Outlaw ghosts and a haunted bookstore (Haunted Denton Square - Denton, Texas)

Not far from the famed Goatman’s Bridge in Denton County, Texas, a courthouse square has its share of spirits.

I return once more to North Texas—a place of strange UFO and cryptid encounters, and also where I grew up. This time, I’m looking at Denton Square, a historic spot where urban legends, history, and hauntings intersect.

Content note: This episode contains mentions of violence against Black and indigenous people and suicide.

Highlights include:

an opera house that became a used bookstore
a digression about how urban legends spread and develop
a ghost horse!!

This is the written version of an episode of Buried Secrets Podcast, which you can also listen to on your favorite podcatcher.

Haunted Denton Square

This episode, I wanted to take a little bit of a break from the series that I’ve been doing about the paranormal and nostalgia. Instead, let’s look at some of the hauntings of Denton, Texas, which is right near where I grew up.

Actually, I just heard myself say that sentence and realized that perhaps doing an episode about the ghost stories of the county that I grew up is maybe the definition of paranormal nostalgia. But the connections between the paranormal and nostalgia are not my focus here, and this is maybe just nostalgic for me.

I’ve done a few episodes about Denton, Texas, and North Texas in general. Like I said, I grew up in North Texas, in Denton County, so that’s why I’ve talked about it so much.

To review some of the weirdness that I’ve already talked about:

Earlier this year, I did a couple episodes about mysterious airship sightings that occurred in North Texas in 1897.

Last year, I did a nine-part series about the Goatman’s Bridge, also known as the Old Alton Bridge in Denton County, Texas.

The bridge had been featured on ghost hunting shows like Ghost Adventures and Buzzfeed Unsolved, but I did a bunch of additional digging and learned a lot—not just about the history of the area, but also about how the legends of that particular haunting spread. And I actually think that I broke some information about that particular urban legend, because I was able to trace it to a couple online sources that people latched onto and repeated. And I look at how the story of that legend spread, was embellished online, and eventually became codified as “the” story of the bridge.

In that series, I took an in-depth look at the history of Denton, including a lot of terrible things that happened there. I’m not going to a ton of detail about that in this episode because I’ve covered it so extensively already. I’m going to focus on ghost stories and this episode will probably be relatively light, overall.

That being said, it’s worth being aware that Denton has some pretty awful stains on its history, probably like most of the United States. So content note for some brief mentions of racial violence or intimidation.

The KKK had a chapter there (Klavern No. 136), and they were very active in the early twentieth century. Also, a Black neighborhood called Quakertown was essentially taken over and destroyed by white supremacists.

If you want to know more about that, I did an episode about it as part of my Old Alton Bridge series. Also, a couple students at the University of North Texas have done incredible research on those parts of Denton’s history, so if you want an even more in-depth narrative about this aspect of the area’s history, check out Chelsea Stalling’s 2015 thesis “Removing the Danger in a Business Way”: The History and Memory of Quakertown, Denton, Texas and Micah Carlson Crittenden’s 2020 thesis The Tall Grass West Of Town: Racial Violence In Denton County During The Rise Of The Second Ku Klux Klan.

So that’s just some important context to have when thinking about what haunts the area.

For this episode, I’ll be drawing from a variety of sources, but I will be relying especially heavily on a couple in particular.

First, there is Dr. Shaun Treat, who is a former professor at the University of North Texas, which is in Denton. He has a blog called Denton Haunts, and has written a ton of blog posts about the ghosts of Denton.

In addition to Treat’s blog, I also read a student thesis from the University of North Texas called Hauntology Man, which was written by Adam Michael Wright. It is actually a treatment for a documentary about Dr. Shaun Treat, so contains a ton of great stories and information. If I say something and I don’t give the source for it, it’s fairly likely that it came from this thesis. As always, these sources and all the other sources I used will be linked in the show notes.

The second source that you’ll see quoted in articles about Denton hauntings is local historian and ghost tour guide Shelly Tucker. It sounds like she’s sparing in what she publishes online and tells journalists, because she’s saving it for the ghost tour or she directs people to her book about Denton hauntings, so not as much of my information came from her.

In my series about the Old Alton Bridge, I traced how somewhat vague stories of urban legends, retold by one or two people online, get codified and spread. Everyone filters things through their own subjectivity, and the fewer people who tell the stories, the fewer points of view things get filtered through. It can also mean that some hauntings might end up being overstated and—probably more likely— others end up being understated, just because if only one or two people are telling the stories, they’re only telling the stories that they know. So I suppose this is my disclaimer that most of the stories I’ll be telling today come from stories told by just two folks online.

Denton Square

Denton is a college town; it houses both the University of North Texas, which has about 42,000 students, and Texas Woman’s University, which has about 12,000 students. Denton itself has a population of about 140,000 people. So while not all of the students at those schools live in Denton, a large proportion of the people who are regularly in town are college students.

And that’s worth keeping in mind: in my series about Fordham hauntings, talked a lot about how colleges seem to be magnets for paranormal weirdness. (There are a handful of ghost stories about UNT, which I’m sure I’ll talk about in a future episode.)

The ghost stories that I’m going to talk about take place in Denton Square, a historic downtown area with a courthouse in the middle. It’s a very aesthetic spot, full of neon signs, old movie theater-type marquees, and cute shops and restaurants.

I am also very sentimental about Denton Square because I got married at a venue about a block away from the square, and after the wedding we took pictures in the square. So literally my phone background is my wife and me in Denton Square in front of one of the many haunted buildings there.

I got married in 2019, and at the time there was a large, very tall Confederate soldier statue in the middle of the square right next to the courthouse. The statue was put up in 1918, right around the time when the KKK was very active in the area, so it was directly tied to the legacy of racial violence and intimidation in the area. Like I mentioned, I did a whole episode about that called “This Way to the Goatman” .Thankfully the statue was taken down in 2020.

But that’s one stark reminder of the past that haunts the area, which prominently featured in the square until recently.

There’s also a grave in the middle of the square, next to the courthouse. And that’s where I’ll start. Because while I don’t know of any ghost stories associated with it, it certainly adds a particular vibe to the square.

John B. Denton’s grave

If you go to Denton Square, you’ll see a headstone surrounded by a little iron fence and some monkey grass on the courthouse lawn.

That is allegedly the grave of John Denton, the man who the city is named after. He was a Methodist preacher and a captain in the Texas military, and he died while attacking some of the indigenous people in the area. I read that he’d attacked the inhabitants of a Keechi Village. His grave was moved three different times, and it’s unclear whether he’s actually buried in Denton Square or if the grave is empty.

Having a single, prominent grave on the square it is a bit of a memento mori and it is a macabre reminder of the area’s past.

Adam Michael Wright’s thesis “Hauntology Man” makes a really interesting point about John Denton as a ghost. The thesis talks about how even if Denton is buried there, his body at this point would be “washed into the Denton soil so he is literally everywhere.” Wright also points out that Denton’s story haunts the area, because he was an oppressor, and he displaced people and killed the people. So that history haunts us as well.

The ghost of Sam Bass

The outlaw Sam Bass is a Texan Robin Hood-type folk hero. According to Treat, there are three different urban legends about him:

1. Stories about where his gold might be

In 1877, Sam Bass and some other folks pulled off the largest railroad robbery in the history of the Union Pacific Railroad, stealing $60,000 from a train in Nebraska.

After that, he went back down to the Denton area, but he died four months later.

So the question is: what happened to his money? He received $10,000 as his cut of the job, which is the equivalent of almost $290,000 today. So it’s pretty unlikely that he spent that much money in just four months.

Folks have theorized that his gold could be a local cave. In the 1980s, it was discovered that one of the caves contained ticks that had both Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and so the cave was quarantined. Because of that, people can’t look for gold in that cave anymore. But apparently some people say that the gold is still out there, and some folks believe that it is buried in Denton Square itself. (Source)

(Sidenote, here’s a great picture of Sam Bass’ cave—or one of them, at least.)

