Shortly before we put the podcast on ‘indefinite hiatus’, one of the show ideas we were discussing was ghost animals, especially once one of us came across a tale of a ghost cow–after all, who doesn’t want to know about a ghost cow?
The ghost cow, unfortunately, wasn’t a huge story on its own, but since it came out of Texas, it lent itself to a collection of stories about Texas and its numerous ghostly animals.
Ghost Cows of Farm Road 511
Farm Road 511 sits at nine-and-a-quarter miles long and runs along the northeast edge of Brownsville, in Cameron County. During the day, it serves as a normal if not fairly busy farm-to-market access road, but the locals will warn travelers to avoid it at night, as the local spirits like to cause trouble for unsuspecting drivers.
Certain dark and desolate stretches of the road are known to provide drivers, particularly the unwary, with a sudden encounter with ghost cattle–and when we say sudden, we mean ‘in-the-middle-of-the-road, appearing-feet-from-the-bumper, jerk-the-wheel-to-avoid-a-collision’ sudden. Many drivers have spun the wheel to avoid suddenly crashing into the spectral cattle, often flying off the road and wrecking their vehicle regardless. Accident or no, when the travelers check their mirrors or get out of the car, no evidence exists that any cattle has been there, living or dead.
As the ghost cows have a tendency to cause vehicular accidents, they come with a steady danger of property damage, injury, or even death, making them one of the more dangerous of all of Texas’s ghost animals.
Brush Arbor Ghost Turkey
This one barely seems worth mentioning, but in the interest of completeness we have the tale of a supposed phantom turkey near Elkhart.
A particular area of unsettled land covered in thick trees there is known to the locals simply as the Brush Arbor. Many ghost stories are attached to the Brush Arbor, in no small part thanks to an unfortunately now-deceased but once extraordinarily active local storyteller by the name of James “Toodler” Rials. Ol’ Toodler liked to tell of a doctor that lived and worked in the countryside surrounding Elkhart at the turn of the 19th century known as John Harper Paxton. Paxton would often pass the Brush Arbor as he crisscrossed the county, and reportedly saw former, long dead patients of his on multiple occasions dwelling in the Brush Arbor, looking longingly at him as though they were awaiting one last diagnosis–perhaps a second opinion on their apparently vacant mortality.
The Brush Arbor itself is primarily habitat for smaller mammals: squirrels, racoons, possums and the like. Whitetail deer might pass through on occasion but were scarce. The area could have once been a great home for black bear and wild turkey, but they were hunted out of the area sometime before the 20th century.
So, when Toodler’s own uncle, Redger Daniels, went hunting there in his youth sometime in the 1930’s, a chill ran down his spine when he heard the call of a tom turkey calling through the thick hardwood forest. Even more suspicious was that the gobbling was followed by a tinkling noise, like several small bells.
Sure, an unidentified turkey call in dense woods may seem a silly thing to frighten a person, but maybe Redger’s subconscious knew something his forebrain didn’t pick up on. Between Dr. Paxton’s deceased patients and Redgers’ exceptionally rare game, is it possible something more sinister waits in the Brush Arbor, trying to lure people in?
Ghost Monkey Bridge
At the intersection of Wilson and West College Streets, a trail lies beaten into the brush behind a roadblock where once West College Street changed into Farm Road 1500. Where the decomposing road meets the nearby railroad tracks, the remnants of an old bridge known to the locals as “Monkey Bridge” slowly disintegrates.
Tales tell that sometime in Athens’s past, a circus train was passing through town when some of the cars derailed and a car containing show monkeys broke open and its primate occupants escaped captivity. Most tales say they fled to the nearby trees; some tales say they took bloody revenge on their owners first. Perhaps the wildest tales are that they were recaptured by a local preacher, Reverend Fuller, and took him to his nearby parcel which he called Fuller Park, where he kept some on display in a cage and others he conducted horrible experiments on in the pentagram arranged tunnels beneath the park. (That last tale may have gotten jazzed up by local urban legend tellers a bit more than the others.)
Despite the wildest of accusations, the area around the bridge has the kind of mystique that local teens looking to prove their courage gravitate towards, often at the defiance of warnings from wiser and more experienced adults. Reports of phantom screams, both man and monkey, have been reported coming from the imperceptibly thick brush around the area. One resident even has a story of visiting the bridge at night only to be chased away by a violent man in a monkey mask.
Whatever the case, the Monkey Bridge is the kind of place that local youth both fear but can’t help to be fascinated by.
Santa Anna’s Ghostly Guard Dogs
The Texas Revolution began in 1835, as American settlers in Texas refused to pay taxes and tariffs to the ruling Mexican government, claiming that Mexico was doing nothing for these people living on its far northern frontier. President Antonio López de Santa Anna repealed the constitution, and to put the rebellious Texans back under control gathered a large army by supplementing his own forces with hired convicts, derelicts, and a large number of natives (the latter of whom didn’t really understand Spanish commands).
Despite some bloody victories at The Alamo and Goliad, Santa Anna’s army stretched beyond their supplies, expertise, and capability to the breaking point. In the end, the smaller and less experienced Texian Army and Navy got the upper hand, and Santa Anna himself was captured the day after his defeat at the Battle of San Jacinto despite disguising himself as a lowly dragoon. After an attempted suicide, Santa Anna was cared for by Texian Army surgeon James Aeneas Phelps, and it was agreed to move El Presidente’s imprisonment to Phelps’s plantation in Brazoria County.
