Ghosts along the Texas Coast (10 page)

Now, Bailey made some mighty strange requests concerning his burial, too. For one thing, he insisted he be buried standing up because he had “never stooped to any man while alive, and didn't intend to change after death.” He wanted his gun placed over his shoulder, and his powder horn nearby. He wanted to be buried facing west, because he'd been moving in that direction all his life, and wanted to be facing in that direction when he crossed over into the next world. And one last request, he wanted a big, full, jug of whiskey planted right at his feet!

Nancy Bailey saw that his instructions were carried out. A huge hole, over eight feet deep, and “big around as a wash tub,” was dug in a pecan grove near the red house. The remains were placed in a pine coffin, and provided with a gun and ammunition as requested. But when Bubba, a favorite slave of Bailey's, a giant of a man, came up with a huge jug of whiskey to plant at Bailey's feet, Mrs. Bailey would have none of that. Bubba insisted that it was what his master had requested, but on that one request, Mrs. Bailey flatly refused. It is said she jerked the jug away from Bubba and threw it out the window. She said Brit had had more than enough of that stuff on earth, and she didn't think he needed any wherever he was headed to in the great beyond. And that's evidently what caused all the trouble to start out on Bailey's Prairie!

Bubba used to talk a lot about old Brit. And he would always conclude his stories saying that “Marse Bailey don't stand easy in his grave. He's still out huntin' dat jug of whiskey.”

A few years after Brit died, the place was sold to John Thomas, who brought his wife, Ann, there to live. He had heard tales that the old red house was haunted, but he hadn't told his young wife. Soon after they moved in, business called John away. On a very dark night, Ann and a servant girl were sleeping in the bedroom when something suddenly awakened Ann. The night was very dark, but darkness had never frightened her. No, there was something different, a “presence” that she felt. She gazed towards the door and could barely make out the form of a big man. She instinctively knew that this was no mortal man. She knew she was seeing a ghost! As the figure seemed to drift towards her, she was far too frightened to scream. As it came to the foot of her bed, it seemed to stoop and grope around under the bed. Then the figure retreated to the doorway and disappeared.

The servant girl, named Malinda, had also been awakened by the figure. She was too petrified to cry out. She told Mrs. Thomas that she (Mrs. Thomas) was sleeping in the very bed in which Brit Bailey had died four years before! This thought brought no comfort to the frightened Mrs. Thomas, and she promptly changed bedrooms!

As soon as John Thomas returned from his trip, Ann told him of her experience, which he explained away as a nightmare, or just a figment of her overactive imagination. But she said she wouldn't sleep in their bedroom again. He said he would go sleep in the room and show her that there was nothing to fear. In fact, he said, Old Brit had been a friend of his, and if he made another nocturnal visit, John joked he'd just get up and shake the old man's hand!

Well, in the bedroom opposite to where she now slept, a few nights later Ann heard a terrible, unearthly scream. She could, and did, move this time. She burst into the room, and found her husband sitting on the side of his bed, rigid with fear. His face was streaked with sweat, and he was just able to gasp . . . “I saw him! It was old man Bailey. I saw him plain as day!” It wasn't too long after that that the Thomases moved away from the big red house.

As the years rolled by, the old house that had belonged to Bailey stood vacant and forlorn. But something was still around. As new dwellings rose up on the other side of Bailey's Prairie, people began to report seeing strange lights. In 1850 Colonel Mordello Munson was awakened by the mournful wails of his hounds. When he went outside to investigate, he found his dogs crawling on their stomachs, cowering in fear. Then he saw a great column of light, the size of a big man! It
was some distance away. Although he and a friend pursued it for most of the night, on horseback, they were never able to catch up to the elusive and mysterious light.

People living around the Prairie still talk about the lights. It is my understanding that Catherine Munson Foster, the well-known Brazoria-area folklorist and writer, now owns Bailey's Prairie. She wrote about it in her book,
Ghosts Along the Brazos
. She says the light would most often appear on late fall nights. It would circle around as if searching for something. Everybody who knew about Brit Bailey and his strange burial rites were convinced that his ghost was still abroad, searching for his jug.