2. Stories about him being benevolent and charitable

There are a few different stories about him being kind to widows. In one of them, the widow of a Confederate soldier didn’t have enough money to pay her mortgage, and her house was about to be foreclosed on. So Sam Bass gave her enough money to pay off the debt and then later stole the money back from the banker.

There’s also story about a robbery that went wrong and resulted in Bass’ death. During the robbery, which happened near Austin in Round Rock, Texas, Sam Bass ended up killing a deputy. It was the first person who he’d killed, and Sam Bass felt bad about that.

So after Bass is captured, he asks about what happened to the deputy and he’s told that he had died. Bass then asked the Texas Ranger who was watching him to give the widow all of the money that Bass had in his pocket and in his bag.

3. Sam Bass’ horse, also known as “the Denton Mare”
The third urban legend about Bass is the ghost story: People have claimed to see the ghost of Sam Bass with a bandanna over his face riding his horse, known as “the Denton Mare,” through Denton Square.

The Denton County Courthouse

Like I said, the courthouse sits in the middle of the square. It was first built in 1896, and it’s a beautiful historic building.

And there are some ghost stories tied to it, of course. People have seen shadowy figures looking out of the windows, including a cowboy. (Of course, because this is Texas.)

There used to be holding cells for prisoners in the basement, and people have said that they have experienced weird sounds there and they felt like they weren’t alone. And apparently there have been a few deaths in the courthouse.

Alright, now let’s get to the hauntings of some of the businesses in the area:

The Campus Theater

Theaters always have to have a ghost, and this one is no different. The Campus Theater first opened as a movie theater in 1949. It was notable for being the first movie theater in Denton with air conditioning, which is essential in Texas. In 1967, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway came to the theater for the red-carpet premier of Bonnie and Clyde. Later, it became the home of the local community theater.

The building itself is beautiful; my phone background is a picture of my wife and I standing in front of the theater right after getting married, so I see a shot of the theater probably . . . dozens (maybe hundreds) . . . of times a day.

The theater has a huge, old-school marquee and a tall, vertical neon sign on green fin above the marquee. It’s got real Art Deco vibes. I’ve never been inside, but it looks awesome from the outside.

The theater is said to be haunted by the theater’s business manager, J.P. Harrison, who started working there in 1949 when the theater opened. Apparently he was a bit of a prankster, both in life and after death. Most of the stories about him involve people hearing weird sounds and footsteps, or there being lighting issues. People have also reported him moving objects both in the back offices and on stage.

Apparently it’s considered bad luck if he has no interaction with a production. So he’s the ghost you want to haunt you. (Source)

J&J’s Pizzeria (118 W Oak Street)

Wright’s thesis recounts a story about a pizzeria on Denton Square called JJ’s. I’m not up to speed on the businesses in the area, but I think this might have been J&J’s Pizzeria, which closed in 2021 after 24 years because of a rent hike. It looks like there’s a pasta place in the location now.

Anyway, back when it was still J&J’s, a woman who worked there talked about how she was going down to the basement and saw a ghost there. There’s not a ton of detail about it, just that she dropped the jar that she’d been holding and ran back upstairs.

Paschall Bar / Andy’s Basement (122 N Locust Street)

This bar and concert venue based in the oldest building on Denton Square (built in 1877) has reportedly seen some paranormal weirdness: mysterious faces in the window and people feeling like someone was pushing them on the stairs. (Source)

Hooligans (104 N Locust Street)

Located in a building dating back to 1899, this bar has some similar, vague reports of weirdness: Supposedly people have been tripped on the stairs by unknown forces.

Recycled Books

For me, the highlight of Denton Square is the awesome used bookstore, Recycled Books. The building was once the Wright Opera House, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. It was completed in 1901 and constructed with bricks from Denton’s old courthouse, which was struck by lightning and burned down in 1894.

The opera house hosted vaudeville, light opera, local talent shows, and melodrama. It was so grand that people came all the way from Dallas to see operas there. Supposedly one actor killed himself in his dressing room, but I’ve only found one (not particularly verifiable) source that’s claimed that.

The opera house shut down in 1913 because there of competition from movie theaters in the area. In 1918, it became the Majestic Theater for a while, but that didn’t last long.

Local historian and ghost tour guide Shelly Tucker said that “its last audience was an all male group who paid $2.00 each to witness a prize fight between a local post office employee and a semi-pro boxer from Dallas.” It later became a saloon, a department store called The Boston Store, and Kibler Office Supply Store. In 1990, it became a bookstore.

The building looks awesome; these days, it’s painted pink and purple. According to a Texas Observer article from 2012, the bookstore, which takes up three floors, is 17,000 square feet and houses about 400,000 books.

The ghost stories here are somewhat vague, but I’ve read about books flying off of shelves, cold spots, unexplained voices, weird sounds, and a ghost named Emma. Supposedly, customers using the store’s online book search database have had their queries get changed to “Emma.” Students who’ve lived in the apartments upstairs from the bookstore have claimed to witness mysteriously moving objects, slamming doors, and phantom footsteps.

According to an article in Denton County Magazine, Tucker asked the owner of the bookstore whether it was haunted:

“Every ghost story you’ve ever heard about that place is true,” he told her.

“So you think it’s haunted?” she asked.

“I know it is,” he replied.

Outro

Alright, so that’s a quick look at the hauntings of Denton Square.

Dr. Shaun Treat, quoted in a UNT student’s thesis called Hauntology Man said: “Denton is a very haunted place, but I suspect it’s not unlike any other place across the American south.”

This quote gets at a lot of the things I was thinking about while researching this episode. I went through a bit of a roller coaster, where I was super excited to dig into all of Denton Square’s hauntings, since it’s the most historic part of a place that has a reputation for being haunted. But then when I actually went through and catalogued the stories, I started feeling disappointed.

I spent months last year researching the parts of Denton’s history that related to the Old Alton Bridge, and I found such a trove of urban legends and rumored phenomena that led me to learn more about history, and history that helped me understand the paranormal aspect of the story better. Goatman’s Bridge is such a rich text when it comes to hauntings.

But it also had something special, which is that while it started out as a local urban legend spread through word of mouth and then morphed into a couple people online talking about it, it spiraled out into something completely different. After Ghost Adventures and Buzzfeed Unsolved featured the bridge, that made it an even more popular haunt, which meant that more people visited the bridge and had an eye out for paranormal weirdness, which meant that more people were likely to notice the paranormal. And the more people posted online about it, the more places people had to share their stories. When researching the Old Alton Bridge, I scoured the comment sections of YouTube videos, Google reviews of the location, and forum posts, looking for unusual personal stories.

But not every haunting gets that sort of attention. Which means that people might consistently notice strange phenomena day in and day out, but it never rises to the level of them spreading the word. At the most, they might mention them to local ghost tour guides.

Now that it’s become so famous, maybe the Goatman’s Bridge has a thoughtform associated with it, which then causes new phenomena, which then makes people talk more about it. But like I said, I think conversation about a location creates venues for people to share their thoughts, which then naturally snowballs into a larger body of folklore.

I do think that something’s up with the Goatman’s Bridge, on a paranormal level. The urban legend also resonates on a narrative level, because as I talked about in the series, it functions as a sort of “folk news” that teaches people about a hidden part of the area’s shameful history.

But I wonder how many other places might have significant hauntings, but there just isn’t a well-known narrative for people’s experiences to be tied into or a place for folks to share them.

I was disappointed by some of these Denton hauntings because they seemed so commonplace. I loved the mysterious name showing up on the bookstore computer and Sam Bass’ ghost horse, but some of the stories felt like they could have happened anywhere. The sound of footsteps? A theater ghost? How do those stories differ from, say, some of the phenomena from the episodes I did about Scranton’s hauntings? Or any bog standard story of a haunting?