Supposedly, a Mexican officer gathered a rescue party with the intention of riding to Phelps’s plantation, Orozimbo, and rescuing their captured leader. The group waited until just before dawn, when most of the plantation was asleep. But when they started to make their approach, the frantic braying of hounds abruptly broke the morning silence, rousing the guards and scaring off the would-be rescuers. This might be a fairly mundane incident were it not for the fact that there were no kept dogs in the area, not at Orozimbo or for many miles away.
One servant claimed to have spied the three animals–two with shaggy coats and one hairless, and all ghostly white–and claimed that they had wild, frightening eyes. The animals matched the description of three dogs that belonged to a who had been killed at Goliad, that reportedly refused to eat or come inside after their master left for battle. One day they just disappeared, not to be seen again until the incident at Orozimbo.
From then on, they would be spotted occasionally in the forests near Orozimbo, but never again was their barking heard. As recently as 1974 a couple saw them near the cemetery and ancient oak tree that serve as the last remnants of Orozimbo. Some say that they remain as ever watchful eyes to the area, just as they were when Santa Anna was imprisoned there.
The Ghost Horse of the Llano Estacado
If you think about the symbols of American freedom, an entire library of images may come to mind, but perhaps the most stoic and reserved still lies with a herd of wild horses galloping across the American plains. Reintroduced to the Americas by European settlers and explorers, it was only a matter of time before a steady trickle of escaped horses found their way into the wild and began to reclaim the land of their ancestors. Today there’s about 72,000 wild horses running across publicly protected lands in the United States, but this is the story of one very special one.
The legend of the Ghost Horse started sometime in the second half of the 1800’s, with legends of a huge mustang the color of pale cream or white snow and ran with such grace that he appeared to glide rather than work his legs. He was known by many names: the White Steed of the Prairies, the Pacing White Stallion, the Ghost Horse of the Plains, the White Shadow, the Winged Steed, and Wind Drinker
Ranchers, horse racers, vaqueros, and all manner of horse handlers knew that Wind Drinker would be a magnificent prize, both as a specimen and as breeding stock, but despite an assortment of tricks and traps, the great horse would always just simply glide away at gale pace. Native trackers were hired to help capture the beast, but upon viewing it they deemed it possessing “unspeakable medicine” and abandoned the project.
Perhaps the most well-known tale of the Wind Drinker’s attempted capture comes from before the American Civil War, and involves a couple of fellows from outside Texas: a fiddle-player from out east named Kentuck and an Arkansas gambler named Jake. Hearing the tales of the ghost horse the two started seeing dollar signs in their eyes and quickly gathered four strong distance horses, some pack mules, and enough supplies to last them half a year in the wilderness. Jake was particularly dedicated to being the man who would tame the animal. “I don’t know exactly where to hunt,” he supposedly said, “but we’ll ride on the prairies until we find the horse or until they are burned crisp by the fires of Judgement Day.”
It took them weeks to arrive at Liano Estacado in the Texas panhandle, and as the weeks turned to months without sightings, Kentuck’s resolve wavered. Jake would often chide Kentuck until he quit complaining, but in the end Jake was right. One rainy evening as the duo sat trying to warm themselves around a buffalo chip fire, they glimpsed the great white horse. At first, Kentuck thought it was Indians when Jake signaled him to look and made for his mount, but them he saw it. “My eyes picked up the white horse,” Kentuck later said. “He stood there to the southwest, maybe a hundred yards off, head lifted, facing us, as motionless as a statue. In the white moonlight, his proportions were all that the tales had given him. He did not move until Jake moved toward him.”
The horse fled, and Jake and Kentuck gave chase. The white beast again seemed to glide across the landscape, and the duo could never manage to close the distance on him–they would ride harder and the mustang would easily match their speed. Foreboding eventually creeped down Kentuck’s spine, and he yelled out at Jake, “There’s no sense to it. I’m remembering things we’ve both heard. Let’s stop. We can’t no more catch up to him than with our own shadows.”
But Jake had come so close after so much work, he refused to slide backwards in his quest. He yelled back, “I told you I’m going to follow till the Day of Judgement!”
Kentuck continued the pursuit, though perhaps not as furiously as his partner, allowing himself to drift back a bit. The world grew silent, the sound of hoofbeats the only noise either of them could hear. As the beast and its pursuers raged on, Kentuck saw a cliff lying in front of them, and felt relief as he was sure the chase would finally end. But that relief quickly got swallowed by terror as he realized neither the Ghost Horse nor Jake was slowing down any.
“Jake, watch out for the canyon!” he yelled, but it was too late, and Jake and his mount flew off the edge and into the dark emptiness of the Palo Duro Canyon.
Reaching the edge, Kentuck was unable to see the bottom, and somehow in the confusion had lost sight of the Ghost Horse as well, his attention solely on his partner’s impending doom. He waited until the light of dawn, when he could find a game trail that led him to the bottom of the canyon, where he found the remains of Jake and the horse he rode into Judgement Day. Kentuck buried them both in a makeshift grave.
Today, campers and hikers in Palo Duro Canyon still report hearing the thunder of hoofbeats on occasion and have even reported seeing a ghostly white horse running the nearby plains and canyon’s edge. A handful of times witnesses have even seen a ghostly cowboy riding in hot pursuit, doomed to chase a beast that it appears he will never catch.
Featured image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay
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