When my brother Cornel and I were youngsters we would visit our paternal grandparents who lived 25 miles from the Big Sandy crossroads in the heart of the Big Thicket, a vast area of tangled, often impenetrable woods, streams, and marshes that at that time encompassed 29 southeast Texas counties and over 3,350,000 acres.
The Big Thicket was dark, dank, and mysterious, dripping with vines and Spanish moss and crawling with water moccasins, ‘gaters, bobcats, wolves and all sorts of creatures so that it was exciting just to wake up every morning, and know you were smack dab in the middle of it.
Every Halloween night our uncles and their friends would take all the boys coon hunting. With the mighty thicket looming all around and the campfire crackling, I suppose that just about all of us would look up at the sky freckled with a million stars all shiny and sparkly and marvel about all sorts of things we’d never completely understand.
When the hounds scattered, sniffing for coons we’d gather around good ole Larry Bob Neches, the best story teller in all of The Big Thicket. With the camp fire burning down to coals that glowed eerily in the night, Larry would wind up real slow giving all the details that make tales as true as Baby Moses and the bulrushes and then he’d deliver a bones shivering story that would get your heart beating so awful fast and make you cold all over, but sweating because you’d be so scared.
We’d all scrunch up close while Larry puffed on his pipe for attention sake before spitting a tobacco stream onto the embers making them hiss and spark and then he would begin:
There’s an old road called the Ghost Road of Hardin County. It’s ‘cross the old boggy swamp just behind those brambly bushes. Trees growing over both sides of that long dirt road offer a natural canopy that distinguishes it from the jungled woods, but I wouldn’t go look for it because I hear those that find that terrible path come back with there hair white all over, and standing straight up too, and their eyes so bugged out that girls run away from them so they never would get married or even get a kiss neither.
Just then a wind would come up and blow through the trees causing the whole woods to quake and moan and we would wish we were back home tucked under downy quilts, peaceful and warm. Way off deep in the woods in the direction of the Big Sandy crossing we’d hear a train whistle blow so long and lonesome that we’d sit real still listening and thinking about tearful goodbyes.
One of the older boys would get up and stir the fire with a big stick, making sparks fly up to heaven and ole’ Lar’ would start up again:
The folk’s that come back from Ghost Road tell of seeing a light way off in the distance and the light would be swinging along and getting closer and closer making them skedaddle for home. Some say that light is from the lamp of a brakeman that fell off the train on Halloween night back in ’29. He got his head cut clean off by the train and every Halloween he comes back just waving his brakeman’s lamp lookin’ for his head that he’s never found.
Those few who have dared to walk down that fearsome road come back more livid than Dracula’s ghost saying that the brakeman started chasing them with a lantern in one hand waving a machete in the other trying to cut their heads off so he’d have a substitute for the one he can’t find. Just as he is about to catch them a ghost train comes barreling out of the woods and yanks the headless brakeman onboard before disappearing in the thicket.
About that time, the coon dogs would be hot on the trial of the ringtail and as they’d thrash through the brush we’d think it was the headless brakeman coming after us and we’d hot foot it for home.