Ghosts along the Texas Coast
Page 18
Mill manager’s house built in old Browndell Community by Kirby Lumber Company in 1903
By 1974, Claude and Sybil Walker were the owners of the place. They also owned and operated the Browndell Liquor Store on Highway 96. It probably did very well, because Jasper, the nearest town of any size, was “dry.” According to Mrs. Cox, Claude Walker came home one Saturday night with the day’s receipts in his pocket. As he climbed the steps from the carport and entered the house through the laundry room, an assailant (or perhaps more than one) awaited him in the dark laundry room, armed with one of Walkers’ shotguns taken from the house. Walker was apparently first struck with the butt of his own shotgun, then brutally shot several times with the weapon. His wife, Sybil, arrived home a little later and was shocked to find her husband lying mortally wounded in a pool of blood on the floor. (Police reports later noted it took every sheet they could find in the house to mop up the blood.) Although Mr. Walker was still alive when the ambulance arrived, he died en route to the hospital. Even today, twenty years later, one of the square white acoustical tiles on the ceiling bears deep brown stains, bloodstains, dating from the night of the murder. Mrs. Cox did not offer any explanation why she had not replaced the gruesome reminder of the tragedy.
The police later discovered Walker’s wallet lying on the Highway 96 right-of-way, where it had been tossed aside after being emptied by the perpetrators of the crime. Several firearms were also missing from the Walker house. The killer, or killers, have never been brought to justice, and the unsolved crime still remains on the Jasper County criminal records. The murderer must have known Claude Walker and his custom of carrying large sums of money late at night as he made his way home from the liquor store. Because the house was in a remote area and the people in the area all knew their neighbors, the Walkers probably left their house unlocked. This would have made it very easy for the assailant to enter the place prior to Walker’s arrival.
Soon after her husband’s brutal murder, Sybil Walker decided to sell the property. Fearing another attack, she was terrified to remain alone in the rambling country place. The Coxes, who came to Jasper from Alabama, purchased the house and the sixteen adjoining acres from her.
Diane Cox vividly recalls the first Halloween night she spent alone in the old house. It was 1976. Her three teenage children were in town attending a football game, her husband was away on business, and she was all alone. She made herself a cup of hot cocoa and sat in her kitchen, trying not to think too much about the heinous murder that had taken place in the laundry room adjacent to the kitchen where she now sat.
Just to make sure all was well, she timidly peeked into the room. As she stated in the article which first touched off my interest in the house, “The hair stood up on my arms, just recalling what had happened in that room. Although I was terribly frightened, there was nothing there, and I breathed a sigh of relief.”
Then Diane heard a ghostly wail . . . an “Oooooooh” sound that really got her imagination going. She first thought it might be her three youngsters just trying to give her a good Halloween scare! The sound was repeated several times. Finally, when the young people arrived home she accused them of standing outside and making weird noises to frighten her. They assured her they had just that minute arrived home, and to back up that claim, they all heard the same mournful moan as they stood together in the living room!
Several times during the next few weeks the sound was heard again, always at night. Cox became increasingly nervous whenever she was in the house alone.
Then, about three weeks after the strange noises began, Mrs. Walker, from whom the Coxes had purchased the house, called Diane to say she hoped that she wasn’t afraid, but their old “yeller dog” kept running back to his old home. Anytime the hound would hear a train whistle or a siren off in the distance, he’d start to howl. Mrs. Walker said she’d gone to bring him back home several times in the daytime, when the Coxes were all away, but she still had trouble keeping him home at night. This explained the “Oooooooh” sound that had slowly been driving Diane up the walls for nearly a month!
At least that problem was solved. But Diane says there are other strange things that keep happening in the old house. The children are all grown and gone now. Mr. Cox has passed away, and Diane lives there all alone, except for two very large dogs that I’d hate to tangle with.
Diane says there are several “cold spots” in the living room, with a “magnetic place” in the air, that makes the hair stand up on her arms and the skin prickle. Lights go on and off at will, and then there are the “voices” which are heard, engaged in nocturnal conversations in various parts of the house.
Several years ago, Diane decided to have what she called a seance to try and learn more about the house in which she lives alone. A gentleman named Ray Nevels from the nearby community of Brookeland whom she variously described as an herbalist, an Indian shaman or healer, and a hypnotist, was invited to come and help her make contact with the spirit world. Besides Diane, her mother and stepfather and a lady friend were present. The hypnotist succeeded in placing Diane into a hypnotic trance. While “out,” she said she distinctly saw a young woman who looked to be in her early 30s standing in the kitchen in front of an old wood stove, which is no longer there. She wore a long dress with an apron. Diane said the dress was in a geometric type print that was very popular back in the 1920s. The woman also had a hair style that dated to that era. Diane said she recalled the apron had a bib front and was safety-pinned to the bodice of the dress she wore. A toddler, no more than about two years old, and still in diapers, was hanging on to her skirts. The woman was stirring something up in a big mixing bowl, and Diane distinctly felt that she was making a birthday cake! Diane also had the name, “Rini,” come to her while in the trancelike state.
