Ghost Story, Ghost Town

In the first episode of the Pine Curtain Confidential podcast's first season, we learn about an East Texas ghost and the piney woods community where he appears. Blending family folklore and Texas history,  Ghost Story, Ghost Town tells a story of what can haunt us, and what remains.

Pine Curtain Confidential is an initiative of the Pine Curtain Project, which blends visual art, research and storytelling to share the folklore, culture and history of deep East Texas.

Transcript

Dispatches from a ghost town community in the piney woods of East Texas, where a bump in the night could be anything from a feral pig to a panther. Unless it’s a ghost with a grudge, something not-found-in-nature, or perhaps your decisions catching up to you

Season One of Pine Curtain Confidential is “Ghost Story, Ghost Town,” a four-episode story that combines East Texas family folklore with the history of Homer, Texas, a once-thriving town that became a Ghost Town after a series of interpersonal and economic impacts over the course of about twenty years, spanning the late 1880s through 1900. While Homer still has a modest population and a tight-knit, thriving and upbeat community, it has never quite risen to the levels of prosperity that it had reached in its inception. This story will shed light on some of Homer’s mysteries and histories, with some ideas on how the two converge. 

The year is 1960, and the night is soup-thick and inky black. A child fights sleep in his bedroom, cocooned in his Lone Ranger bedspread and watched over by posters of John Wayne and Mickey Mantle. The Farm-to-Market road alongside his house is usually busy with the noise of drivers traveling from their country houses to the town and back, but tonight, aside from the occasional crackle of a glowing bug zapper, there’s silence. Not even a stray dog barking at raccoons or night vermin snuffling and digging in the fragrant gardenias and rose bushes that surround his clapboard house. 

He is bored. He is hot. He kicks off the covers and huffs, wishing it was morning and time for his cartoons and cereal, his prizes for making it through the long, dull night. He trains his imagination toward the shadows on his wall, shaping his small fingers into a gun. “Pow! Pow!” he whisper-yells. “Down, you dirty dog!” 

The house creaks in response, settling into itself like a living thing. But the boy isn’t scared. Mom says the house is just tired, like anyone would be if they had to stand up and shelter 40-years worth of families, all of them clanging in the kitchen and running across the hardwoods, day in and day out. 

He is just briefly out of his imagination, in a moment he’ll remember for the rest of his life, when one of the shadows slides across the room and stops at the edge of the bed. It becomes a tall, lanky man wearing a trench coat and fedora, locks eyes with him, then, almost leisurely, slides out the window. The boy sneaks out of bed to watch, pressing his face to the glass as the man paces the length of the yard a few times then disappears into the late-summer night.

The man reappears over the boy’s entire life. As a grown-up in his 70s, the boy-who-grew-up will still talk about this night visitor, an apparition that was alarming and only somewhat less scary as it spent the intervening generations lurking in doorways, pacing the edge of the yard and turning corners, moving quickly just beyond view. 

His sister tells another story. 

 “He banged on the wall from that little, closed-off room between the kitchen and my bedroom.” 

“He said he lives in the wig shop.” 

“He told me his name, but I will never share it.”

For a brief time, the house was rented out to tenants. And when I say brief, I mean brief. A couple of months or less. The tenant couple woke up one too many times covered with red bite marks. They were packed and gone within the week.

Most recently, an elderly veteran there would feel tormented by oily shadows moving along the fireplace hearth and feeling his bed shake in the night. While he was almost 90 years old, and did have a metal plate in his head in exchange for his years of military service, he also knew what he was experiencing and what he was experiencing wasn’t right. 

The matriarch of the house? Well, she takes it in stride. What else can she do? 

What do you think it is? I asked her on a recent visit. 

She shook her head and leaned forward in her recliner, gestured toward another, darker room where the fireplace was. “This was original to the house,” she said. “ We built the walls, roof, rooms...pretty much everything was new when we came here. But the foundation and the chimney, that has been here a while. Way before us.

Perhaps the chimney is a conduit for spirits. Maybe it’s that. 

She and her first husband both had siblings that died in their teens, one from appendicitis and another from complications after a fall from a horse. Maybe it’s one of them? Maybe.

Or maybe, in this tidy, pretty house with its well-maintained yard and climbing jasmine blinds,  that sits between two churches and an auto-body shop, in a sleepy community with a traumatic history, something else is going on.

After all, this isn’t the only place in the community where strange things happen. From orbs and voices in the local church to groups of apparitions crossing the road, there is a lot of activity that no one can really explain. But when you learn that it’s a ghost town, everything starts to make sense.

It’s been said that the past isn’t even past, and that is certainly the case in Homer. To know Homer’s history is to look at the houses ensconced on generational land, the families who have lived there for centuries, and the rise, fall, and missed opportunities of the community itself. 

Situated roughly seven miles from Lufkin and carved out of seemingly impenetrable pine groves,  Homer has maintained a population of around 360 for the past decade or so, and has no economy to speak of beyond a collection of churches, artisans who can do everything from paint your car to craft intricate stained glass panels, and small, lower community investment businesses like port-o-potty lots and boat storage. But the 1800s told a very different story. The second seat of Angelina County, Homer had a busy main street square anchored by a courthouse. Within this multi-block area, there were stores, restaurants and at least three bars. The Hudiburgh Hotel sat near the square’s northwest corner; a schoolhouse with plenty of land for children to learn and play was across from it.  Law offices and other businesses lined streets, and artisans and merchants could peddle their wares to a diverse population that included Germans, Austrians, and Swiss.

The city was poised for great success until 1881, when the Houston, East and West Railway bypassed Homer, and went through Lufkin instead. For generations, there was a legend that implied Homer was shunned due to a saloon brawl and arrest involving railroad executives, but historical records indicate that Homer was never seriously in the running to receive this necessary and sustaining boost to its economy due to its geographical location.

Against the larger conflict of the railroad’s recharted path and after its decision, smaller dramas were playing out among Homer’s citizens. Fierce interpersonal feuds were a common occurrence, flaring up every few years. One of the last of them, in spring 1900, saw two of Homer’s most prominent families turned against each other in a battle that would leave two dead, a town traumatized and a family name faded from the community forever.

Thank you for tuning into Season One, Episode 1 of Pine Curtain Confidential. Our next episode will explore some folktales and history in Homer’s past, focusing on a feud that claimed two lives.

I’m Stephanie Khattak, a writer, an artist and the creator of Pine Curtain Confidential goodbye for now, and I’ll see you in the pines.