knows. Leaving a thing behind is a great deal easier for the man who was served."

From a nearby bench, Edmund Ludwig, the pianist, spoke mildly. "In 1897," he said, "I cancelled a concert at the Millett rather than see a Black audience sent to the balcony. I have always found that revisiting a quarrel is the only way to win it."

Elias Navasota, who had had a hundred and eighty-seven years to compose a reply, and had found that the best one was an extended arm, offered his to Dinah Pruitt. She took it. They danced. Behind them the Colonel's toast went on for some time, to the lawn, which was not listening.

IX. A Tour Group

Near the corner of Congress and Sixth, a man in a top hat held a lantern over a crowd of twenty-six people with matching lanyards.

"And that brings us," he said, in a stage whisper, "to Austin's most tragic ghost story. On Christmas Eve, 1885, a seventeen-year-old named Eula Phillips was murdered in her home, one of the final victims of the Servant Girl Annihilator, and her killer was never caught. Some say her ghost still wanders—"

A young woman in a long pale dress stepped out of the dark behind him. She was seventeen and she had been seventeen for a hundred and forty years. Eula Phillips had been buried in an unmarked grave in the oldest part of the hill, one of only nine burials there that year, and she had never been given a stone.

"Is this the part where you mention the tip line?" she asked.

The tour group applauded. A woman at the back took a photo and said, "They really commit."

"It's been a hundred and forty years," said Eula, to the top hat, kindly, "and I'd hoped it would be solved by now."

The top hat opened his mouth, closed it, and tried a third time, and nothing came out. Behind him, the tour group had begun to feel, collectively and for the first time, that they should be running away from whatever was happening here.

Eula looked at them, and she was not angry. She was only tired, in the way you are tired when you're the main event of a story that other people tell for a living.

"It would have been nice to have been remembered with a marker," she said, leaving behind the dispersing terrified tourists.

And she was gone into the dance. The tour guide stood alone on the corner for a long time, quietly closed the lantern, checked his composure, and rapidly followed his customers in fleeing, letting his top hat hit the ground and not looking back.

X. The Thirty-Six

There is a part of this story that is deadly serious, in which Death played more slowly.

He reached the head of the avenue, where the Capitol stood, and the music thinned until it was just a single line, pure and low and barely a tune. Out of the east of the cemetery, from the side of the hill where a chapel stands, came a small group of thirty-six.

They were the men, women and children who in 1914 had been covered by a mortuary chapel. In 2016 they were found there. In 2017 they were lifted out, and in 2021 they were put back, in a new place with a new stone, near enough to where they had lain. For sixteen of them, science could not say whether they had been girls or boys.

They walked together down the center of Congress Avenue. No one said anything upon seeing them. In fact, for a long half minute the entire street, living and dead, was perfectly quiet.

Then a woman at the front, who had been displaced more times than any resident of East Austin, glanced back at the interstate construction, at the glass towers, at the leasing banners, and let out one long, slow, patient breath.

"Well," she said. "We did get here first."

And somewhere in the crowd, a living person began, quietly, to laugh, and then another did, and the music picked back up.

XI. The Rooster and the Bats

The dance ran on past three. A hundred pedicab drivers learned the waltz. A man named Brayden, who worked in "growth," pledged to the nearest skeleton to sell his Tesla and walk to work, and later could not remember why. Walter Tips conducted the Saengerrunde through a third encore on the Capitol steps, and Carl Besserer, leading the strings of the dead, observed, to no one's surprise, that the E string was still flat.

A state trooper approached the median with the stiff dignity of a man in a pressed shirt and said, "Sir, you can't hold an event on the Capitol grounds without a permit."

Death lowered the violin an inch.

"I have an appointment," he said, "with everyone."

The trooper considered for a long moment the sight of the angel of death before him. Then he took one step back, and found, to his surprise, that he was no longer in control of his own bowels.

The east grew gray.

