Spooky Texas Read online

  And then, above the roaring of the storm and the screaming of the people rose the voice of Padre Simon. “Peace, my people. I will deal with this!” he cried.

  Padre Simon strode out of the church gate and pushed forward through the massive wind toward the whirling, shrieking menace, waving his hands and praying aloud. As we watched, Padre Simon’s hands seemed to cut through the spiraling fury in front of us, pushing it back and then back again. It grew smaller and smaller, shrinking in on itself as Padre Simon strode toward it. And suddenly it was gone, leaving only a white streak of smoke where it had been, and the black roiling cloud fled south, away from the good Padre.

  For a moment we were stunned by the suddenness of our salvation. Then the people shouted in amazement, and everyone ran to the good Padre to pound him on the back and kiss the ring on his hand and kneel at his feet. He had saved us from the tornado. Many of the workers who had murmured and plotted against the Padre were in tears, so ashamed they were for doubting him. But they doubted no more.

  Later, we learned that the tornado had struck the grand house of Don Carlos, carrying him away and leaving him bruised and bleeding in the plaza. After that, he went back to Mexico City and never returned, and everyone who worked in the potato fields grew happy again and loved the good Padre who had walked right up to a tornado to protect his people.

  The good Padre lived for many years among us, giving us counsel and guiding us along the paths of righteousness. Knowing it was the greatest wish of my parents that I be educated, he helped provide the money necessary to get me started in boarding school and encouraged me in my studies. Padre Simon died when I was fifteen, and it was a sad day for our community. I wished he had lived long enough to see me win a scholarship to a university in Texas. He would have been so proud. But it was not to be.

  In honor of my parents and the good Padre who had so diligently guided my footsteps as I grew up, I worked my way through college and then law school. I set up practice in Wichita Falls, married the daughter of my partner, and settled down on a small ranch outside of town. We kept a few cows, horses, and chickens, and I was very happy puttering around my house and barn after a hard day at the courthouse.

  I often spoke about the good Padre to my bride, until she felt she knew him too. She particularly loved to listen to the story of “Padre Simon and the Tornado.” I heard her repeating it as a bedtime tale to our little daughter a few months after her birth. It made me smile to think that Padre Simon lived on in our house.

  I was still smiling when I dropped off to sleep beside my wife that night. But I wasn’t smiling when I was jerked out of a deep sleep in the middle of the night by someone shaking me fiercely by the shoulders.

  THE WARNING

  “Wha . . . what is it?” I demanded sleepily, prying my eyes open to glare at the intruder. I found myself staring into the face of Padre Simon. He was the same little round priest with the dusty robes and beaming, florid face, though he wasn’t smiling at the moment.

  “Get up now, Pedro, and take your family to the root cellar,” Padre Simon ordered as soon as he saw that I had awoken. Beside me, my wife sat up with a gasp, staring at the Padre.

  “Go right now!” Padre Simon shouted at us, and then vanished completely.

  We leapt out of bed, my wife snatching our daughter from her cradle, and sped down the stairs and out the front door. It was inky black outside, but I could hear a familiar roaring, shrieking sound not far away. We were met by such a gust of wind that we were nearly blown back inside, and my little daughter wailed in fear. I grabbed hold of my women, leaned forward, and pushed against the wind until we made it around the side of our house. After two tries, I managed to lift the door to the root cellar against the massive, howling wind, and tumbled my girls inside. A moment later, I too was inside, and the door was secure.

  We lay huddled in the darkness as the roar of the wind grew louder and banshees seemed to howl over our heads. The clattering and thudding and whining of the tornado made my ears ring. I clutched my family in my arms as my house was torn away right above me. Above the wails of my infant daughter and the shriek of the wind, I thought I heard music. After a moment, I realized that the storm was pumping the pedals of my wife’s player organ, which was playing Amazing Grace—the song attached to the rollers—as it was swept out of our front parlor and away.

