April Slaughter (21 page)

Allen and I did all of the typical tourist stuff, stopping in to the little antique shops and even taking a ride on a horse-drawn carriage as we toured the historic streets and neighborhoods. Although it was fall when we visited, the heat and humidity of summer had not yet left Texas. We met up with a small group
of people in the early afternoon to investigate a covered rail car that sat just beyond the Historic Jefferson Railway Train Depot in the woods of the Big Cypress Bayou.

I knew nothing of the rail car’s history, going in only with the knowledge that people had claimed it was haunted. We split into small groups and each took turns inside the car with their cameras, digital recorders, and various other devices, hoping to catch something paranormal.

When it was our turn, Allen decided to test out the K-II meter while I ran video. It was daytime, but from inside the passenger car you could barely tell. The windows were nearly all covered over and only a random streak of light or two found its way in. Allen sat on one of the passenger seats with the K-II and began to ask a series of questions. Nothing happened at first, but then I noticed something odd happening with the video camera. As I was looking into the viewfinder, the picture would become increasingly blurry when it had just been crystal clear. Every few seconds, the camera would focus and then blur again.

“The camera is acting strange,” I said to Allen.

“What’s it doing?” he asked.

“I can’t get it to stay focused.”

Immediately after we noted the strange incident, the lights on the K-II meter in Allen’s hand went berserk. A long beam of light passed underneath his hand and under one of the other passenger seats. The beam moved toward the other side of the rail car, then back toward us, and the camera refused to stay focused until the anomaly faded away. The lights on the K-II had reacted every time the light passed by it, but they never lit up again after that. Something in the car had triggered the EMF sensor in the K-II and made my camera act strangely, but we had no idea what it was. We waited several more minutes before deciding to let the next small group of people take our place in the car.

We gathered our things and stepped outside to see that the others were all standing with their backs to the rail car. Jerry Bowers turned to look at us and was pointing his finger out towards the woods nearby. He motioned to us to come closer.

“Can y’all hear that?” he asked.

We stood still for a few moments listening for whatever it was that had caught Jerry’s attention. All of a sudden, I heard what sounded like a man yelling off in the distance. My first thought was that someone was out there and possibly needed help.

“We need to go out there,” said Allen.

“Let’s go,” I replied, and off the two of us went out into the woods beyond the train tracks.

We wandered around for about ten minutes, and never heard the yelling again. We didn’t even know which direction we were headed. All of a sudden, Allen stood still and looked down at the ground. At his feet was a peculiar glass bottle. He bent down and picked it up, and for reasons neither of us ever figured out, we brought it home with us. It sits in our kitchen window. Several weeks after we brought it home, a psychic friend of ours told us that the bottle was the reason Allen felt drawn into the woods, and that the spirit of a woman was attached to it. We were told she was friendly, so it didn’t bother us that we had brought a “stranger” home.

The time came to head back to the train depot for a ride through the reportedly haunted woods. I was more than just a little relieved when the sun finally set and the air cooled off just enough to sustain what little energy I had left. Allen, Jerry, and I sat in the last seat at the back of the train. A switchman was the only person behind us, as his job was to jump off of the back during the ride to switch the rails.

While the train slowly moved along the tracks, a guide at the front of the passenger car relayed stories of what others had
experienced on the ride and in the woods that surrounded us. It was completely dark outside, and it was difficult to see any further than a few inches out from the car without turning on a flashlight.

The switchman behind us jumped off the train and disappeared. A short while later, a loud thud hit the back of the car and the three of us just assumed he had caught up and jumped back on. I turned to look, but no one was there.

“Someone’s behind the train,” said Jerry.

“I know, I can hear them talking,” I replied.

We could hear what sounded like a quickly spoken conversation directly behind the train car. Jerry snapped a couple of photographs, but they turned out to be completely black. I grabbed my flashlight and shined it out on the tracks just behind the rail car. About ten feet off of to the right, I saw a man standing next to a tree. A split second later, he was gone. He hadn’t moved; I didn’t see him walk away. He was just gone. I shined the light directly out where I had seen him standing, but he was no longer there.

“Did you see him?” I asked Allen and Jerry.

“Who?” they asked.

“The guy by the tree out there.”

Neither of them had seen the man, and the others on the train didn’t report anything out of the ordinary when we pulled back up to the depot. I asked the guide who the individual might have been, but he said that no one else should have been out there. I wondered if the specter had anything to do with the conversation Jerry and I had heard carrying on just behind us as the train slowly crept along the tracks.

The depot itself also had reported paranormal phenomena, so we all wanted to check it out before concluding our efforts that night. Destry Brown, vice president of operations at the Jefferson Railway, spoke to me about some of the things he had
experienced since he started working there in April 2002.

“I spend most of my time here in the depot, and there is always something going on in here,” he said. “We have a string of sleigh bells that hang on our door, and at any given time they will ring as if someone had ahold of them, shaking them violently, but no one is there.

“When I am all alone in the building,” he continued, “I’ll be working on something in the upstairs lobby and hear the office doors downstairs opening and closing. It’s really strange because a lot of things happen when I have the building locked up tight with the alarm set. No one else could be in the building without my knowing it.”

“Has anything else happened when you were here alone?” I asked.

