Clan Cornelius spent some time yesterday evening lining out just which tales of terror we will indulge ourselves in over the next few weeks leading up to All Hallows Eve. The traditional fare will be represented of course: Sleepy Hollow and Bram Stoker’s Dracula are annual mandatory viewing in our keep. But other tales are in the offing, and we watched some trailers to explore them. This activity came back to haunt me at 4:35 a.m., when I was awakened from my slumber by a disembodied female voice. She intoned:
Low battery.
Low battery
Low battery…
Reaching for my blunderbuss loaded with silver buck-and-ball, I leapt from my bed, slowly recognizing that it was only Ceili’s Bluetooth speaker, dying on the kitchen counter. Her last words were:
Power off.
*
Ah, yes, we do love this Samhain season. I bugged out of work with just enough shooting light left in the day yesterday, and headed out to Zimmerman Butte for a bit of Frontier Partisan biathlon (that’s kettlebell complexes and shooting for the new folks at the campfire). On the way out and back, I listened to the relatively new podcast Texas Tales. There is no state in the union more loaded with folklore than Texas. This yarn was about what is purportedly the most haunted piece of ground in Texas — The Devil’s Backbone:
Fall is in the air and the undeniable truth that Halloween is just around the corner. As we enter into the spooky and scary season, we thought we would do podcasts that frankly just give us the heebee jeebees.
As you drive through one of the most beautiful landscapes in Texas, it is hard reckon with the fact that so many horrific events have taken place there. It seems at times, that the spirits of the dead have never left. Explore with us Devil’s Backbone. One of the most haunted places in Texas. Beautiful by day. Scary as hell by night.
Captain Schwertfeger reports that he has traversed the Devil’s Backbone in the Texas Hill Country more than once. If he experienced anything… unusual… I expect he’ll fill us in in the comments section.
Anyhoo, spectral Confederate cavalry thundering through the night, the shade of a hanged family-murderer, a spirit wolf, a Comanche or Lipan Apache lurking around a hunter’s tree stand… these are in the x-ring of the haunted frontier.
The podcasters also make mention of Baby Head Cemetery, which I’d never heard of. WTF is up with that name? We’ll let its historical marker do the talking…
The marker is circumspect. The tale goes that the Indians — presumably Comanches — impaled the baby’s head on a stake as a warning to settlers to clear out and stay out. I believe this is more than mere folklore. I am quite sure it happened. The Comanches were a great warrior people, but their cruelty was unsurpassed and very well-documented.
On our next visit to Captain Schwertfeger’s Austin outpost, we need to make a swing through the Texas Hill Country. I definitely want to visit the Devil’s Backbone Tavern, which sounds like my kinda joint, especially if they’ve got some of that good Texas country music cooking. I love this story:
The Devil’s Backbone Tavern certainly has long been a favorite “haunt” for musicians and music fans alike. The Tavern has become a haven for singer–songwriters and locals. Todd Snider, wrote the song “Ballad of the Devil’s Backbone Tavern”. Snider recalled driving along the Texas Hill Country backroads and trying to find a bar in which he was scheduled to perform. He never did locate that bar, but he did stumble across the Devil’s Backbone Tavern. After going inside to ask for directions, Snider decided to stay and play for the patrons there instead. According to Snider, the song has served as a personal reminder as to why he chose to pursue a musical career.
“Written in Mission, Texas, February 1932; suggested by the memory of the hill-country above Fredricksburg seen in a mist of winter rain.”
CimmeriaI rememberThe dark woods, masking slopes of sombre hills;
The grey clouds’ leaden everlasting arch;
The dusky streams that flowed without a sound,
And the lone winds that whispered down the passes.Vista upon vista marching, hills on hills,
Slope beyond slope, each dark with sullen trees,
Our gaunt land lay. So when a man climbed up
A rugged peak and gazed, his shaded eye
Saw but the endless vista–hill on hill,
Slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers.It was a gloomy land that seemed to hold
All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun,
With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds,
And the dark woodlands brooding over all,
Not even lightened by the rare dim sun
Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.It was so long ago and far away
I have forgotten the very name men called me.
The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream,
And hunts and wars are like shadows. I recall
Only the stillness of that sombre land;
The clouds that piled forever on the hills,
The dimness of the everlasting woods.
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.Oh, soul of mine, born out of shadowed hills,
To clouds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun,
How many deaths shall serve to break at last
This heritage which wraps me in the grey Apparel of ghosts?
I search my heart and find Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.
