Ghosts, Haunted Places Part of 'Weird Texas'

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.

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."

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...

When I worked in on campus as a student, I often engaged the veteran guards in conversation about weird and funny things that they have seen and heard on campus.

One guard told me about when he worked the night shift with a few other guards at the Quack Shack.

One night, he and the other guards were making their rounds and ensuring that all the offices, exam rooms, and labs were locked and secure. They finished checking their floors and met at a kiosk on the ground floor to chat and while away the time until their next rounds.

While sitting at the kiosk, they heard a door slam on the floor above them. Then, they heard heavy footfalls on the floor above them. A few seconds later, the elevator switched-on and they heard the doors for the ground floor (about 20 feet from them) open and they heard footfalls coming near the kiosk. The footfalls went around a corner. The guard with whom I spoke stated that he peeked around the corner only to seek a dark form moving down the hallway and turn left at the end of the hallway. He immediately scurried down that hallway to see what was down there. He reached the end of the hallway and turned left only to find a dead end.

Somebody needs to set up a web cam to try to catch the Dairy Barn mist. Meanwhile, here's some dark cloudy Lubbock Halloween weekend reading:

Lubbock Stories:

Tech folklorist knows where the ghosts are haunting
Tech professor emeritus of English, Kenneth Davis, tells a story. In the late 1960s, a distinguished professor from a western engineering school retired and came to Texas Tech University, where he began a chemistry program. The professor was popular and well-liked by students and faculty, said Kenneth Davis, professor emeritus of English at Tech. "He conducted a study hall in Holden Hall and he helped students with first and second semester chemistry," Davis said.

Does the angel really shed tears?
Here's a brief bit of Lubbock lore. A born and bred Lubbockite told the story of her ritual initiation into a high school peer group one night in late September. The story involved the statue of an angel that dominates the vista near one entrance to the City of Lubbock Cemetery. According to the storyteller, she was in her early teen-age years when she heard the tale. Friends told her that, after sunset, if she ran fast as she could from the front gate of the cemetery to the carved statue and touched the angel's feet, the stone, winged figure would shed tears.

The House with the Gables
On Oct. 31, 1950, a vacant two-story frame house at the corner of 50th Street and the Tahoka Highway burned to the ground, erasing from the scene what perhaps was the most mysterious landmark in Lubbock's history. Every town has its haunted houses and its legends, and it was around "the house with the gables" that was woven Lubbock's tale of discovered buried treasure and spooks.

A haunting tale
Old building gives workers eerie feelings
Many who work at the Texas Tech Ex-Students Association look as if they've seen a ghost, when actually they say they've only heard and felt its presence. "I used to have these sensations that someone was walking behind me and running their fingers along my back," said Dana Gamble, business manager.

CEREBRAL SPECTER
When darkness falls in a haunted house...
When my editor wanted me to spend the night on Friday the 13th in a haunted house, I jumped at the chance to do it. I'm not into all this booga-booga stuff, but if something should happen, I could get a great story. After I found a haunted house in Lubbock, I bragged to everyone that I knew how I planned to spend the night there.

The Lubbock Lights

'Flying whatsits' visited the South Plains several times
The 'flying whatsits' continued to zoom through Lubbock skies Friday night as numerous residents reported seeing flashes of light flying at "unbelievable speeds" — and at least one person showed up with photographs of what he said he saw in the sky. Identity of the strange objects continued to baffle all who claimed to have seen them and three Texas Tech professors who examined photographs taken by Carl Hart Jr., 18-year-old amateur photographer of 2332 Nineteenth Street, could offer no explanation.


Original A-J Article about the 'Flying Whatsits'	Photo of a sign in Lubbock

1977 Article about the Lubbock Lights	Computer enhanced photo of the Lubbock Lights

Area Stories

A Haunting Tale
Ghost hunter meets match in old hotel
The sun had disappeared before I parked at the Commercial Hotel in Floydada. When I got out of the car, the air had a pleasant crispness to it, and an almost-full moon began to make its way across the sky, occasionally veiled by fingers of hazy clouds. As fall nights go, Oct. 26 was perfect for ghost hunting. Michelle Ruddell, new owner of the old hotel, stood holding the screen door for me. She bought the old building recently at an auction, and said she's making it into a Women's Christian Job Corps office called The Maker's Mansion.

Wayland's ghost never reached her goal
The Plainview campus of Wayland Baptist University is haunted. At least that's what some alumnae believe, including history professor Estelle Owens. The history professor told the story of young woman, perhaps 20 years old, who was obsessed with succeeding as a musician.

Plainview High School haunted by Herkie
Though no one seems to know exactly when or how the tale began, Plainview High School reportedly has a ghost. According to the book "Phantoms of the Plains: Tales of West Texas Ghosts," by Docia Schultz Williams, a ghost named Herkie is said to haunt the school auditorium.

Old Matador jail home to mysterious guest
In the tiny town of Matador, a relic of a jail reportedly houses a disembodied soul. Matador, population about 800, is northeast of Lubbock between Plainview and Paducah along Highway 70. The old county jail, in use until a few years ago, was built in 1891, complete with its own trap door for hanging horse thieves, murderers or worse, said Lucretia Campbell, Motley County clerk.

Revenant stalks Bailey County jail
Frightened jailers have told sheriff's deputies that something haunts the jail in Bailey County. Many jailers and several inmates report that a ghost is loose in the facility, said Deputy Sheriff Eileen Ciampoli.

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