“We have a toy box upstairs with several small cars in it for kids to play with while they wait for the train. One night, I had everything locked up and was working in my office downstairs when I distinctly heard what sounded like those toy cars rolling across the floor upstairs. I went upstairs to see what was going on, but the cars were right where they should be in the toy box.”

“Why do you think the depot is haunted?” I asked.

“I think the location is more haunted than the actual structure,” said Destry. “This was all an industrial area during the 1850s, and I know there were probably a number of accidents here. Also, passengers coming in on the steamboats sometimes had to walk into Jefferson from about four miles downriver if the boats couldn’t make it all the way up. It wasn’t the safest area, and I am sure many of them were mugged or hurt as they tried to make it into town.”

With the area’s rich history, there really was no telling just who might be haunting the Historic Jefferson Railway and depot building.

When our small group tried to catch something paranormal on our audio and video equipment, we were disappointed that nothing out of the ordinary happened. I’ve learned that a lot of ghosthunting is playing the “hurry-up-and-wait” game. Nothing is ever predictable, and having patience can often be difficult.

Late that night, just as we were packing up our equipment to leave, Jerry picked up his digital voice recorder that had been sitting on the counter. He had almost forgotten it was there. Had he left it behind, he may never have discovered what he had captured when he returned home and reviewed the audio.

At the very end of the recording, when all was quiet and we were about to leave, a voice made a simple and humorous observation.

“Tourists!”

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, a friend of mine turned me on to an HBO series called
Six Feet Under
. The show centers around the Fishers—a family of undertakers that live in and operate a funeral home in Los Angeles, California. The series began with the tragic death of Nathaniel Fisher, the family patriarch and owner of the Fisher & Sons Funeral Home. His hearse was broadsided by a bus while he was on his way to the airport to pick up his oldest son on Christmas Eve.

As his casket is being lowered into the ground during the graveside service, the scene cuts to Nathaniel sitting on top of the hearse parked nearby, witnessing his own funeral. He looks on unconcerned, wearing an Hawaiian aloha shirt and sipping a tropical drink from a coconut. From that scene on, I was hooked on the show, as it reassured me that I wasn’t the only one who
wondered if I might be able to attend my own funeral. How would I perceive the process? What would my reaction to it be?

Every time I step foot in a cemetery, I look around at all of the plots and am instantly empathetic for the families and friends who have had to endure the death of a loved one. I have been to my share of funerals and have acquired a deep respect for the different rituals we all use to honor those we have lost. I am especially intrigued with the individualized stones and monuments that are erected in remembrance of those that have passed.

Scottsville Cemetery is home to some of the most beautiful funerary statues I have ever seen. Looking at pictures online did not sate me, and on a beautiful Saturday afternoon when most other wives would be bugging their husbands to take them shopping, I was begging mine to take me to a cemetery—and a reportedly haunted one at that!

Scottsville Cemetery isn’t very large, but the stories that have come out of it sure are! In almost every cemetery, you will find statues of angels. They symbolize a belief in the divine, a higher power, and peace—ideals that bring comfort to the living and honor the dead. There is, however, one angel in Scottsville Cemetery that has caused a great deal of fright in those lurking about in the dark.

An account I found online detailed an incident where six individuals had driven out to the cemetery to spend some time on the grounds at night. As they walked around with their flashlights, nothing much was happening and they were all a bit disappointed. They decided to leave and began to walk toward their car when they passed one monument that sent a jolt of fear through them. The beautiful life-sized angel draped over one of the headstones they had seen when they arrived had vanished! All six people knew she had been there earlier, but where was she now? Had she flown up into the night sky, or was she lurking somewhere among the other headstones? Neither idea
was very comforting. The group ran for their car and drove quickly away.

This particular angel has scared quite a few others as well. Some say if you stand close to her for any long period of time at night, she will lift her head to look you right in the eye. Naturally skeptical that such a large piece of stone could become animated and interact with people, I wanted to see her face-to-face.

Allen and lead investigator with The Paranormal Source, Jerry Bowers, accompanied me on my excursion to Scottsville, just as eager as I was to see the mysterious angel step down from her place atop someone’s grave and move as she had been reported to do. We arrived in the late afternoon and immediately took notice of the angel. There she sat, perfectly carved and lifelike, seemingly weeping over a headstone. If she moved during the couple of hours we spent on the grounds, she must have done it while we weren’t paying attention. Nevertheless, I kept looking back in her direction just to make sure she stayed put. She did.

At the west side of the cemetery there is a springhouse at the bottom of a hill, and just beyond it is a peculiar set of stairs ascending a hill to empty space. It is said that at one time a large two-story home sat on that hill, but it had burned to the ground sometime over fifty years ago. Before it was destroyed, locals reported that they would stand on those steps looking up at the house and hear sounds coming from within. Disembodied conversations and the sound of someone dragging furniture across the floor fascinated and frightened many. They knew the house was empty, so who or what was still in there?

Now that the house is gone, you’d think that the strange phenomena would have left with it, right? Wrong. Curious kids, regular cemetery visitors, and paranormal investigators have all said that as they stand at the top of the stairs, they have heard a woman weeping down near the springhouse just below
them. Sometimes the sound is faint, while at others it sounds as though a living, breathing person is obviously distraught.