Gradually the lights have lessened in size and intensity, until they seem to appear only once in a great while. Around West Columbia these days they say that Brit can only work up enough strength to shine his strange light every seven years. Some folks say he has caused cars to stop dead on the road, and some even say he caused a gas blowout when oil well workers worked too close to the site of his grave, an unmarked site somewhere up on Bennett's Ridge that no one can seem to locate now.

If you accept the seven-year theory, then figure that Brit should be around again in about 1995. That is, if he is still searching. After so much looking for years and years, he may have found his lost jug by now and be well settled down into an eternal stupor.

While researching the South Texas ghost situation, it became my privilege to enjoy a highly interesting correspondence with Wilbur Butler of Beaumont, who shares my interest in “spirits.”

Wilbur first heard the story of Knox Crossing from his mother, Wilma. He said it had been so long ago he can't even recall when he first heard it, but it must have been over forty years back. His mother was a schoolteacher at Choate, a little community on Highway 239 between Kenedy and Goliad. She taught in the Mexican school. In those days, the Anglo and Hispanic children attended different schools, Wilbur explained.

Mrs. Butler said back in the early 1930s, one of her students, who was named Pedro Chavez, told her what had actually happened to him, and of course, she repeated the story to her family. Young Wilbur and some of his teenage friends investigated the area where Pedro had his strange encounter, but they never had a sighting. Years later, Wilbur and his wife and children visited the area and this time came back convinced that there was something to the story after all. Wilbur sent me the story he had written about Pedro's strange experience and has given me the permission to quote it to you, just as he wrote it:

There is no such thing as a ghost, is there? This is the question that seventeen-year-old Pedro Chavez pondered as he walked along. The dirt road beneath his feet, lit only by the light of the moon, paralleled the San Antonio River down near the farming community of Choate, Texas. In the moonlight Pedro could make out an opening in the shadows in the trees up ahead. He knew the area well, and so he knew the break in the shadows, that indicated another dirt road intersecting the one on which he traveled. He must now follow its path on his way home, just as he had many times before.

It was late at night, for Pedro had stayed at the dance much too long. On previous occasions he had always left early enough to pass this way well before midnight. But he had so much fun dancing with all the girls, he let time get away from him. Anyway, as he danced, he kept telling himself, “There's no such thing as a ghost.” It was easy to convince himself as the music played and he held pretty Maria in his arms. Now alone, as he trudged along the dark dirt road, it wasn't quite so easy to believe!

As he neared the intersection of the roads, his pace grew slower. Stopping to check the time, he fumbled in his pocket for the watch he had borrowed from his father. By the light of the moon he could see it was 11:58 p.m. Pedro kissed the small gold cross that dangled from the watch fob, and made the sign of the cross across his chest with one hand as he stuffed the watch back into his pocket with the other. He now quickened his pace, hoping to get across the river before anything happened. As he reached the intersection, he stopped and peered around the corner. His knees trembled as he stood and looked over the river bridge in front of him. It was an old wooden structure with a heavy wood framework on both sides and across the top.

He had come to Knox Crossing, well known for its apparitions. Pedro had crossed over this bridge many times before and nothing had ever happened. But tonight a cold wind seemed to pass through Pedro, as he stood there, his heart pounding and his breathing becoming labored. Yet, he saw nothing. Just maybe, if he walked quickly and quietly, nothing would happen.

Pedro stepped out onto the plank floor of the bridge. He had gone only a few paces when a light appeared at the other end. The light seemed to float in midair. As Pedro continued, he kept to the opposite side of the bridge from the light, which now began to move, as if coming to meet him. While the light was still some distance away, he began to see a form taking shape behind it. The light appeared to be suspended from a frail arm held high above a body. As his eyes moved down the arm to where it joined the body, Pedro noticed a beautiful white flowing gown. But something was wrong! As his eyes
searched the darkness to find the identity of the young woman who carried the light, he realized there was no head above her shoulders! The cold steel of a knife blade being driven between his shoulder blades could not have chilled him more!