Then, Diane said, she suddenly felt she was in the laundry room and had “become” the victim of the Walker crime. She said she “saw” and “felt” the awful murder that had taken place there. She said she could actually feel the bullets as they entered her body! And she experienced a terrible fear, just as Mr. Walker must have felt, on that last night in his life. She said she then snapped out of the trance, but the memories of that evening still remain very fresh in her mind.
A couple of years after the seance, or psychic experience, Diane met a lady whose husband’s grandmother had once lived in the house. She described her vision to her and also asked her if the name “Rini” meant anything to any of her family. The woman’s husband said, “Why, Rini was a close friend of my grandmother’s,” but he had not heard her name mentioned in many years!
Diane said she also once had a distinct vision of a group of men, probably sawmill workers, engaged in an animated conversation on the back porch of the house. (The porch is no longer there. It was altered to make room for a bathroom.) It must have been a hot evening, as the men were shirtless, wearing just their customary work overalls.
To this day, Diane says, often when she is reading in her front living room she suddenly hears a lively conversation “like a party going on,” in the kitchen, or when she’s in the kitchen, the same sounds emanate from the living room! She does not find these “otherworldly” conversations particularly frightening. By now she seems to take them for granted.
There are two big dogs that live with Diane. They won’t go into the central hallway (which used to be the open “dog trot”) after dark. And her brother absolutely refuses to remain in the house at all after the sun goes down. Diane herself admits she always reaches around the corner and flips on the light switch before entering a darkened room. However, she is not particularly uncomfortable about living alone in the mysterious old house. She says she’s trying to take good care of the place, and she calls herself a “caretaker.” She has the theory that “they” don’t threaten “caretakers.”
It’s an interesting house. And Diane Cox is a very interesting lady . . . and pretty brave, too, in my opinion.
Where the Ghost Car Used to Run
Pat Chance graciously showed me around the place the November Saturday morning I came to call. The tour included a look at a small family plot type of cemetery not very far from the house. The plot, overgrown somewhat with native vegetation, is only about 12 feet square, and is surrounded by an old wire fence. The gravestones of Alan Bishop, who was buried there in 1874, and his wife, Dorcas, are there, and Pat said she believes other Bishops, including stillborn infant twins, rest there as well. She said she’s been told that when the Bishop family came west from Georgia in a covered wagon caravan in 1849, they brought some hickory nuts with them for the children to eat on the long journey. When they arrived at their new homestead, there were only five of the nuts left, and they planted them on their new property. At least one of the hickory trees that sprang from that planting over 100 years ago has survived to shade the little family burial plot!
The land stayed in the Bishop family for many years. One of the descendants of the original settlers who later lived on the land was the colorful “Beaver” Bishop, sheriff of Jasper County. But more about him later.
Dan and Pat Chance purchased the property from the old Hancock estate, the land having gone out of the Bishop family some years before. After they purchased it, they lived for a time in a small house off the dirt road at the back of their property. Today the house stands on a little high spot up above the creek, which occasionally floods. The house is deserted, surrounded by high grass, and is slowly being taken over by the elements.
But in 1973 it was a fairly comfortable little house. One summer day soon after they moved in, Dan said he came home at noon, and after having a bite of lunch, he decided to take a short nap before returning to his office in Jasper. It was a very hot day, so he undressed and lay down on the bed, clad only in his undershorts. He was alone in the house that afternoon. Before he was able to fall asleep, he heard a car approaching. He said it had the unmistakable sound of an old “flat-head” engine. It pulled up and stopped, and he heard the car door slam. He hastily got up and pulled on his trousers, and went to the door to see who his unexpected caller might be. Imagine his surprise to find no car was there! There was no way it could have driven off without him hearing or seeing it. The dirt road there in front of the house is very narrow and there is no place it could have turned around. He was so astonished that he didn’t mention the strange event to anyone, including Pat, for a very long time!
Later, Dan learned that the same car sounds had been heard by a number of people who had once lived on the property. The little house was fully three-quarters of a mile off Highway 63 West. Because the dirt road was so narrow, no one could drive off without being seen or heard. The sounds of what they called “the ghost car” had puzzled and unnerved many people over a long period of time.
Once a young friend of the Chances’ son came over to visit the family on a Saturday afternoon. He went off in the nearby woods behind the house to hunt. Soon he heard the sounds of a car engine coming right at him, and there wasn’t even a road where he was walking! Then, the car stopped and the car door slammed. There was no car anywhere in sight, of course. Chance said the young man fairly flew out of those woods!
Now, back to Sheriff “Beaver” Bishop. Just a few hundred yards from the Chance home there are some small bits of the foundation of the sheriff’s old home, which burned many years ago. There is so little left of the cement slab portion of the old foundation, if Pat Chance hadn’t pointed it out to me, I would have missed seeing it. Pat said the former sheriff was a very colorful, sometimes controversial, character from all she had heard. We must remember that the days when he was sheriff, from 1918 to 1928, were very turbulent times. He was the chief lawman in a county where stills were in almost every ravine and every thick grove of trees. In spite of prohibition, moonshiners were everywhere, and it was rumored that some of the very best, the “creme de la creme,” of illicit whiskey was brewed in Jasper County. Chance said there were a lot of stories she had heard that centered around Sheriff Bishop, but what is truth and what is legend she couldn’t say.