But then I started thinking about how folklore seems to slowly spread, to congeal as more people tell their stories. And part of me wonders how many “commonplace” hauntings are just a hint at something much larger, at stories that are waiting for their time to unfurl.

Anyway, the next episode will probably be about more Denton hauntings. I haven’t talked about some of the more famous UNT ghost stories, which seem to be some of Denton’s best-known urban legends (aside from the Goatman). I even saw something about a Pigman that I need to do further research on.

Outlaw ghosts and a haunted bookstore (Haunted Denton Square - Denton, Texas)

Not far from the famed Goatman’s Bridge in Denton County, Texas, a courthouse square has its share of spirits.

Content note: This episode contains mentions of violence against Black and indigenous people and suicide.

Highlights include:

an opera house that became a used bookstore
a digression about how urban legends spread and develop
a ghost horse!!

****Support the New Blood Kickstarter! Please spread the word and—if you’re able to—back the project to help bring two new queer paranormal shows into the world! Check out newblood.tv for more info.****

This is the written version of an episode of Buried Secrets Podcast, which you can also listen to on your favorite podcatcher.

Haunted Denton Square

I’ve done a few episodes about Denton, Texas, and North Texas in general. Like I said, I grew up in North Texas, in Denton County, so that’s why I’ve talked about it so much.

To review some of the weirdness that I’ve already talked about:

Earlier this year, I did a couple episodes about mysterious airship sightings that occurred in North Texas in 1897.

Last year, I did a nine-part series about the Goatman’s Bridge, also known as the Old Alton Bridge in Denton County, Texas.

So that’s just some important context to have when thinking about what haunts the area.

For this episode, I’ll be drawing from a variety of sources, but I will be relying especially heavily on a couple in particular.

Denton Square

But that’s one stark reminder of the past that haunts the area, which prominently featured in the square until recently.

John B. Denton’s grave

If you go to Denton Square, you’ll see a headstone surrounded by a little iron fence and some monkey grass on the courthouse lawn.

Having a single, prominent grave on the square it is a bit of a memento mori and it is a macabre reminder of the area’s past.

The ghost of Sam Bass

The outlaw Sam Bass is a Texan Robin Hood-type folk hero. According to Treat, there are three different urban legends about him:

1. Stories about where his gold might be

In 1877, Sam Bass and some other folks pulled off the largest railroad robbery in the history of the Union Pacific Railroad, stealing $60,000 from a train in Nebraska.

After that, he went back down to the Denton area, but he died four months later.

(Sidenote, here’s a great picture of Sam Bass’ cave—or one of them, at least.)

2. Stories about him being benevolent and charitable

The Denton County Courthouse

Like I said, the courthouse sits in the middle of the square. It was first built in 1896, and it’s a beautiful historic building.

And there are some ghost stories tied to it, of course. People have seen shadowy figures looking out of the windows, including a cowboy. (Of course, because this is Texas.)

Alright, now let’s get to the hauntings of some of the businesses in the area:

The Campus Theater

Apparently it’s considered bad luck if he has no interaction with a production. So he’s the ghost you want to haunt you. (Source)

J&J’s Pizzeria (118 W Oak Street)

Paschall Bar / Andy’s Basement (122 N Locust Street)

Hooligans (104 N Locust Street)

Located in a building dating back to 1899, this bar has some similar, vague reports of weirdness: Supposedly people have been tripped on the stairs by unknown forces.

Recycled Books

The opera house shut down in 1913 because there of competition from movie theaters in the area. In 1918, it became the Majestic Theater for a while, but that didn’t last long.

According to an article in Denton County Magazine, Tucker asked the owner of the bookstore whether it was haunted:

“Every ghost story you’ve ever heard about that place is true,” he told her.

“So you think it’s haunted?” she asked.

“I know it is,” he replied.

Outro

Alright, so that’s a quick look at the hauntings of Denton Square.

Dr. Shaun Treat, quoted in a UNT student’s thesis called Hauntology Man said: “Denton is a very haunted place, but I suspect it’s not unlike any other place across the American south.”

But I wonder how many other places might have significant hauntings, but there just isn’t a well-known narrative for people’s experiences to be tied into or a place for folks to share them.

The Pigman of Bonnie Brae Bridge (Haunted Denton, Texas)

____This is the written version of an episode of Buried Secrets Podcast, which you can also listen to on your favorite podcatcher.____

This episode is about the legendary pigman of Denton, Texas. Kinda.

The thing is, I’d never heard of the pigman, so it’s really an episode about how urban legends and folklore are spread, what makes one urban legend take off while another lingers in obscurity, and what our urban legends say about us.

Though I do also tell the story of the pigman somewhere in there.

Highlights include:

the “Cowboy Mafia”
the WPA Folklore Project

Content note: this episode contains a brief mention of sexual assault, stories about violent attacks that lead to disfigurement, quoted language that suggests that facial disfigurement is tied to someone’s moral character, mentions of the war on drugs and corruption in the U.S. legal system.

Last year, I did a whole series about the Goatman’s Bridge in Denton County, Texas. It was nine episodes long, and I could’ve gone on for longer. There was an immense array of online sources with information about the goat man, from YouTube comments and Google reviews of people telling their own stories about the paranormal near the bridge, which is also called the old Alton Bridge. There were videos of people going to the bridge and investigating, including episodes of Ghost Adventures and Buzzfeed Unsolved. There was such a wealth of information about the goat man, and it was so well-known that it’s one of those topics that you can just talk about for hours and hours, and I did.

In the last episode, I talked about how urban legends grow, particularly in the Internet age. I also talked about how it felt like the seeds of some of the urban legends and ghost stories of Denton, Texas, are just starting to germinate. As far as I can tell, in the past, urban legends were spread via word-of-mouth and then were occasionally written down in books of ghost stories, newspaper articles published around Halloween, the work of academic folklorists, and incredible initiatives like the WPA’s Folklore Project.

The WPA Folklore Project

In case you aren’t familiar with it, in the 1930s, during the Great Depression here in the United States, there was a New Deal jobs program that paid more than 300 writers from twenty-four different states to go around and document the folklore of a generation that was dying out. If you read a book about urban legends in the United States, it’s fairly likely that that project will end up being mentioned.

A few examples from my own book collection include:

Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folk Tales of Louisiana by Lyle Saxon, Edward Dreyer, and Robert Tallant explicitly says that it is made up of “material gathered by workers of the Works Progress Administration, Louisiana Writers Project, and sponsored by the Louisiana State Library Commission.” There are a ton of books out there that were written as part of the WPA writers project, so if you live in the US and you’re interested in folklore, it is worth seeing whether your state has one.

’Pon My Honor Hits the Truth: Tall Tales from the Mountains by Hubert J. Davis (who also wrote the more famous book The Silver Bullet and Other American Witch Stories, which also drew from stories collected by the Virginia Writers Project, the WPA program)

The Vanishing Hitchhiker American Urban Legends and Their Meanings by Jan Harold Brunvand includes stories collected by the WPA program in some of the citations

So there are a ton of amazing sources for folklore, which nowadays I think we would call urban legends, from prior to the 1930s. Those stories have been written down and repeated and cited again and again.

But lately, I’ve been really interested in urban legends and folklore that seem to have their roots in the 1950s through the 1970s. There seem to be this other crop of folklore from the mid-twentieth century. So many UFO, alien, and cryptid sightings seem to have occurred between the 1950s and the 1970s. The Loveland frogman was first sighted in the 1950s. The Barney and Betty Hill UFO abduction happened in 1961. The famous Patterson-Gimlin film, which supposedly caught Bigfoot on video, was filmed in 1967.