  It felt as though we were there for hours, waiting for the storm to pass. But it was probably only minutes. When all was calm, I forced open the door of the root cellar and climbed out into the darkness. We’d fled so fast I had no flashlight with me, but the moon was peeking out from the swirling clouds, and in its light I saw bare ground where my house had stood. No, not quite bare. There, standing alone in the center of the clearing was the cupboard where my wife kept her best china. Not a cup inside it had been chipped.

  Turning slowly, I saw that our barn, which lay several hundred yards away, was untouched. And the player piano was lodged in a tree beside it. As I stared at my devastated home, I saw something come drifting down from far up in the sky. For a moment, it blotted the moon. Then it fell directly at my feet, and I saw it was the blanket from my daughter’s cradle. I picked it up and turned in time to see my wife and baby emerge from the root cellar. Wordless, I handed my wife the blanket, and slowly the three of us walked over to the shelter of the barn to rest for the remainder of the night.

  We’d lost our house, but not one cow or horse had been snatched from our barn or pasture. It was my wife who summed up what we were feeling: “Thank God for Padre Simon,” she said. “He saved you twice, Pedro.” And so he had.

  6

  El Muerto

  KINGSVILLE

  We sat on the steps of the back porch, watching as sunset became dusk, and then the stars came out over the wild, lonely landscape. The wind murmured through the tall grasses and mesquite and softly touched our hair and faces as my husband and I sat sipping lemonade and watching—as we did every night—to see if El Muerto would appear.

  The ranch had been in my family for generations, and at least one person in each generation had seen El Muerto, the terrible headless rider, galloping through the back field on his midnight-black stallion with serape blowing in the wind and severed head bouncing on the saddle horn beneath a wide sombrero. My mother had seen the specter from this very porch when she was a teenager, and her mother had encountered the headless horseman riding down the road at dusk a week before her wedding to my grandfather.

  No one in my generation had seen the specter, and when my husband Tony moved into the family home after our marriage last April, he had expressed a great desire to be the one who saw it.

  “Tell me the story again, Theresa,” Tony said, leaning back in the white wicker chair, his eyes fixed on the rising moon.

  I sighed a little and smiled. Tony loved the stories about Bigfoot Wallace, the Texas Ranger responsible for El Muerto, almost as much as he loved hearing my mother talk about the time she saw the ghost, sitting right here on this back porch so many years ago. My handsome husband claimed that I was the one who told Bigfoot Wallace stories best out of anyone in my family. He asked for them often, and I always obliged him.

  I brushed a hand through my dark curls, pushing them away from my forehead, set down my half-full glass of pink lemonade, and told him the story of Bigfoot Wallace and El Muerto.

  When Bigfoot Wallace, the bold hunter and frontiersman, came to Texas to avenge the death of his brother at the Goliad massacre, he found himself in love with the wild beauty of the new Republic. Bold, daring, with a huge stature and even larger sense of humor, Wallace eventually moved to San Antonio at the extreme edge of the frontier, to sign up as a Texas Ranger under Captain Jack Hayes.

  In those days, Texas was as wild as the west could get. There was danger in the south from the Mexicans, danger in the west and north from Comanche raiders and desperados, and danger in the east from the Cherokee Nation. Sam Houston, commander-in-chief of the armies of Texas and first presiden
t of the Texas Republic, had appointed young Captain Hays to raise a company of Rangers to defend San Antonio.

  Hayes had high standards for his men. They were the best fighters in the West—they had to be, considering that they were often outnumbered fifty to one. A man had to have courage, good character, good riding and shooting skills, and a horse worth a hundred dollars to be considered for the job. Captain Hayes had heard all about the exploits of Bigfoot Wallace, who’d once taken on a whole Comanche raiding party single-handedly to get back the horses they’d stolen from him. Hayes signed him up on the spot.

  Armed with Colt pistol and a Bowie knife, Texas Ranger Bigfoot Wallace took on the wild West, and quickly made his mark on Texas folklore. In those days, the Rangers tended to handle stock theft at the end of the rope, so to speak, stringing up the bandits, forcing a confession out of them, and then leaving the bodies swaying in the wind to deter other outlaws. Only their method didn’t work. The bandits kept right on stealing, sometimes passing right under the bodies of their fellow outlaws to do it.

