If you visit the Dr Pepper Museum in downtown Waco, you probably think you’ll just learn about the soda. But according to museum staff, there is also a spooky side, and you can see it in one of their ghost tours.

Rachel Moore is the educational experience manager, and she said over the last few decades the building has been a museum, staff have shared plenty of supernatural experiences. They started documenting the experiences about five years ago.

Moore said the experiences have often happened during the day, staff have seen and heard faces and footsteps, they’ve seen cans falling from secured museum shelves and lights flickering.

Moore said she’s a bit of a skeptic, but even she has experienced some things she just can’t explain. She said the ghost tours are chance for people to see what they can find.

“It’s less of a ghost story and more of a paranormal investigation,” Moore said.

“We want our guests to be the investigators, we provide them with different tools to look for ghosts themselves, or look for this paranormal activity themselves.”

Moore said the tours are usually small groups, with just two tour guides. They happen at night, and they turn the lights and most of the power off so people get the full experience.

Moore said they never know who or what people will experience, but a lot of activity has happened around the truck in the courtyard. Moore said that spirit is nicknamed Shorty, and she said he was killed moving trucks during the Waco tornado in 1953.

But not everything people experience is necessarily a spirit. Moore said they also believe they’ve seen orbs, and some experiences are probably connected to objects in the museum.

“As a museum, we collect a lot of different things from Dr. Pepper and soft drink history, Waco history,” Moore said.

“And because of that, we have objects that were important to a lot of people, and a many times, people believe that something can be imprinted on that object, not necessarily the building.”

Moore said they don’t believe anything dark can be found within their walls.

“There’s a good chance that throughout history, people were working in this factory, walking down that hallway and turning the corner thousands of times a day, and it left an imprint on the space,” Moore said.

“So it’s not necessarily an entity to interact with, it’s just a recording in that area.”

Moore said they’ve typically done a lot of these tours around Halloween, but they’re offering another one Saturday night. The tours will be offered usually about twice a month and you can find availability on the Dr Pepper website.

—KWTX