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."
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On the Net:
www.weirdus.com
free dixie,sw
I had to hiss to UT and A&M, they being TTU's most intense rivals.
rotflmRao!
free dixie,sw
Some of these stories may interest you...
Thanks.
Have a look at the hyperlink on post #60.
Thanks again, lol.
"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."
Okay, this is just a urban legend.
Screaming Bride was a one lane, steel tressel, wooden roadbed bridge over the Trinity. With it's steep onramps, vehicles could go airborne if the driver took the speeding. My last drive over was as a passenger in about 1971 and those of us in the vehicle were shown why its name is such. Yes, we went airborne as the driver wanted to do to scare us.
Arlington & Fort Worth closed off the bridge around 1973 and this was a popular place for everyone to shoot their firearms since the sixties. Favorite targets were old cars that were dumped into the river. When the sun was just right, a tail light or headlight would shine through the water until the new target was shot out. There was always a supply of junk cars to shoot.
The two cities in jurisdiction began busting people for shooting inside city limits around 1974 and by '75 the road leading up to the bridge was closed 1/2 mile up on each side.
During this same period is when someone set fire to the bridge twice (wood roadbed) and the cities didn't want to deal with it. The bridge was blown up around 1977 to remove all reasons for people to be out there.
A new bridge was built about 1/2 mile upstream around 1985 on Greenbelt Rd as a shortcut for Bell Helicopter employees that lived in Arlington. There is a concrete railroad bridge between these two locations, but that is a different story.
she said that her grandmother always warned her to look out for him at dances from the time she was about 2-13. she also said she really knows nothing else about the subject.
fwiw, she said,"all the frogs i EVER kissed had regular feet". i LOL!
free dixie,sw
I'll have to ask my older "Tias" about that.
Thank you.
NOW, i'm interested in learning more about the "dancer w/chicken feet"!
free dixie,sw
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