With
Halloween around the corner, this is a good time to mention the devil, ghosts
and things that make sounds in the night.
Take, for example, the Devil’s
Pocket, an intriguing piece of land lying in a remote part of Newton County
near the Sabine River. A combination
of tangled undergrowth, marshlands, hummocks and glades, the land left settlers
with droughts, floods, plagues of malaria and fever, failing crops and the disappearance
of their cattle.
And to add to the misery, a meteor is said to have smashed
into the middle of the forest, landing with a terrible explosion that shook buildings
for miles away.
It left a gaping hole some fifty feet across and thirty
feet deep. Steam rose from the hole for weeks, leading a man to remark that “the
devil came to see us.”
While
the meteor story has not been confirmed, the area has a depression in the earth
that is often filled with stagnant water and moccasins. Even today, hunters give
it a wide berth.
Part of the reputation given to the Devil’s Pocket also
came from unsavory characters who took refuge in the area.
The
devil also had a hand in a stretch of the Neches
River, where the river once raced between high cliffs for a distance of about
six miles.
Even during normal river levels, the stretch took on the characteristics
of rapids, and boats found it difficult to navigate in either direction, leading
crews to call the area “the Devil’s Race Track.”
Early steamboats
only went through the passage when the river was at flood stage, and the waters
were as calm as quieter parts of the river.
During the days when loggers
floated great rafts of logs down the river to the Neches
River and Beaumont’s
sawmills, the log wranglers often shot through the Devil’s Race Track at dizzying
speeds, and more than a few men lost their lives.
Above
old Hadden’s Ferry on the Sabine River,
there was another river stretch known as “Widow’s Bend,” where early sternwheelers
and log rafts went aground because of swift waters that put the boats and rafts
into a deathly spin.
After several disasters at the bend, the site was
supposedly marked by the ghostly cries of widows, leading to its name.
One
of my favorite stories is “the Laughing Ghost of Todd Springs,” an area
on a small stream near Shelbyville
in Shelby County.
The story goes that Indians murdered a family living
near the springs and the ghost of the mother continued to scream each night as
she mourned for her family. Each scream, it seems, was ended with a hysterical
laugh.
Freight haulers who camped at Todd Springs while making their way
across East Texas grew so fearful
of the screams and laughter in the night that they soon avoided the area. |