*
[A] case can be made that the Puritans were the only Americans who actually dwelt in a sword-and-sorcery universe.
The people of 17th-century New England lived in an enchanted universe. Theirs was a world of wonders. Ghosts came to people in the night, and trumpets blared, though no one saw from where the sound emerged. Nor could people see the lines of force that made a “long staff dance up and down in the chimney” of William Morse’s house. In this enchanted world, the sky on a “clear day” could fill with “many companies of armed men in the air, clothed in light-colored garments, and the commander in sad [somber].”
All that, of course, militates toward watching The Witch.
As Hall notes, the “world of wonders” was by no means the sole property of Puritans. It was pervasive in the 17th century:
The lore of wonders was popular culture in the sense of being accessible to everyone; it was a language that all groups in society shared, known not only to the “learned” but to ordinary folk as well. It was popular in being so pervasive, and in being tolerant of contradictions. A full history of this culture and its absorption into Protestantism would lead in several directions, including that of witchcraft. My purpose is more limited, to begin upon a history of this lore as it was received by the colonists, and to trace how it provided them with a mentality of the supernatural.
Portents and prodigies were routine events in English printed broadsides of the 17th century. “Strange news from Brotherton,” announced a broadside ballad of 1648 that told of wheat that rained down from the sky. “A wonder of wonders” of 1663 concerned a drummer boy who moved invisibly about the town of Tidworth. In “Strange and true news from Westmoreland,” a murder story ends with the devil pointing out the guilty person. Hundreds of such broadside ballads, stories told in verse and printed on a single sheet of paper, circulated in the England of Cromwell and the Stuarts. Newsheets, which began appearing with some regularity in the 1640’s, carried tales of other marvels. Pamphlets of no more than eight or sixteen pages contained reports of children speaking preternaturally and offered Strange and wonderful News … of certain dreadfull Apparitions. The yearly almanacs weighed in with their accounts of mystic forces emanating from the stars and planets.
The same prodigies and portents would recur again and again in broadside ballads, newsheets, chapbooks, and almanacs. Tales of witch-craft and the devil, of comets, hailstorms, monster births and apparitions—these were some of the most commonplace. “Murder will out,”as supernatural forces intervened to indicate the guilty. The earth could open up and swallow persons who tell lies. “Many are the wonders which have lately happened,” declared the anonymous author of A miracle, of miracles, as of sodaine and strange death upon perjured persons, strange sights in the Ayre, strange births on the Earth, Earthquakes, Commets, and fierie Impressions, with the execution of God himselfe from his holy fire in heaven, on the wretched man and his wife, at Holnhurst. …
A single ballad spoke of blazing stars, monstrous births, a rainstorm of blood, lightning, rainbows, and the sound of great guns. Others told of dreams and prophecies that bore upon the future of kings and countries. Almanacs and other astrological compendia reported similar events: comets, eclipses, joined foetuses, infants speaking…
As legend has it, back in the 1800s a prostitute lived in the upstairs portion of the hotel. She had a daughter who died of cholera in the northwestern wing when she was a small child. The spirit of this girl continuously appears to unsuspecting guests. Her hair is long and dark and she wears a white gown.Those who have been haunted by this particular ghost report some peculiar and bone-chilling activity. One night, when a group of hunters from Denver was snowed into the hotel, one of the men woke up screaming at 3 AM. He had apparently been shaken awake by an unknown force, who wildly threw objects around the room.
Matthew says
I recently read Frankenstein for Halloween. It’s not frontier partisans literature but I was surprised to find there is a long scene where the monster tells of the time he watched a family of impoverished nobles and happens to pick up an education on world history. The monster mentions crying at the fate of the Native Americans.
I think I might sometime later this month, reread Blood Meridian.
JimC says
Blood Meridian = The Great American Horror Novel.
Rick+Schwertfeger says
I’ve only driven over the Devil’s Backbone in the daytime. So, sorry, no hauntings to report. But I do have three to mention. The first two are from my years in Captain Paul McNamee’s New England. 1) I commend to all one of America’s greatest short stories, “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Set in Puritan Salem, Massachusetts, said Mr. Brown has heard that devilish goings on take place in the surrounding woods at night. Determined to find out, he says goodbye to wife Faith and heads out there. There’s no way I want to ruin, nor can I adequately describe, Hawthorne’s story. Suffice it to say that ol’ Nathaniel had his finger smack dab on pulse of the Puritan mindset, and on the very human curiosity, even or especially for “the bad stuff” Really, read “Young Goodman Brown”!