And again and again, as I research hauntings, I have found that the roots seem to be in urban legends told in the 1970s. I’ve talked about the reasons why think that might be. For example, I found no mention of any of the Fordham University hauntings in print prior to the 1970s, and I know that part of The Exorcist was filmed there in the 1970s, and The Exorcist was a cultural touchstone and made so many people think about the paranormal, so I think there’s something there.

You could probably also argue that the science fiction films of the 1950s and the 1960s may have influenced UFO and cryptid sightings, so for example, The Creature from the Black Lagoon came out in 1954, and the first frogman sighting was also in the 1950s. There was a lot of cultural stuff going on there, and I also wonder if there was a feedback loop happening with the media. People were interested in science fiction, fantasy, and horror movies, so maybe they’re more likely to notice things that are tied into the media that they enjoy. Meanwhile, newspapers are seeing that people are interested in these subjects, so when they get reports of weird things, maybe they were more likely to print those sorts of reports, since there is a demonstrated interest.

Or who knows, maybe the car culture of the mid-twentieth century meant that more teenagers had access to cars, which meant that they hung out in the woods more often and did more things independently further from home in places that were accessible via mass transit, and so then maybe that increase their likelihood of seeing things or thinking that they see things.

I’m really just spitballing here, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot.

But it feels like a lot of the urban legends that are still circulating nowadays — which have solidified into stories about cryptids and hauntings that paranormal TV shows go to investigate — have the roots in the decades ranging from the 1950s to the 1970s.

The Goatman’s Bridge

When I did my series about the Goatman’s Bridge in Denton County, Texas, I also researched other stories of goatmen from around the United States, and it seems that many of them also originated in the 1970s. I’m not exactly sure of when the legends of the Old Alton Bridge goatman, though I’ve heard claims of it beginning in the 1950s, and I’ve definitely seen people online and comment sections mention hearing the legend in the 1970s and 1980s.

But here’s the weird thing about the legend of the Denton goatman: the legend as we know it now seems to be partially made up, and mostly based on a YouTube video made by a student at the University of North Texas in July 2008. The YouTube video gives details that I have never seen in any media prior to that video, setting a specific date that the victim in the legend was murdered and giving him a name. Now, I’m not gonna get super into this, because I talk about it in an enormous depth in the series that I did about the old Alton Bridge, but one of the things that’s most interesting to me about it is the fact that this was a story that was circulating via urban legend and through word-of-mouth for very long time. And when I was growing up in Denton County in the 1990s and the early 2000’s, I never heard the story of the Goatman’s Bridge. It seems like the story was circulating at different high schools in the county, but not mine. And despite growing up very close to the bridge, I had no idea that it had all this folklore attached to it.

As far as I can gather, that 2008 YouTube video got traction and then the story as told in that video began to spread online. It crystallized a certain version of the story, which I believe is partially fictional despite being based on real events that happened frequently in the area. And I found posts from a different person online who claims to have done a lot of work to try to spread that version of the legend. Then, because there were more and more blog posts and videos about the bridge, suddenly there were places for people to tell their own stories about strange things happening there. And then two popular ghost hunting shows then featured the bridge, completely solidifying it in the imagination of the paranormal community as one of the most haunted places in the United States. I’m not saying that it’s not haunted, but it is entirely possible that other places could be just as haunted but their stories didn’t spread the same way.

The fact that I had never heard the story of the bridge despite having grown up there tells me that it is possible for a legend to be very well-known in certain circles while people living literally ten minutes away may have never heard the legend.

Modern folklore

Also, absent any kind of large, concerted effort to collect folklore and local urban legends the way that the WPA Folklore Project did, what do we have to record more recent pieces of folklore? I know that there still folklorists working out there today, and I don’t mean to denigrate any of their work. There are also amazing people like Timothy Renner of the podcast Strange Familiars who do a lot of work to collect personal stories and folklore from around the world. So I’m not trying to say that no one is recording strange local stories.

But I would argue that a lot of our modern folklore these days gets recorded on places like Reddit. There used to be online forums and blogs where people would share their stories, but as platforms have been consolidated, there are fewer and fewer places where people share their stories. And that also means that they have to be motivated enough to seek out a platform to share the story, and to be comfortable on a platform like Reddit. Which plenty of people aren’t.

That being said, I am very curious about the ways in which legends build momentum as people pay attention to them online. Because the more people talk about an urban legend, the more people learn about it and then the more it spreads. They almost have the vibe of what someone might call a tulpa or thoughtform, which is the idea that you can essentially will an entity into being just by intensely concentrating on it. But in this case, it might have that metaphysical dimension, but it has this very literal dimension of attracting people to a story and then having that story spread.

Anyway, let’s talk about the Pigman of Bonnie Brae Bridge in Denton, Texas.

The legend

As you might guess from the very long intro that I did, there is not a lot of info out there about the Pigman of Bonnie Brae Bridge. In fact, I don’t even really know what the Bonnie Brae Bridge is. As far as I can surmise, it seems like there are perhaps multiple bridges on Bonnie Brae Road in West Denton, and perhaps this creature haunts some or all of them.

Here’s the story that I found online on the blog Denton Haunts. This urban legend dates back to the 1950s. High school kids would go out into the woods to hook up and they would come back with stories about a “a grunting, rock-throwing, grotesquely deformed Pig Man.” (Sorry about some of the language in here; it sucks that every monstrous urban legend and every movie villain has some sort of facial disfigurement.)

Apparently there was a newspaper article — which I have not been able to find so far in my newspaper database searches — in which cops cautioned people to stay away from these locations because there have been reports of someone vandalizing parked cars and bothering couples who are parking there. But it sounds like most of the story came from word of mouth. The tale became that there was a “malevolently grotesque PigMan that terrified young lovers and unwary travelers who ventured into these rural regions known as “Hog Valley.””

Teenagers reported that they had encountered “a grunting figure who scurried in the shadows of the creekbed and pelted parked cars with stones, and others told of a man-like creature with glowing red eyes who traveled the roadside with an aggressive pack of grunting wild hogs.” The original blog post that the story comes from suggests that these were pranksters, or maybe these were stories that parents told to keep their kids from hooking up in the woods, both of which seem plausible for at least some of the sightings. Though it’s also totally possible that it could be a mix of something real and copycat hoaxes.

Also worth noting: the blog post is accompanied by a YouTube video that was made by somebody else, not the author of the blog post. The video seems to be of a supposed “pig man” who was sighted in Tennessee, not Denton. And just based on what the YouTube account is and based on the conversation in the comments, I kind of think it’s a creepypasta. Also, to me, the video looks like a bobcat, though what do I know? I’m not exactly a nature expert.

Also, the stories mention that this happened in Hog Valley, which it seems to be implied is in or near Denton, but I don’t actually know where that is. It’s possible that there’s a place that used to be called Hog Valley but now is not called that. I’ve encountered that even here in New York City where I live now. For example, in Woodside, where I used to live in Queens, there was a place called the Snake Woods and Rattlesnake Spring that’s now just apartment buildings but used to be a creepy forest.

That being said, there is a comment from 2013 on this blog post where someone says “i played around in hog valley many late nights in the early 80’s and had been scared off plenty times !” which makes me think that it’s a real place that just isn’t very searchable online.

The blog post then recounts two origin stories for the supposed pigman:

The drifter: A drifter was cutting through a farmer’s land when he was attacked by wild boar, and then somehow those bites caused him to transform into half-man, half-pig creature “doomed to roam the creekbeds of Hog Valley, ravenously searching for easy prey like unsuspecting paramours parking on the rural roads outside of town.”

