Scares are on the menu at Better Than Sex, a Plano dessert shop some say is haunted

A ghostly family. A man in a butcher’s smock. The whir of an electric mixer and the whispering of your name, with no one else around.

These strange and spooky experiences and others have been reported at Better Than Sex, a restaurant housed in one of Plano’s oldest buildings.

The stories were revealed last year as part of Plano’s annual Apparition Expedition, an annual event highlighting spooky tales of the city’s past. The event, once a walking tour, was held virtually in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and is being presented this year as a film screening Oct. 15 at Cox Playhouse.

Co-owners Derrick Miller and his wife, Sheila Phalen-Miller, and members of their staff said they have witnessed a series of paranormal events at the restaurant since it opened in 2019.

“There’s been some, I guess spirits, that have been around here,” Miller said during last year’s event. “Staff and team members have actually had some interactions with them. A lot of people have heard their names in here … called.”

Reports of these experiences over the years have led some to say the building is haunted. It was once a drug store that was one of the only businesses to survive several fires, including the Great Fire of 1895, which destroyed much of the downtown district.

Miller said he paid little attention to the weird goings-on until recently, when he was in front of the restaurant and heard his name whispered. He looked around, expecting to see one of his servers, but no one was there, he said in the presentation.

Miller isn’t the only one to have experienced spooky occurrences.

About three weeks after the restaurant opened for business, Lisa Chavez, the restaurant’s pastry lead, was talking with two other co-workers when a large mixer suddenly turned on by itself.

“You hear the mixer turn on, and it goes from zero to our highest speed,” Chavez said in the video.

She thought someone was playing a prank, but no one was near the mixer at the time.

Since then, kitchen manager Joffrey Smith said he has been leery of coming into the building alone and has had other suspicious encounters.

One night, he said he had to go back inside the restaurant after leaving. At the end of a hallway, he said he saw “a mom, a dad, and to be honest with you, it looked like a bald-headed 8-year-old girl with a bow on the top of her head.”

“They didn’t come out," Smith said in the video. "They literally stayed right there, until I decided not to come up the hallway where I had to continue to look at them.”

He said he didn’t stick around to see what would happen, instead venturing down another side of the restaurant.

At least one customer has also reported a ghostly encounter. That night, Miller said he noticed a guest who was extremely pale and “looked like he’d seen a ghost.”

Apparently, he did, or so he said.

Miller asked him if he was OK, and the man said, "I know it might seem weird, but has anybody ever said anything about paranormal activities here?

“I said, ‘Well, it is an old building,’ ” Miller said in the video. “So, it wouldn’t surprise me.”

The guest explained that he had seen an apparition of a man in a butcher’s smock, just standing and staring at him.

“During the course of the dinner, he had to go outside and regain his composure, twice,” Miller said in the video.

Some of his staff have said that if they ever see anything, they won’t be back, the owner said. But Miller is open to learning more about his ghostly guests, possibly having people stay in the restaurant overnight to investigate what might happen.

“Whatever’s here,” he said, “it seems pretty friendly.”