Nida Marshall, a former Jasper public librarian and newspaperwoman, has recently written an informative history of Jasper in her book, The Jasper Journal, published in 1993 by the Nortex Press in Austin. The story she wrote about Beaver Bishop is very interesting. Beaver, whose real name is thought to have been Andrew Jackson Bishop (no one has come forward who has actually ever seen his real name in print) was born in 1886. His parents were John Allen Bishop and Cooper Reese Bishop. Beaver was the great-grandson of the original Jasper County settler, Alan Bishop. Beaver was a big man, well over 6 feet tall, and he weighed over 200 pounds. He always wore a Stetson hat, which added a few more inches to his stature! His formidable appearance, plus the fact he carried a gun he knew how to use, made him a figure to be reckoned with! The 1920s were a tough time to be a lawman, but Beaver managed to pretty much rule Jasper County for a decade during those wild and woolly days. It was rumored that he had several notches on his gun!
Deserted old home on Dan Chance’s farm
Beaver grew up in Jasper, and went to schools there, and by the time he was 16 he had worked for several local lumber companies. In 1910, when he was only 24, he was appointed a deputy sheriff. Then in 1918, at the age of 32, he was elected sheriff and served ten years. He married Dessie Mae Stephenson, and in 1916 their son, Jack, was born.
Bishop made lots of raids on local stills and many a moonshiner was put out of business during his administration. The sheriff had made more than a few enemies by the time he went out of office.
According to Marshall’s book, the former sheriff was wounded in an “affray” in 1930. It seems the misunderstanding arose over some of Bishop’s hogs. Two brothers, whom he suspected of stealing his hogs, were caught up in the “north quarters” selling fresh pork off the back of a wagon. Bishop looked into the wagon and saw his mark on the hog’s ears. To quote Nida Marshall, “Hog stealing was then an unpardonable crime resulting in stiff penitentiary sentences. Owners branded their individual marks in the ears of the hogs for identification. The law required that the ears of butchered hogs be left intact when they were brought to market.”
When Bishop drew their attention to the fact he knew they’d taken his hogs, one of the brothers took the long butcher knife he was using to slice the pork and drew it across Bishop’s midsection, wounding him. The former law officer drew his side arm and shot and killed the man.
The Chances believe the sounds of the car (or it might have been a small truck) that they used to hear might have been the sheriffs vehicle, looking for moonshiners.
But the sounds of the “ghost car” are not the only strange things that the Chances have witnessed over the years on the former Bishop property.
For a time, the Chances lived in a mobile home they brought in to their property after they vacated the house which was their first home. One night a nephew spent the night with them. In the night the young man took suddenly ill. As he came out of the bathroom, he glimpsed a woman at the end of the hallway. She was wearing a pink housecoat, and he only saw her from the back. He presumed that it was his aunt, Pat Chance. The next morning he apologized for waking her up in the middle of the night. Pat told him she hadn’t awakened at all; in fact, she had slept soundly all night long! When he described the figure he had seen, she assured him she didn’t even own a pink housecoat!
In the same vein, several men driving down Highway 63 West once reported having seen several women, clad in housecoats or robes, walking along the side of the road. When they stopped to see why the ladies were out at night dressed in that fashion, the women lite
rally disappeared in front of their eyes. They were never seen again! A theory is that maybe some of the ladies occupied one of the several houses that were scattered about the property at one time. Maybe they were former “ladies of the night” that the sheriff had arrested, and they were out to find him and take revenge. Who knows?
After she showed me the location of Sheriff Bishop’s old house, Pat Chance remarked she had heard that a lady who later lived in the house after the sheriff’s death reported seeing so many “ghosts and spirits” that she finally suffered a nervous breakdown and ended up confined to a mental institution. Pat Chance said she believed the house burned down thirty or forty years ago. There’s really nothing left of it, so the fire must have done a thorough job.
In 1946, when he was 60 years old, the giant of a man who had survived lots of close calls was killed. The death of Sheriff Bishop was listed as a hunting accident, and it was said a friend of his shot him by mistake, taking him for a deer. Mrs. Chance said a lot of people believed he was murdered. She said she had heard that a man was later arrested and sent to prison for the crime, and he died while in confinement. The Chances were told that on the night the sheriff died, the bells in the tower of the old courthouse in Jasper rang, but they were not rung by human hands! Whether they were mournfully tolling or cheerfully pealing would have to depend on what side of the law those who heard them might have been. . . .
It’s been quite a number of years now since the sheriff’s old flat-head engine car has been heard on the dirt roads of the former Bishop place, and no one has seen any housecoat-clad spectral females for a long time either. Things seem pretty peaceful and quiet these days out on the Chance property, and that’s the way Pat and Dan like it.