2) Way back in the very early 1970s I was aquatinted with a couple who owned a house in a North Shore, Massachusetts, town – I think it was in Gloucster. The core of this colonial house dated back to the 1600s – no kidding! Anyway, my friends said that the house was haunted with a benign female ghost, who frequently traipsed around downstairs at night. AND, there was an upstairs bathroom with an old style bathtub. Its door had one of those latches where the thin metal handle slides down into a metal slot. I used that bathroom, and can attest that the handle was very snug in the slot. It took a big tug to slide it up to open the door. Well, one night the lady of the house was home alone taking a bath there, with the door snugly latched. Sure enough, she was scared shitless when the latch suddenly moved up out of the slot and the door opened! The ghost did not appear, however.
3) Lastly, a truly haunted place in one of my and Marcia’s favorite towns, Alpine, way out in west Texas. The Holland House Hotel, which we have stayed in, is haunted. Once again, no sightings on the night we stayed there. But read about it here: https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/texas/haunted-hotel-tx/. A Cornelius visit to the Holland House certainly is in order.
Paul McNamee says
I second “Young Goodman Brown.” Not only read it in high school as part of curriculum, but there was even a short film we watched, too. (there seem to be some on YouTube, but those are newer)
Keith West says
I am with a large university whose colors are red and black in the western part of Texas where the land is flat. The building my office is in is supposed to be haunted. I’ve never had any eerie experiences there, and I’ve worked late grading exams many nights where I was alone after everyone had left. I certainly can believe it’s haunted. There have been three murders committed in it, one of them a decapitation.
When I was in graduate school at UNT, on the other hand…
JimC says
More…
Matthew says
Yeah, I’d like to hear more of this too.
John M Roberts says
Here in New Mexico we have a haunted movie theater. Albuquerque is home to the Kimo theater, a gloriously strange movie palace built in the ’20s in what has been described as the “Pueblo Deco” style. For instance, its proscenium is surrounded by cattle skulls with red lightbulbs in their eye sockets. Back in the early ’50s it was the scene of a freak water-heater explosion in which a 7-year old boy was killed. Over the decades people working late in the building across the street have seen a small boy in one of the upstairs windows. Believing they are seeing a child who has been accidentally locked inside the theater, they have called the police to report it. No child has ever been found inside. The incidents have been spaced far enough apart in time that the employees have not heard of the previous incidents. Nobody has ever been aware that they are seeing a ghost, only perceiving a real child in the window. In many of the best ghost stories there are no spooky Hollywood trappings, no clanking chains or ghostly wails, just the sight of somebody long dead looking like a solid, living human being.
JimC says
This is great. And Pueblo Deco kinda trips my trigger.
John M Roberts says
If you’re ever through Albuquerque, the Kimo is open to the public for free. Definitely worth a visit.
Paul McNamee says
This is a deep post.
When I hear “Devil’s Backbone,” I don’t think of Texas, and no, I don’t think of the del Toro movie (though, that is an excellent, warped ghost story.) My mind goes to the Natchez Trace, also named the Devil’s Backbone, for good reason. Robbers & unscrupulous ‘inn’ owners along the trail where Meriwether Lewis either took his life or was murdered.
https://www.amazon.com/Devils-Backbone-Pelican-Jonathan-Daniels-ebook/dp/B00K7KHQRI
New England haunts. Full of ’em. Among my book collection is a collection of ‘Weird’ New England books. I don’t refer to it much now, but I was quite taken with it all in my younger years. Witch trials, things that go bump in the night, nautical disasters, pirates. I can’t posts photos here in my reply but maybe I can post up some photos to share on Google.
JimC says
Please do. My current favorite NE haunting is the Witch of Wellfleet business surrounding Maria Hallett, Black Sam Bellamy and the wreck of the
Whydah.
You are right about the Natchez Trace. I’ve always had a sense of creeping horror about that road; very “Howardian” sensation.
H.P. @ Hillbilly Highways says
My in-laws new house is just a stone’s throw from the Devil’s Backbone Tavern, so it looks like I will be penciling in a trip for the week of Thanksgiving.
If you haven’t read the Del Rey collection of REH’s horror stories, you really should pick up a copy this Halloween season.
I can’t see a reference to REH’s Cimmeria poem without thinking of Allen Christie’s Hills of Scotland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k304e9_QeMw
JimC says
I’ve read pretty much all of REH — but I don’t own the collection. Guess who just called the book store?