It began as the oboe in the old piece begins: one thin, cracked, foolish, triumphant note from the far side of I-35, where one of East Austin's free-roaming roosters, an animal with no permit, no handler, and no regard for anything, drew breath and sang. A second one answered from a porch on Chicon Street. Then, from the river, a dark, rustling wave came sweeping back up under the Congress Avenue Bridge, the last of the season's bats coming home before their winter flight.

All over the avenue, the dead looked up.

The skeletons were the first to go, in a clatter of bones, like a xylophone dropped down a flight of stairs. Then the shrouds, then the wool coats, one after another, all down the great boulevard, pulled back toward the hill like a tide going out. Zilker went with his block of ice, already melting. Tips went with his bratwurst fork, and Besserer with his opinion. Fontaine went with his newspaper under his arm and Littlefield went a respectful two steps behind. Dinah Pruitt and Elias Navasota went arm in arm. Tom Miller went the long way, to look at I-35 one more time. Ben Thompson tipped his hat to a driverless white car, which waited politely, and then he too was gone.

The dead went home across the interstate the way they had come, and what they left behind was not much to look at in the dawn: four lanes of cars with their doors open and their hazard lights blinking, three hundred strong, not a driver among them. TxDOT would later describe it as a significant incident of undetermined cause. The tow trucks arrived at seven, and everyone who saw it agreed that the interstate, for the first time in memory, looked exactly like what it had always been: a very long parking lot.

Death tucked the violin under his arm. He glanced once down the length of Congress Avenue. It was nearly empty, and it was very quiet, and it smelled faintly of coffee and exhaust. "Good crowd," he said, to no one, and followed the others up the hill.

On the curb outside a downtown coffee shop, a half-asleep barista found a paper cup that had not been there a moment before. It was warm, and it had a name written on it in an old, careful, unpracticed hand.

ELIAS

Nobody ever came to claim it. She kept it for a week.

Epilogue, r/Austin, 7:14 a.m:

Why is the police helicopter flying in circles over the cemetery? - 4 hours ago, 241 upvotes

PSA: did anyone else see skeletons on Congress last night? - 2 hours ago, 55 upvotes

Why is I-35 full of empty cars? Does anyone know what's going on? - 1 hour ago, 29 upvotes

So there you have it. Some of the real people in this story, each documented as buried at Oakwood or its Annex: Walter Tips (Texas Legislative Reference Library), Carl William Besserer and Edmund Ludwig (music writer Michael Corcoran), and, from the City's 2015 Historic Cemeteries Master Plan, Peter Mansbendel, Swante Palm, Alexander Penn Wooldridge, Albert Burleson, Harvey Marks, Elizabeth Johnson Williams, Abner Cook, A.J. Zilker, George W. Littlefield, Jacob Fontaine, Susanna Dickinson Hannig, John Gordon Chalmers, and John Henry Faulk. Tom Miller is listed as an Oakwood burial by the Handbook of Texas and the Political Graveyard. John A. Lomax Sr. is buried there, and Alan Lomax has a cenotaph, per the City. Ben Thompson's burial is documented by Texas Gravestones and Eula Phillips's by the Servant Girl Murders research site, and the City says Joe Sing is buried in the Annex. Also, Rizzbot with the cameo.

A list of people: Gene Ramey is on Wikipedia's list of Oakwood burials and in the City's music exhibit, but I could not confirm his grave from a primary source. A.J. Zilker's ice fortune comes from a blogger. Tips is called "conductor of the Saengerrunde" in the Saengerrunde's National Register nomination, and the "no bad men when men sing" motto is from Corcoran. Mansbendel's walnut banner is from an artist's tribute site. Wooldridge's two-percent cemetery ordinance is in the master plan, whose footnote dates conflict (1909 or 1919). Ludwig appears as "Emil" in some sources.

Invented people, standing in for the unnamed and forgotten: Elias Navasota (a name for the real, anonymous first burial), Ned Tolliver, Sexton Ambrose Pell, Doña Remedios Ibarra, Col. Augustus Prewitt, Dinah Pruitt, the twenty-five-dollar lot buyer, and the woman among the thirty-six.

Bonus items:

Bonus Photo Album - All 24 photos in the Portal to Texas History - unknown dates

Chronicle articles: #1, #2, #3

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