The Cowboy Mafia: This second story is wild and goes into something I had never heard of. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was apparently a “Cowboy Mafia” made up of motorcycle gangs who may have guarded “concealed sites of illegal drug activities.” It sounds like sources are hazy there and supposedly the people who have been interviewed haven’t wanted to give details, but the idea is that someone was, to quote from the blog:

brutally beaten by a biker gang after having his nose cut off and a ‘Glasgow grin’ carved into his face (like the Joker)… a gangland sign that someone has been ‘nosy’ and talking or ‘squealing’ to police. Horribly disfigured and unable to function in polite society, this “PigMan” was forced to roam the rural countryside foraging for food, sometimes raiding hog slop or taking shelter in barns, sheds, and under bridges in anonymity except for an occasional frightening encounter.

So the idea there was that the pig man was supposed to be a deterrent so no one else would snitch on the Cowboy Mafia, and the blog Denton Haunts mentions that this would have been a reflection of the the community’s anxiety about having this organized crime outfit in the area. Also, the Cowboy Mafia was a real thing, and I will get into that later.

The source

All of the information that we have about this supposed creature comes from one blog post. A single blog post from October 2011 published on the blog Denton Haunts. Anything else that mentions the Denton pigman, as far as I can tell, geta this information directly from this blog post.

Normally a story like this would be something that I might mention on a round up episode of a bunch of different urban legends from an area. And originally, I was going to just include this on a more general episode about Denton hauntings. But I found this really interesting and bizarre, and I find this source probably about as credible as any source of Denton ghost stories could be. I’ve mentioned this blog plenty of times on my podcast, but Denton Haunts is run by a former professor at the University of North Texas, Dr. Shaun Treat. At least at one point, he was doing ghost tours in the area. Last episode, I extensively cited a thesis by a student at the University of North Texas who did a documentary based on Dr. Treat’s ghost tours.

So, to me, I don’t think that he is making up this story. Though, to be clear, I don’t know him personally and have never met him. But he is someone who has spoken to a lot of people about ghosts and hauntings in the area, so he is in the position to have been told stories like this. So I think this is an instance of someone having been told a bunch of different versions of the legend verbally and just writing it down.

There are only three comments on the blog post, none of which elaborate on the legend. Though one of them is somewhat upsetting and describes an alleged SA experience that someone had at a local haunted house that involves someone dressed up as a pig, which to me suggests that perhaps someone was kind of playing on the legend by dressing up that way. Or they could’ve just randomly chosen a pig mask. Who knows?

The Cowboy Mafia

All right, I said I would loop back to the Cowboy Mafia. One thing I love about urban legends is that as you dig into them, you learn a lot of weird bits of history that you never would’ve come across otherwise. Despite being from the area, I had never heard of the Cowboy Mafia.

They were well-known enough to have their own Wikipedia page, though, so that’s where most of this info comes from.

In the 1970s, there was a group of cannabis smugglers who Dallas newspapers dubbed the Cowboy Mafia. They were said to be the most prolific drug smuggling ring in all of Texas. Between 1977 and 1978, they imported more than 106 tons of cannabis over the course of three trips from Columbia to Texas. These trips were undertaken on shrimp boats called the Agnes Pauline, Monkey, Jubilee, and Bayou Blues. Each boat carried between 35,000 and 40,000 pounds of cannabis, which was then brought to ranches owned by a man named Rex Cauble, which is a Texas name if I’ve ever heard one.

In 1978, the crew of the Agnes Pauline was unloading their cargo in Port Arthur, Texas, when the federal government came and seized the boat. This led to a high-profile arrest and court case. Twenty-six members of the smuggling ring were convicted in 1979. Rex Cauble, the multimillionaire rancher who was believed to be the mastermind behind all of this, was convicted of many crimes, including smuggling 106 tons of cannabis, in 1982.

He was sentenced to ten concurrent prison terms of five years, which I think just means five years, and was released in 1987. If you read the Wikipedia article, it’s pretty enraging, because he could have lost up to a third of his fortune of $55 to $80 million (which comes out to between $173,336,632 and $252,126,010 in 2023 inflation bucks). But the way in which things were structured and actually carried out, it looks as if he and his family got to keep most, if not all of his money. Remember that this was happening concurrently with the war on drugs which began in the 1970s and which Reagan intensified in 1982.

The war on drugs was enormously destructive to the United States, resulting in the prison population in the United States skyrocketing, which meant that families were torn apart and people’s lives were ruined even for extremely minor drug-related convictions. It destroyed whole communities, particularly communities of color, and had a terrible effect on this country that is way outside the scope of this episode but which is significant.

Meanwhile, Cauble was convicted of an enormous amount of drug smuggling, and you could argue that officials bent over backwards to make sure that he got to keep as much of his money as possible and that he spent as little time in prison as possible.

So to me, the scariest part of this story has nothing to do with the paranormal and has everything to do with government corruption and how the ultra-wealthy get to live under a different set of laws than everybody else.

Well, there we have it. I managed to turn in a 500-word blog post from twelve years ago into a 4,000-word essay. I was going to talk about pigmen from other places in the United States, but I’ve run out of time. Just know that there are plenty of pigman legends from various states. Much like the goatman, the pigman seems to be a cryptid-type trope pops up in various places and takes on some of the unique character, history, and anxieties of a specific area.

Do I think there is a pigman out there in Denton? I don’t know. It’s awfully hard to prove a negative, I just don’t think we have enough information to make any kind of educated guess. To me, it seems like an urban legend from the 1950s which may or may not have been based on a real encounter with something paranormal morphed into a different story based on local news about drug smugglers, and I’m curious what tone the story would take on if it reemerged today.

Or, alternatively, if it’s still something that’s talked about often today and not just remembered as a legend that people used to tell in the 1980s and earlier, I’m curious about what shape the story has now. How might it be filtered through our anxieties? Will this be a tale that ends up spreading and proliferating online in a similar way to the Goatman’s Bridge legend? Or is this an urban legend that will stay hyperlocal and spread verbally?

I guess by talking about it, I’m doing my part to spread it, but who knows if it’s something that would catch on. If you live in the Denton area, have you had an experience with a pigman? Have you heard different version of this legend? I’d love to know; you can email me at buriedsecretspodcast@gmail.com.

About the episode art: This is based on a picture I took of a tree near the Old Alton Bridge in Denton, Texas.

The UFO crash in Aurora, Texas

A look at the Aurora, Texas, UFO crash, one of many sightings during the mystery airship flap of 1897.

Highlights include:

airships!
urban legends and uncertain truths
Jacques Vallée

This is the written version of an episode of Buried Secrets Podcast, which you can also listen to here or on your favorite podcatcher.

Last year, I did a podcast series about the story of the famous Goatman’s Bridge or Old Alton Bridge in Denton County, Texas, where I grew up. While I was doing that research, I came across a lot of weirdness in Denton. The area is known for being haunted, I already knew there were multiple ghost tours that operate in the city of Denton (my mom’s taken one of the tours and reported back that it was great!) So the hauntings weren’t that surprising to me. However, I was really fascinated by one unexpected detail: Denton was supposedly host to a number of mysterious airship sightings in 1897. At the time, I was deep in the Goatman’s Bridge series so couldn’t look into it further; I made a note of it for a future episode and moved on. That was a year or so ago.

Historically, I haven’t talked about aliens or UFOs much at all on this podcast, so the Denton airship sightings have been languishing in a file, untouched. But a recent realization about a series of synchronicities has led me to feeling that I need to dig into alien lore and history a bit more.

Because of that, last month I started reading Jacques Vallée’s seminal 1969 book Passport to Magonia, which is all about the connections between fairy lore and UFO sightings.

Passport to Magonia is so famous that a lot of its contents felt very familiar to me. It’s a remarkable read, because I can’t imagine compiling the amount of information that he did—strange sightings both in folklore and in more modern times—in an era before the internet. (I also think about this all the time with regards to Charles Fort’s research. I know he practically took up residence at the New York Public Library.)

