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
try www.lonestarspirits.org
Thanks for the post. I work in the McCulloch County Courthouse. The Courthouse is reported to have the spirit of General McCulloch and his paramour. I had worked there about a year when I mentioned that I was always smelling cigars even tho the courthouse is a non-smoking building. The smoke didn't offend me because my daddy was a cigar smoker and the smell was rather peaceful. The judge told me about the spirit and his affinity for cigars. He asked if I ever smelled gardenias...I hadn't but the Generals's parmour is supposed to smell of gardenias. As one who did not believe in spirits...I now question???
Big Spring? I've heard about when the professional girls were in town that the EL was turned off on the big neon sign on the roof of the Hotel Settles, thus announcing to everyone "in the know" that, ummm, entertainment was available.
Well, these neighbours had lived in Big Spring for a few years before moving to the neighbourhood where I met them.
Once house that they had was a few miles outside of Big Spring. They had had odd things happen when they were there (like a screen door unlatch itself and open and close wildly).
One night, they had a guest visitng the house (a friend of one of their sons). This guy was downstairs in the living room on the night of his visit and everyone else was asleep. This guy was watching some TV before he planned to go to sleep. Well, he heard footfalls upstair and thought that one of my neighbours or their kids were stirring upstais and thought nothing of it.
Then he heard slow footfalls on the stairs. The chair in whiach he was sitting was close to the stairs. Out of the cornr of his eye he saw a pair of feet that were glowing green. No legs or body - just feet and they walked down the satirs and began to move toward this kid. At that point, he bolted out of the chair and ran screeming from the house. My neighbours said that the kid refused to ever vist the house at night after that.
Wasn't Quanah Parker born near Big Spring?
beats me.
Thanks! It was been a looooong time since I last visited Rockwall. Now, I have to make plans for a visit.
More research hasn't been done on this? Is Rockwall near Waco? (we're 24 secs away from beating the Bears)!
What is the score?
We just won; 28-0.
Oh, I thought taking Chemistry was the scary part of the story.......... ;^)
As an aside - was that a weird football game or what? So close for so much of the game then we blew it out at the end....... Baylor played well, good for them!
"Oh, I thought taking Chemistry was the scary part of the story.......... ;^)"
LOL!
Yeah...I went from pins & needles to FReeping the entire last quarter.
I wish I had a ghost in Holden Hall helping me with History........ you see, there were a couple of football players in my History class and I, uh, couldn't see around them, yeah that's why I couldn't concentrate - because they took up too much room.......... ;^)
I was flipping between the Nebraska/ou game and our game........ Nebraska almost came back and beat ou.........
Well, I have heard some folks feeling "uneasy" in parts of Holden Hall. I have been there alone at night a few times and have heard some odd noises that are not the usual plumbing and AC noises.
It wasn't me, I swear.........
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.