Posted on 10/28/2005 8:28:35 PM PDT by hispanarepublicana
Ghosts, Haunted Places Part of "Weird Texas" LAST UPDATE: 10/28/2005 6:28:16 PM This story is available on your cell phone at mobile.woai.com.
This tale begins with a larger-than-life bronze statue of Christ, arms outstretched, resting atop a concrete pedestal above a family plot in the tree-lined gloom of the Oakwood Cemetery.
The statue's hands are palms up during the day. At night, so the tale goes, the statue's palms turn downward. And, the eyes follow any movement in the graveyard, home to the remains of Sam Houston, the father of Texas.
Known to locals as the "Black Jesus" because the bronze quickly weathered to ebony years ago, the sculpture marks the grave of prominent Texas lawyer Benjamin Harrison Powell, who died in 1960.
The yarn is featured in "Weird Texas," a new book of legends, mysteries, oddities, haunted places and ghostly tales of the state.
Over nearly 300 pages, the trio of writers Wesley Treat, of Arlington; Bob Riggs, of Austin; and Heather Shade, of El Paso, cover one end of Texas to the other in pursuit of unexplained phenomena, quirks and oddballs.
"Texas is an eccentric state," said Treat, who supplements his writing as a photographer and occasional actor. "Few people would disagree Texas has its own personality, quite a few eccentric people, a lot of tall tales, a lot of braggers. So stories get around."
Stories like a lost gold mine near El Paso. The crash of an alien airship in 1897 outside Aurora, north of Fort Worth. Ghost lights at Marfa in West Texas and in the Big Thicket of East Texas.
"I don't like to write about things I haven't personally visited," said Treat, 31. "I'll actually go and visit these things, track down people or local experts and talk to them. That's part of the fun, finding out real stories."
The book, an offspring of New Jersey publishers Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman, who turned their "Weird NJ" magazine into a "Weird U.S." book, includes a disclaimer that says while the authors attempted to present a historical record of legends and folklore, many of the anecdotes couldn't be independently confirmed or corroborated.
"Some of it's complete myth, urban legends," Treat said. "But some have a ring of truth to it."
Some of the truthful weird sites and phenomenon are easy to verify - like the thousands of Mexican bats that fly out from under the Congress Avenue bridge over Austin's Town Lake during warm nights, or the famed Cadillac Ranch, where 10 classic Cadillacs are buried face down, tail-ends up in a wheat field near Amarillo.
Others, however, require some imagination, which adds to the mystery.
Ghost sightings, for example, are plentiful in Texas, from the Lockhart firehouse, the railroad tracks in San Antonio, White Rock Lake near Dallas to the ghost nun of Loretto's Tower in El Paso and the Ring of Ghosts in Brazoria.
Ghosts apparently haunt Waco's Cameron Park, where supposedly a pair of horse thieves were hanged in trees by vigilantes, and at Arlington's Screaming Bridge tombstones reportedly glow in the Trinity River where a carload of teenagers were killed in a traffic accident in 1961.
The book's section on "creepy crypts and telltale tombs" tells the tale about the glowing grave in Kilgore of Karen Silkwood, a whistleblowing union activist and the subject of the movie "Silkwood" who mysteriously died in a 1974 traffic wreck in Oklahoma, and the concrete grave marker of a woman in a fetal position over a plot in the Old Fairview Cemetery in the Panhandle town of Memphis. What's weird about this one is no one's sure for whom the marker is intended.
Co-author Riggs is particularly familiar with East Texas, where he grew up in Sour Lake in Hardin County and now publishes a health magazine in Austin.
"People who live in the big cities don't have any clue how weird it is out in the woods and swamps of East Texas," said Riggs, 60.
He points to Ghost Road, otherwise known as Bragg Road, legendary in the Big Thicket as home of a playful basketball-sized ball of light.
"People sometimes see a light there and the light exhibits unusual behavior," Riggs said. "What I'm seeing in my work is this light is a genuine scientific anomaly, not just swamp gas, but a genuine unknown. I've been hearing stories about this stuff since I was a kid."
Riggs likes to tell about meeting a game warden who talked about people making repeated reports of seeing strange creatures or unexplained livestock killings in East Texas.
"This is a Parks and Wildlife Department game warden telling me this, but it wasn't hard for him to believe," he said. "I've done a lot of research, had enough things happen, been scared a few times myself."
---
On the Net:
www.weirdus.com
Could've been worse. Could've been a buzzard. I have this fear that I'm going to get to heaven and there's going to be a lengthy application process where I don't have all the information I need (balance on the mortage principle listed seperately from the balance on the mortgage interest, phone number of first employer, etc.)