The appendix of Passport to Magonia, a list of sightings from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, takes up half the book. I can only imagine how valuable a resource that was prior to the internet. To be honest, it’s helpful even now, when I can easily search sightings online.

It’s completely unsurprising to me that the book is as iconic as it is. I ended up taking so many notes while reading the book that it took me a while to finish. During the time it took me to read it, I kept coming across different references to sightings that he talked about in the book. That happened in podcasts I was listening to, other books I was reading simultaneously, and conversations I saw online.

Normally, if I were reading something and then suddenly started seeing the specific things the book was about come up again and again everywhere, it would say it was synchronicity. To be clear, it wasn’t that similar subjects appeared in my information diet. Again and again, I noticed people citing specific cases that appeared in Passport to Magonia (which are now so famous that in most cases, I didn’t see the book mentioned as a source; that stuff’s just in the zeitgeist now.)

But to bring us back to the subject at hand: The 1897 airship sightings that I had made a note to research someday popped up a lot in the book. That was another thing that felt like synchronicity, but was probably more of an indication of how significant the book is and how much of an influence it still has on conversations about the paranormal today.

While the book doesn’t talk about sightings in Denton, Texas, it does talk about some other nearby sightings that year. So I took this as a sign that I should dust off the 1897 airship topic and look into it.

When I was reading about some of the Denton airship cases online, I also came across a strange UFO case[^1] in Aurora, Texas, in a county that borders Denton County. This particular UFO crash was so significant that it’s become the thing that Aurora is now known for.

This time, I’m looking at the 1897 airship flap in general as well as the Aurora UFO crash.[^2] Next time, I’ll talk about the Denton County sightings.

The 1897 airship flap

First, let’s look at how Vallée describes the events of 1897 in Passport to Magonia:

To present in an orderly fashion all the accounts of that period would itself take a book. My object here is only to review the most detailed observations of the behavior of the airship’s occupants on the ground. But first, how did the object itself behave? It maneuvered very much in the way UFO’s are said to maneuver, except that airships were never seen flying in formation or performing “aerial dances.” Usually, an airship flew rather slowly and majestically—of course, such an object, in 1897, ran no risk of being pursued—except in a few close-proximity cases when it was reported to depart “as a shot out of a gun.” Another difference from modern UFO’s lies in the fact that its leisurely trajectory often took it over large urban areas. Omaha, Milwaukee, Chicago, and other cities were thus visited; each time, large crowds gathered to watch the object. Otherwise, the airship exhibited all the typical activities of UFO’s: hovering, dropping “probes”—on Newton, Iowa, on April 10, for example—changing course abruptly, changing altitude at great speed, circling, landing and taking off, sweeping the countryside with powerful light beams. . . .

All the operators who engaged in discussions with human witnesses were indistinguishable from the average American population of the time.

So there’re a few interesting things here.

First, he points out that the UFOs seemed to be slow moving and didn’t shy away from urban areas. That feels like a far cry from how many sightings are described nowadays, but his point about how transportation methods have changed since then feels important.

Basically, today, we have technology that allows us to move quickly in pursuit of any kind of flying object in the sky. But back then, that wasn’t a concern—human tech just wasn’t there. So, theoretically, any extraterrestrial visitors could take their time and know that they weren’t about to get chased down by some jets.

I also wonder how much of this has to do with the differences in technology from a practical standpoint (people theoretically being able to chase slow-moving aliens down) versus from a cultural standpoint.

What I mean by that is: How much of the difference in sightings is due to calculations on the part of the craft’s pilots, and how much of it is due to how people perceive things at the time? In a world where there aren’t jets and airplanes, a even slow-moving object in the sky might seem nearly magical.

How much of our experience of UFOs is about the actual objects in the sky? How much of it is about our own perception and the culture that we live in?

In Passport to Magonia, Vallée addresses that specifically:

In the Flying Saucer Review, Jerome Clark observes that “the 1897 wave indicates the futility of any attempt to divorce flying objects from the general situation in which they operate.” This makes the study of such objects infinitely broader than the simple investigation, in scientific terms, of a new phenomenon; for if the appearance and behavior of the objects are functions of our interpretation at any particular time in the development of our culture, then what chances can we have of ever knowing the truth?

I love this question. I’m not interested in the nuts-and-bolts interpretation of UFOs; I like weird, paranormal, magical theories about UFOs. So it’s fascinating how our perception of flying objects changes over time.

The mystery airship wave began in 1896 in California. After that, reports began to appear throughout the country, apparently moving eastward. (Passport to Magonia includes a helpful map of sightings.)

Some of the sightings seemed to be unidentified lights, but a lot of them sound reminiscent of dirigibles or airships. Typically, the reports said that the pilots seemed basically human. Many people thought that these airships were the work of some sort of genius inventor. Apparently so many people believed that Thomas Edison was behind them that he actually had to issue a statement saying that he was not involved. That being said, there were some people who had more outlandish theories, such as the idea that the airships had flown here from Mars.

While some (mundane) airships had been flown before this flap, no airships existed that were able to maneuver the way these crafts did.

At the time, skeptics tried to claim that these were just hoaxes and pranks or that people were hallucinating or that they were seeing huge swarms of fireflies and thinking they were airships. It definitely seems like there could have been some yellow journalism going on here, because this was the era of making up stories to sell newspapers.

Do I think that every airship report in 1897 was true? No. Do I think that all of the airship reports were made up? Also no.

The 1897 Aurora, Texas, UFO crash

This brings us to Aurora, Texas.

Despite being from the area, I had not been familiar with Aurora at all before doing this research. For reference, the town is about 20 miles northwest of Dallas.

Aurora is a small town of only about 1,400 people (as of 2020). People know about Aurora because of the UFO crash, which happened in April 1897. Local legend has it that the pilot of the UFO was even buried in the local cemetery.

Interestingly, the town seems to have fully embraced the urban legend. According to Wikipedia, at some point, the official city website mentioned the UFO story and contained images of an alien, though the website has since been updated with a new logo that contains just a windmill (though a windmill is involved in the UFO story).

But you can still find the more far-out logo elsewhere online. If you search Aurora, Texas, one of the main things that comes up is a smallish billboard of the town logo, which is in a sort of stenciled serif type with some swirls. One of the swoops on the logo leads to the UFO, almost as if it’s a trail left by the craft. Then in small type down below, it says “a legendary western town.” Also, in the picture I found, the billboard with the logo stands next to a metal UFO sculpture, a windmill, and a cutout of an alien waving or maybe flashing a peace sign.

Outside the town cemetery, there’s also a historical marker that includes a mention of the UFO as well as some of the town’s other tragedies. In reading this, I noticed there were a lot of rough moments in the town’s history. I wondered whether the story of the UFO was just a nicer way to connect to and be proud of the town’s history. I recently read an excellent article in Smithsonian Magazine by Joseph P. Laycock about cryptid festivals and small towns with tragic histories, and I think something similar might be in play here:

To me, what makes monster festivals strange are not the creatures they celebrate, but rather the way they facilitate the intermingling of cultures that have traditionally defined themselves in opposition to each other.

The conventional wisdom is that struggling small towns should appeal to a nostalgic time when America was more conservative, more Christian and simpler – not stranger. To be sure, monster festivals always attract local families with smiling children. But to bring in tourism dollars, they have to draw other elements not easily reconciled with what architecture professor Kirin J. Maker calls “the myth of main street.”

There certainly exists what might be called a “cryptozoology tribe” that turns out for these festivals – cryptid fan culture has heavy overlap with horror movie fans, conspiracy theorists and a “psychobilly” aesthetic. Black T-shirts, tattoos and patches for “The Misfits” abound.

These eccentric tastes may be part of the reason small towns usually don’t invest in monster festivals until they have to. The mutation of monsters from bizarre police reports into emblems of the community seems to go hand in hand with the destruction of small town economies by the forces of globalization and urbanization.