  Now Bigfoot’s fellow Ranger, Creed Taylor, had a big spread that lay west of San Antonio, in the cedar hills clear on the edge of Comanche territory, and he was always losing stock to bandits and Indian raids. The last straw came for Taylor the day the famous Mexican raider and cattle thief Vidal and his gang rounded up a bunch of horses from his ranch and took them south toward Mexico. Most of the Rangers were heading north to pursue some Comanches out on a raid, so Taylor and a friend set out alone in pursuit of the thief. They bumped into Wallace just below Uvalde and told him what was going down. Bigfoot was always ready to hunt horse thieves and desperados, especially those of Mexican descent, never forgetting what happened to his brother at Goliad. He decided it was time to put an end to Vidal’s gang once and for all.

  It didn’t take too long for the three men to locate the camp where the horse thief and his gang lay sleeping. They snuck in from downwind so as not to alert the horses, and shot and killed Vidal and the other thieves in the gunfight that followed.

  That was when Wallace got an idea. Obviously, hanging horse thieves hadn’t deterred the outlaws raiding the ranches of the good folk of Texas. Perhaps a more drastic example of frontier justice would do the trick. Severing Vidal’s head from his body, Bigfoot and his fellow Ranger tied the body—clad in Mexican rawhide leggings, buckskin jacket, and colorful serape—to the saddle of the wildest mustang in the stolen herd, making sure it would stay in an upright position. He worked a rawhide thong through the jaws of the severed head, secured the head in the sombrero, and then tied the head to the saddle horn so that it would bounce and flop around with every step taken by the mustang. Then Wallace gave a shout and sent the horse running away with its headless rider, hoping the gruesome sight would deter future cattle thieves.

  What Bigfoot managed to do was frighten everyone in South Texas. Folks would be peacefully walking down the road one evening when a terrible, headless rider would gallop past on a midnight black stallion with its colorful serape blowing in the wind and a severed head bouncing on the saddle horn beneath its sombrero. Scared the heck out of everyone who saw it. Nothing seemed to deter the terrible specter—not bullets, not arrows, not spears. Could be it scared everyone so bad they couldn’t shoot straight. Or maybe the mustang had a charmed life. Whatever the reason, the horse and its headless rider roamed southern Texas for a good long while, and folks started calling the specter El Muerto, the Dead One.

  Several years passed before a posse of cowboys finally grew brave enough to bushwhack the horse and release the withered corpse from its back. But even after Vidal’s body was laid to rest, soldiers and passers-by still saw the headless apparition riding across the fields and lanes at night. El Muerto’s spirit would never rest in peace. Bigfoot Wallace made sure of that.

  EL MUERTO

  I finished the story just as the full moon topped the largest mesquite tree in our backyard, and I leaned against the back of the rocker, reaching for my glass of lemonade, which was more melted ice now than juice.

  “And Grandma Jean actually saw El Muerto galloping down the road not far from here,” Tony said as I took a sip, “and dropped a basket full of chickens onto the road, which ran away squawking in all directions.”

  “Grandma ran squawking too,” I said with a chuckle. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Your Mom didn’t run when she saw it,” Tony reminded me, as he always did when we discussed El Muerto.

  “She didn’t have time to run,” I said. “It happened so quickly. She was walking down the porch steps, right here, heading to the barn to see what was disturbing the horses when a dark, headless figure came galloping across the field, serape flapping. She froze in place, clutching the handful of carrots she was taking to her mare. It wasn’t until the ghost was almost upon her that she saw the head bouncing on the saddle horn. She opened her mouth to scream, and the specter vanished with a rush of cold wind. Needless to say, she went running for the barn as fast as she could go, screaming all the way!”

  I rose briskly then, saying: “That reminds me. We should check on Dancer. That foal’s due any day now, and she had problems with the last one.”