If that happens, you're in the other place ;)
Kind of like that far side cartoon with the two old guys sitting on the park bench feeding the birds. There are a bunch of pigeons busy pecking at the ground and a little further back are two or three vultures just staring at the old men.
Well, my Father passed several years ago and rests in Christ; but my mother sees him often. I'll tell her to ask him the next time she sees him...
;)
Actually, he lived much farther to the south of Athens - down in what we call "deep" East Texas, in what was once known as "The Great Western Wood".
Near Athens, there are tales of ghostly Spanish missionaries who follow the vestiges of the old trails which crisscross the area.
Not far away, one should find the last remains of Trammel's Trace, to the east. There you may encounter the memories of smugglers running guns and goods north and south along the old trail, long forgotten by all but those who still haunt it;
and to the south, go to Hwy 21, to the town of Douglass. There - into the darkened cover of over-arching trees, around the bend and down a nameless road just off the highway - you will see a grassy field open up and drop down into the shadows towards a natural landing on the Angelina River.
I have seen it in the moonlight, in the cold of winter, a wayside for the ghosts of those who stopped before me. Two centuries before, it was a lonely inn, an isolated stop along the way for Spanish travelers when Highway 21 was "The King's Highway".
I could not see quite see them, but I did not have to see them to know they were there. I spent only a moment, before moving quickly on down the road...
I believe your hand on the face story. Up until I was about 20, I didn't believe in ghosts or spirits, but then I spent a summer in what turned out to be a haunted apartment building in Cedar City, Utah. Most unpleasant summer of my life. Every time I went to sleep in either of the bedrooms I would wake up gasping for breath with a feeling of intense pressure on my chest. After a while, every time I even stepped into one of the bedrooms, I felt like someone who was very, VERY angry was following me around and telling me to get out. I finally ended up spending the rest of the summer sleeping in the living room, which seemed to be free of "influences." (Oh, and I was *intensely* relieved when my downstairs neighbor reported the same occurences, since I thought until then that I was just nuts!)
While I haven't experienced any of the things other people have mentioned, I've seen the Marfa lights at least 1/2 a dozen times. Just weird lights off in the distance that appear and disappear.
On the Texas A&M campus we're supposed to have several haunted buildings, most notably the Animal Industries building. Decades ago it was were all the meat on campus was processed. One night a man working alone in the basement sliced open his leg and bleed to death before being able to get out of the building and find help. Many people swear they've seen his ghost in the basement and in front of the freight elevator which he where he died. I had a class in there in 1999 and never saw anything unusual.
about 12 years ago my 14 month old daughter died in her sleep of SIDS. Needless to say I was grieving pretty hard, but I WASN'T crazy.
well for a while after she died, I'd hear things...like..I'd be lying away at night with the lights on reading a book and hubby snoring away next to me and hear very definite foot steps walk around the bed, stop by my head and turn and walk around to hubby's head and do it again and again. One morning(2 a.m.) hubby heard "someone" jumping in our daughters crib(which was in the next room.) for about 15 minutes(he timed it on the clock radio). Lots of little things like that happened for quite some time. I totally believe!
Hi, hispanarepublicana. Interesting thread......
When I was 13, I was in the middle of a bridge overlooking a dam upstream of a series of mill races. As I looked over the rail, I felt someone shove me from behind. I whirled around expecting to see either my brother (who was fishing down at one end of the bridge) or one of my friends from school. There was no one there.
At the old Chemistry Building at TTU, a woman with the janitorial crew encountered a student who was trying to steal an advance copy of the exam. I think he'd come in through an underground tunnel. He decapitated her and left her body sitting up behind a desk or at a lab counter. It's said she haunts the building and the tunnels as well, particularly around finals and midterms.
mysterious underground wall? tell, tell!
Also, there are reports of a deceased Chem prof who loiters in one of the study rooms and occasionally tutors students (they usually discover, later, that their tutor was "not of this world").
There are other spots on campus (Dairy Barn, Museum, Quack Shack, etc.) and in the Lubbock area that are reported to be haunted.
I didn't know about the Dairy Barn and Quack Shack being haunted!!! What's the stories on those?
HR, there is a three volume set of Texas ghost stories that cover three geographical regions of the state.
When I return home from my office, I'll post the bibliographic info here for you and everyone else.
"I was a little disappointed they left out the mysterious, ancient, underground wall which surrounds Rockwall ,Texas."
Wow. This is the first time that I have heard this. What is the story behind it?
|
I should tell the story of what happened to some neighbours of mine when they lived in Big Spring: glowing feet walking on the staircase...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.