. . . At the same time, these festivals draw middle-class urbanites like myself who want to learn more about places that many Americans have forgotten about or fail to understand.

While there isn’t (to my knowledge) a UFO-related festival in Aurora, their UFO sculpture has a similar vibe.

To get a sense of some sadder parts of Aurora’s history, here’s a little bit of what the historical marker says:

An epidemic which struck the village in 1891 added hundreds of graves to the plot. Called “Spotted Fever” by the settlers, the disease is now thought to be a form of meingitis [sic]. Located in Aurora Cemetery is the gravestone of the infant Nellie Burris (1891-1893) with its often-quoted epitaph: “As I was so soon done, I don’t know why I was begun.” This site is also well-known because of the legend that a spaceship crashed nearby in 1897 and the pilot, killed in the crash, was buried here. Struck by epidemic and crop failure and bypassed by the railroad, the original town of Aurora almost disappeared, but the cemetery remains in use with over 800 graves.

So what happened in Aurora? The story goes that in April 1897, in the middle of this pretty big flap of UFO sightings around the country, a UFO came to Aurora (which at the time was an even smaller town with a population of 237 people).

Apparently the craft was damaged. It was chugging along at 10 to 12 miles an hour and was losing altitude. Some accounts said that the craft was shaped like a cigar and that it emitted a bright light.

The UFO went over the public square, and then exploded when it hit the windmill of Judge Proctor, scattering debris everywhere. It also destroyed the windmill, a water tank, and the judge’s flower garden.

There were also some vague descriptions of the alien’s remains. He was “badly disfigured” in the accident, but observers were able to see enough of him to believe that he was not from Earth. (I’m not sure how they determined that.) A local signal service officer claimed that the alien was from Mars.

Also, papers with a sort of hieroglyphic text were supposedly found on the pilot’s body.[^3] The craft was made out of an unknown metal that looked kind of like a mix of silver and aluminum, and it was said to weigh several tons. Everyone in the area came out to see the crash, and then they held a funeral for the pilot the next day.

In 1973, a reporter named Jim Marrs[^4] visited the Aurora Cemetery in search of the pilot’s grave. He said he found it; it was a rough headstone made out of rock that was half missing. But he said that the half that remained bore a carved design that looked like part of a saucer with little portholes (so like the standard 20th century flying saucer image). That struck me as a bit odd, if the tombstone was supposed to have dated to the 19th century. He said the grave was not full size, but would have fit a child.

Another journalist brought a metal detector to the grave and said he suspected that it contained “at least three large pieces of metal.” Later on, though, that same journalist went back to the grave—again with a metal detector—and he couldn’t detect anything anymore. He saw a metal pipe that had been stuck into the ground and he suspected that someone had maybe used that to get the metal pieces out of the grave. (Though I have no idea how that’d work.)

Then, sometime in the 1970s, someone stole the grave marker and the plot’s location was lost. Investigators have used radar to find an unmarked grave in that general area that they think he was buried. But the Aurora Cemetery Association has said they don’t want researchers to exhume the grave (which seems fair to me).

Over the years, there have been various debunkings. One theory about the 1897 flap claimed that it was actually caused by a secret society of airship builders, the Sonora Aero Club, who were based in California.

Apparently the club was kept secret for decades, and only came to light when someone found intricate drawings of airships in an antique store in Houston in the 1960s. The 2004 book Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery by Michael Busby apparently talks about that in detail, so check that out for details.

It’s worth noting, however, that the existence of the club is up for debate; The Atlantic published an article about it in 2013 called The Airship Club That Might Never Have Existed (paywalled).

The article gives a basic rundown of the supposed club:

They called themselves the Sonora Aero Club and, over time, they counted some 60 members, possibly many more. Their ranks included great characters, such as Peter Mennis, inventor of the Club’s secret “Lifting Fluid,” later described as “a rough Man, whit as kind a heart as to be found in verry few living beengs,” despite being “adicted to strong drink” and “Flat brocke.” The Aero Club’s rules: Roughly once a quarter, each member had to stand before the gathered group and “thoroughly exercise their jaws” in telling how he would build an airship.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I wasn’t able to read the whole article; it’s paywalled and I wasn’t able to access it through any of the New York Public Library’s newspaper databases.)

Another story goes that S.E. Hayden, the man who first wrote the article about the crash, made it up. According to a 1979 Time magazine article, an 86-year-old resident name Etta Pegues said: “Hayden wrote it as a joke and to bring interest to Aurora. . . . The railroad bypassed us, and the town was dying. . . . People wish so hard the story was true they really start believing it. Why, the judge never even had a windmill.”

Was she right, and it was all a hoax? Who knows, but it’s perhaps worth nothing that she was four years old at the time of the crash, so probably didn’t have clear memories of the event itself. My guess is that she relied on the stories that her family and neighbors told her when she got older, and who knows whether those individuals had a vested interest in hiding the truth. (I wonder whether, after excitement about the initial 1897 flap faded away, people might have been embarrassed to have talked about their own visitor, and started to deny it. But I’m just speculating here.)

Whether or not it’s true, it’s still a fascinating bit of a small town’s history. And it leads us right into the Denton airship sightings, which I’ll talk about in the next episode, the week after next.

[^1] The Aurora case is well-known enough to have inspired a 1986 movie about it called The Aurora Encounter.

[^2] By the way, I will talk a bit more about the Aurora case in the next episode, because after I was done recording this week’s episode, I realized that I completely forgot to talk about the MUFON report on the Aurora crash. I literally had it open in a tab on my browser, and yet . . . forgot about it. ADHD is wild, y’all.

[^3] A quick source note: a lot of the info in this episode came from a great article in TexasHillCountry.com. I included that in the show notes, so check that out for more info. It’s a really interesting read.

[^4] I didn’t realize how funny it is that a man named Marrs investigated the case of this possible UFO pilot from Mars until I read this out loud for the episode. Is this a wild synchronicity, or possibly a thematic pseudonym?

The 1897 UFO Flap in North Texas

In 1897, a series of mysterious airships were sighted all around the United States. This is a look at the flap in general, with a particular focus on some of the North Texas UFO sightings.

Highlights include:

The Dallas-Fort Worth area as a “window area” with heighted strange activity
A glimpse into how Victorian-era people responded to UFOs
Lots of bearded aliens

This is the written version of an episode of Buried Secrets Podcast, which you can also listen to here or on your favorite podcatcher.

North Texas Airships

Since dropping the last episode, I started reading the book Operation Trojan Horse by John Keel. I haven’t finished it yet, but I did pore through the chapter that was relevant to the mystery airships of 1897. Keel calls out the high level of UFO activity in Texas—specifically in North Texas—multiple times.

In his analysis of the 1897 flap, Keel says that there are certain places, or window areas, that seem to have an unusual concentration of UFO sightings.

I’ve talked about window areas before, during my Fordham hauntings series, but they’re areas of heightened activity. Keel says that Texas is part of a large window area that’s “centered in the Gulf of Mexico and encompasses much of Mexico, Texas, and the Southwest.”

He specifically calls out “the area around Dallas, Texas,” which includes Denton, as a UFO hotspot. He goes on to say “Texas had more than 20 percent of all the sightings in 1897, and that state has had continuous sightings for the past twenty years.” Also, Keel claims that every UFO flap since 1964 began in the UFO hotspots he identified (which, in addition to the Dallas area, includes Michigan and Iowa.)

The hypothesis that Dallas is a UFO hotspot certainly seems accurate based on the events of spring 1897. Between April 13 and April 17, 1897, twenty-three Texas counties had a total of thirty-eight separate reports of airship sightings, many of them in North Texas.

The 1897 flap

Before I get into the Texas sightings, I wanted to elaborate on the 1897 airship sightings and touch on some details I didn’t include last time. This is a Spark Notes-style recap of the relevant chapter in Operation Trojan Horse, since it had some great info that is different from what I covered last time.