  Tony set down his glass, and we wandered down off the porch hand in hand like a couple of kids, enjoying the moonlight and each other. We’d stopped for a kiss under the mesquite tree when the wind suddenly turned cold and a horrible smell of blood and decay washed over us. We broke apart, gasping at the stench, and I clapped a hand over my mouth to keep from throwing up. The moon overhead seemed to grow brighter, and suddenly we both heard the sound of hooves galloping nearby. I grabbed Tony’s shoulder as a ball of light burst into being and coalesced into the figure of a black horse, topped by a headless rider. He was a flickering monochrome of white and black, with just a hint of colors in his tattered leggings, buckskin jacket, and blowing serape.

  “El Muerto,” I gasped, gaping at the figure, too shocked to take it in.

  Tony was quicker on the uptake. He gave a shout of pure fear, picked me up, flung me over his shoulder and bolted for the house. I pushed myself up off his shoulder to stare in pure, astonished wonder as the figure galloped closer and still closer, cape flapping. I could hear a bump, bump sound coming from the specter, and my eyes were drawn to the withered head under the grotesquely happy-looking sombrero. The figure was pulsing as it moved toward us, like a black-and-white film stretched too tight and about to break. Then it disappeared, and all the hairs on my neck stood on end. Luckily, I remembered to duck just in time to avoid hitting my head on the doorframe as Tony leapt onto the porch and through the screen door.

  “It’s gone. It’s gone,” I shouted as Tony ran right through the kitchen, heading toward the staircase. “Put me down! It’s gone.”

  Tony kept running, and I ducked again to avoid the low ceiling of the stairs and stayed crouched on his shoulder until he reached the safety of our bedroom. We ended up in the closet, of all places, and my big, strong husband crouched on the floor trembling among the shoes while I stroked his blond hair and gallantly refrained from chuckling.

  “I thought you wanted to see El Muerto,” I whispered into his ear when I judged that he had calmed down.

  “Not anymore,” Tony finally managed, looking up at me with his dark-lashed gray eyes. His pupils were still dilated with shock. “I’ll stick to horror films from now on!”

  “That’s my brave cowboy,” I said with a smile.

  Tony gave me a sheepish grin in response, then pulled us both upright and led us out of the closet. I gave him a kiss and left him to get ready for bed while I went to check up on the mare, figuring Tony’d had enough supernatural adventures for one evening. But somehow, I knew we’d seen the last of El Muerto. He’d appeared only once to each generation in my family. At least . . . so far!

  7

  Sifty-Sifty-San

  WALLIS

  There was once a beautiful old house right on the edge of a lake, surrounded by lovely woods about te
n miles outside of Wallis. The house was set so far back from the road it couldn’t be seen. It was considered prime real estate in those parts, but no one wanted to live there because the house had the reputation of being haunted. In fact, no one had ever spent a single night in that house, because a spirit calling itself Sifty-Sifty-San drove everyone away long before midnight.

  Now the owner of that house was tired of paying taxes year after year on the home when he couldn’t get anyone to rent it for more than one night. He was anxious to prove that the house was livable, and he offered a very large reward for anyone who would spend a whole night there. Several cowboys and even a few Texas Rangers took him up on the offer, only to flee screaming just before midnight at the coming of Sifty-Sifty-San. The owner of the house raised the amount of the reward, but such was the reputation of the haunted house that no one was willing to take him up on his offer, no matter how much money was offered.

  In desperation, the owner of the house went to the big city, looking for a man or woman who had some experience with ghosts, figuring such a person would be able to banish the spirit of Sifty-Sifty-San once and for all. He was in luck. The first night in town, he came across a man named Sam who had spent much of his life banishing ghosts from haunted properties all over the West. When the owner of the haunted house had explained his predicament, the ghost-buster at once agreed to come to Wallis and spend a night in the haunted house. The owner was so happy he went right out and bought Sam as many groceries as he could carry, so Sam would have plenty of grub to eat while he waited for the ghost.

  At dusk the next evening, Sam started down the long drive leading to the haunted house with a big bag full of potatoes, bacon, cornmeal, and red beans in his hand. He whistled cheerfully to himself, happy to have such an easy assignment. Who could be afraid of a silly ghost when the sun was shining and the colors of the sunset were glowing across the waters of the lake? With the prospect of a good meal in his belly, a good night’s sleep in a fancy house, and a big wad of money in his pocket come the morning, Sam was a happy man.