Essays

Moseying: Living La Vida Llanero

More ghost stories of the Llano Estacado
April 7, 2004

Silver, Sanco, Shafter Lake, Kent, Florey, Frankel City, Fort McKavett, Mentone, Orla, Soash, Girvin, Stiles, Texon, Upton, Upland, Best, Penwell, Longfellow, Claremont, Iatan, Bronco… this is just a partial list of ghost towns and almost ghost towns of west Texas. When a person takes a serious and careful look at “The Roads of Texas,” a wonderful collection of roadmaps, the list grows and grows. When looking at the book and searching out named cemeteries a person can figure there was a town nearby.

They are not the picturesque ghost towns of the Rocky Mountains, with weathered wooden mining structures and beautifully aged dilapidated cabins. Some of our ghost towns do not have much visible to the eye at all, unless you get out and walk among the mesquites and search the surface of the ground for chips of pottery, strange chunks of metal or even a little boy’s marbles. Some do have some imposing structures, like the courthouse at Stiles, or the bank at Upton, or the jail at Claremont. Other sites seem to be junkyards, like the collection of oil field tanks at Penwell.

This column has already featured Shafter Lake, Penwell, Claremont, Stiles, Fort McKavett, Iatan, and discussed life in declining towns (and the reasons for their decline), as well as life in the now vanished oil camps and one-room schoolhouses. In return, I have been blessed by many visitors and phone calls from folks that once lived in such places. The entry patio at my house now has a handful of relics from some of the sites – an old horseshoe, some shards of crockery, some marbles, and a “gearwheel” from some sort of oil field equipment.

A person can go online to learn some more about the old ghost towns of west Texas. Ghosttowns.com, Rootsweb (Texas), Genweb (Texas), and the Handbook of Texas Online are great places to start. With a little bit of digging, a person can find privately printed memoirs by settlers, and other books that add a little bit more to the effort of envisioning life in these locations. I have had great fun doing so!

The other day I heard a supernatural reason for some of these towns dying – a tale I have since learned has been told in small towns from near San Antonio to near Lubbock to near El Paso. The story always begins at a dance… big crowds of people enjoying life and partying. The band on stage would be “cooking,” getting the crowd dancing faster and faster, playing conjuntos, rancheras, polkas, and cumbias.

In would walk a stranger, handsome and wearing lots of gold jewelry, a black shirt and a white vest – “muy macho,” indeed. “He was the most handsome man anybody had ever seen, not one girl could take her eyes off of him. And he could dance the best anybody had ever seen, never getting tired, dancing with almost every woman, and never sitting down. When he would touch a girl’s dress, she felt chills going up and down – he had some kind of incredible power!”

In each of these stories, while the handsome stranger was dancing with a woman, she would become entranced, and during a slow dance would start resting his cheek on his shoulder. They would begin to sway, and their feet cease moving.

“Your feet – oh no – Your feet!” She would tear herself from the embrace of her partner. The other dancers would suddenly freeze as she struggled to escape his clutches. The other women would begin to scream, some would start praying, and some would faint. The other men would grab their partners and drag them off the floor, but not approach the stranger, for his feet were no longer in well-polished shoes but revealed as four long-nailed stubs sticking out of his trouser cuffs! Chicken feet – a sure sign of the devil!

As everybody stared, the stranger ambled out of the room to the restroom. The bravest men would follow, but in the stalls would only be a cloud of smoke and the strong smell of sulfur, with the window shattered where the stranger made his exit. In some of the stories, the last woman to dance with the devil would die, but in Pyote it is said the girl disappeared and was never seen again. The twist I heard to the story, however, was that after the devil made his appearance, the town would soon lose population. People would say the town was cursed and leave, never to return.

Another story that is associated with towns of declining population tells of a priest traveling down the highway and who is waved down and told that a girl is dying in a house not far away. The priest would go to the house, where the door stood open and the sounds of a woman in anguish emanated from within. He would enter and give her absolution, and her confession and comfort her the best he could, before finally leaving after promising to return in the morning. When he would return, he would find the house empty, except for the bed she had been in, and that only a set of springs. The wallpaper would be torn, and the windows broken and no sign of anyone having been there in years.

I have written about how my wife Deborah and I like to stop at small town cemeteries and old family plots alongside the back roads. The gravestones are a form of folk art that we admire, and we find the items placed on or near the graves of interest as well. We often find passalong plants that help learn which plants were favorites long ago. We have not ever been to a cemetery after dark, and after another story was passed on to me, I do not know that I want to, but Deborah may talk me into it. I have “heard-tell” of a grave down at Garden City that sometimes glows in the dark! (She is braver than me! She likes to look into the stories of the unexplainable – like the Marfa Lights, and stories of the mysterious – like the Roswell UFO crash.)

It is said that when it was first noticed, so many curiosity seekers came that the sheriff had to order a deputy to stay there to prevent the trespassers from coming in and accidentally knock the stones over. Garden City is not a ghost town, but a town that never grew as big as the founders’ wished. According to the person telling me the story, the glowing grave is the reason that the town never grew – who would ever want to be buried there?

We humans are fascinating creatures – in that we believe the supernatural stories that explain why hopes and dreams are crushed and ruined. “It is the Devil’s fault!” Such a story is much easier to understand than an analytical review of the vagaries of the ebb and flow of economic pressures that are so complex that doctoral dissertations only provide the basic framework explaining the decline of the town. And who is to say? HMMM? Out here on the vast expanses of the west Texas plain it is said that we live closer to God than any other place -- because there is “so little else to distract us” -- so maybe the Devil sometimes lurks nearby!