Closer and closer she came. He could see her quite plainly now. Pedro could hardly force his eyes from the void where her head should be. It just wasn't there! Close enough now to reach out and touch her, she passed on by. Pedro's eyes now focused on her other arm and hand, which she held at her side. She was clutching something. Only then did Pedro realize, she carried her head by its raven black hair! The very moment his eyes met the eyes of the head she carried, a fiery green glow pierced him to his very soul. Unable to move, he could only watch as the figure moved on past. The head she carried slowly turned as she moved away, keeping its hollow green eyes focused on him.

It seemed to take an eternity before Pedro could move, and even then he dared not look back. He had reached the end of the bridge before he finally regained his senses. Standing there, he looked back across the bridge and thought, “Did I really see her, or did I just imagine the whole thing?”

Fifty years after Pedro had told the story to his teacher, Mrs. Butler, her son, Wilbur, and his wife, Ann, accompanied by two of their children, Stacy and Beau, decided to check out the old bridge at Knox Crossing. Wilbur said they parked their station wagon near the same intersection that Pedro had described and then just sat in the darkness to see if anything might appear. Wilbur said he had grown up in that area, and over the years had visited the place without seeing anything unusual. But this particular night they were not disappointed. Just before midnight they turned off the car's engine and lights. They quietly held a conversation when suddenly all four of them froze without warning. Butler says a light suddenly appeared in the field to the left of the road and floated above the tall weeds there for a short time. Then it began to move in the direction of the dirt road which leads to the old river bridge. Butler stated, “As it came to the road it changed course, and rather than going in the direction of the bridge as one might expect, it came directly at us, traveling at an electrifying rate of speed.”

Wilbur said not one among the four of them had Pedro's nerve to stay and see what mysterious forms it might hold. “We drove away like
a bat out of hell with a ball of fire tied to our tail!” But unlike Pedro, the Butler family never doubted what they had seen. Four sets of eyes had seen the same mysterious “ghost light.”

Wilbur Butler knows that he and his family saw something highly unusual that night they went ghost hunting near the old Knox Crossing Bridge. Recently, a friend of Wilbur's, Nancy Vernon of Rockport, sent him a Xeroxed page from the late Ed Syers' book
Off the Beaten Trail
, which describes an eerie ghost light more or less in the vicinity of where the Butlers had their strange sighting.

Syers stated, “There are some valid ghost believers in the brush country below San Antonio; though over the past, they have reacted with an insensitive vigor, reaching for firearms or clubs. Take the old moss-covered bridge between Kenedy and Runge and what stalked below. Kenedy's Beauregard Moye, who looks like a white-haired cowboy, and is, took me out.

“Long ago, he and the other boys chased “The Thing” night after night, towards the dark timber edging Pleas Butler's pastures (note: Pleas Butler was Wilbur's great-uncle), trying to get between it and the river.

“It kept changing size,” Mr. Moye reflected. “Big as a wagon in the trees, then above them, like a barrel on fire. Get close? It'd turn off like a light.

“Otto von Schroeder, a fast dead shot (and a neighbor of the Butler family, according to Wilbur), and strong as they came, got it down once and tried to stomp it. In the confusion, he might have thrown a couple of shots, but he never could get a real grip on it.

“It retaliated angrily, soon after, by drifting right through three-strand wire, burning too bright to look at, and chasing Miss Sallie Ricks' buggy into a ditch. Miss Sallie wasn't hurt, but she was considerably put upon; and Mrs. Moye has kept an eye on that bridge for her ever since. But he still doesn't understand.” Wilbur says after reading this account in the Syer's book, maybe what he always thought was Pedro's headless woman's lantern might just be “the Thing” that Mr. Moye just didn't understand. We don't either. Do you?

Between Victoria and Goliad, off Highway 59, there's a small community called Reeves Thicket. It used to be one huge ranch, but over the years the land has been subdivided and sold off in large lots where over 300 families reside today. The original ranch belonged to one man, John Reeves, Sr., who came here from Pikes County, Georgia, in the early 1840s. It is believed his wife probably died in childbirth, because Reeves came to Texas alone, leaving his father and oldest son, John Jr., behind for a time. Finally, after he acquired considerable land holdings and established a law practice, he sent for young John and his father to join him. John Jr., brought his wife, Cady, and their nine children with him. Later, another child, their tenth, William Worth, was born after they had settled into their new Texas home.