Like I mentioned last time, people started seeing these mysterious airships in 1896. It began the week of Thanksgiving in California, and the mayors of Oakland and San Francisco both said that they saw these unidentified flying objects with their own eyes. In Sacramento, people claimed that they witnessed multicolored lights moving as if they were on yo-yo strings. In Oakland, people said that they saw an egg-shaped craft that was 150 feet long with four rotor-like arms and a giant light that illuminated the ground beneath it.

An electrician in San Jose said that one of the airship pilots asked him to help with some repairs. He was brought to a field north of San Francisco to help out, and afterwards, the pilot was so grateful that he took the electrician to Hawaii. The electrician claimed that the trip took twenty-four hours. However, later on, his wife said that he had been home in bed on the night that he claimed to go on this trip.

One man reported that an airship landed near his house and he talked to the pilot. The human pilot had a beard, and he said that the ship “had come from the Montezuma Mountains.”

Sailors said that they saw “glowing spheres and saucer-shaped machines rising out of the water and flying away.” Those were mostly seen on the coast of Japan and China, but some people saw them in Europe as well. Keel points out that that’s notable because at the time, news traveled slowly, so someone in China didn’t necessarily know that people were seeing airships at the same time in California.

Then, in March and April 1897, the airship sightings started to spread outside of California. They were mostly seen in the midwest, from Texas to Michigan. Keel writes that there are hundreds of reports. However, no one collated them until Jacques Vallee and some other researchers did that work. At the time, some reporters seemed to think that there was one airship that people were seeing all over, but if you look at all of the reports together, it’s clear that it couldn’t have just been a single craft.

It sounds like the airship passengers were believed to be human, regardless of whether the witnesses suspected they had an extraterrestrial origin. A number of reports said that the crew of these crafts had beards. The Courier-Herald in Saginaw quoted someone who said that “they had the longest whiskers they ever saw in their lives.”

There’s a great article from May 13, 1897, from the Weekly World in Helena, Arkansas, that makes it sound like the people inside these airships were definitely humans.

In this story, a constable and a sheriff—who both signed affidavits asserting that their testimony was true—were on horseback at night and they noticed a light in the sky and saw it descend. When they got closer, they saw two people with lights moving around the ship. And now I’ll read a bit from the testimony:

Drawing our Winchesters—for we were now thoroughly aroused to the importance of the situation—we demanded, “Who is that, and what are you doing?” A man with a long dark beard came forth with a lantern in his hand, and on being informed who we were proceeded to tell us that he and the others—a young man and a woman—were traveling through the country in an airship. We could plainly distinguish the outlines of the vessel, which was cigar-shaped and about sixty feet long, and looking just like the cuts that have appeared in the papers recently.

It was a dark, rainy night, and the woman, who held an umbrella, was standing behind the men. The bearded man offered them a ride and they said no thanks. They had a pretty mundane conversation. Witnesses asked questions about their lights and received some technical answers.

Then they got to talking about what the airship travelers’ plans were, and they said they wanted to go to Hot Springs for a few days and have some hot baths, but they didn’t have enough time to do that. But they said that they were going to end up in Nashville after seeing the rest of the country. Then the witnesses left, and when they came back that way the airship was gone.

This is so funny to me, just because it really does sound like normal small talk. It is remarkable in its unremarkableness.

Another interesting detail was that some witnesses, including one in Michigan, heard voices coming out of these flying objects, almost as if there was a loudspeaker. I really liked this description that a witness gave. He said that the craft was:

“About 800 feet long—big brute—row of Japanese lanterns all along top—large wide sail like a fantail dove—dark bay in color—and I heard voices from above.”

On a more gruesome note, there was one story about a man named Alexander Hamilton who lived near Vernon, Kansas. A mysterious airship came to his farm and stole a cow: The inhabitants of the airship had put cable or wire around the cow and it had gotten stuck in a fence. After Hamilton wasn’t able to free the cow, he had to let the airship get away with it. The ship lifted up the cow and carried it away. The next day, “the branded hide, legs, and head of the animal were found on the property of Lank Thomas, who lived about four miles away.” It’s a precursor to so many of the livestock mutilation stories that became so commonplace in later UFO lore.

Earlier Texas UFO sightings

Last time, I talked about the Aurora, Texas, case in 1897. But there had been UFO sightings in North Texas prior to that.

In 1873, in Bonham, Texas, a group of workers in a cotton field witnessed a “great silvery serpent” which dove down from the sky toward them. They ran away and then the serpent tried to attack them again. Unfortunately, the chaos scared some horses that were pulling a wagon, and the driver fell and was killed by the wagon wheels.

According to Operation Trojan Horse, on Thursday, January 24, 1878, a man named John Martin saw “a large circular object pass overhead at high speed” which he described as “about the size of a large saucer . . . evidently at great height.” near Dennison, Texas.

Martin may have been the first person to describe an unidentified object in the sky as a saucer, though it sounds like that’s debated, because there’s a more famous moment when someone described something as a saucer in 1947. I found a funny article in Texas Monthly that talks about this specifically: the author claims that Martin coined the term, saying “that honor rightly belongs to Texan John Martin, who had spotted one 69 years earlier.”

I just mention that because it makes me laugh. As someone from Texas, it feels really Texan to claim as many firsts as possible, no matter what the topic is. Also, the article is interesting because it talks about a lot of Texas’ UFO connections that I didn’t know about:

Texas can boast of having some of the most compelling evidence ever uncovered of alien visitors—such as Aurora’s crash site, Lubbock’s mysterious lights or Dayton’s close encounters. Texas has also bred its share of peculiar UFO devotees, such as Heaven’s Gate leader Marshall Applewhite, who was born in Spur and had his first spiritual vision while walking along a Galveston beach, as well as some members of the Republic of Texas, who reportedly believe that the Marfa Lights are proof of a subterranean energy grid that the Pentagon is trying to tap into with alien technology. MUFON, the world’s largest UFO investigation organization, is based in Texas, as is NASA, which oversees an intergalactic radio signal monitoring program called SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Texas’ 1897 UFO sightings

Let’s look at some of these 1897 airship cases in Texas.

In Rockland, on Thursday, April 22, 1897, around 11 PM, a man named John M. Barclay said that he saw “an oblong machine with wings and brilliant lights.” He was awoken by his dog barking. When he looked outside, he saw the ship, which landed in a pasture nearby.

Barclay went out to see what was going on, and of course this is Texas, so he brought his rifle. He said that as he got near the ship, an “ordinary mortal” came out to talk to him and asked him to put down his gun.

John Keel includes a sort of transcript of the whole encounter:

“Who are you?” Mr. Barclay asked.

“Never mind about my name; call it Smith,” the man replied. “I want some lubricating oil and a couple of cold chisels if you can get them, and some bluestone. I suppose the saw mill hard by has the two former articles, and the telegraph operator has the bluestone. Here’s a ten-dollar bill; take it and get us those articles and keep the change for your trouble.”

Mr. Barclay reportedly asked him, “What have you got down there? Let me go and see it.”

“No,” the man said quickly. “We cannot permit you to approach any nearer, but do as we request you and your kindness will be appreciated, and we will call you some future day and reciprocate your kindness by taking you on a trip.”

Barclay located some oil and the chisels, but he couldn’t get the bluestone. He returned and tried to give the man back the ten-dollar bill, but it was refused. “Smith” shook hands with the Texan, thanked him, and asked him not to follow him to the object. Barclay asked him where he was from and where he was going.

“From anywhere,” Smith answered. “But we will be in Greece day after tomorrow.”

That same evening, about half an hour later, another Texas man had a similar encounter.

Here’s the account from Passport to Magonia:

Franck Nichols, who lived 3 km east of Josserand and was one of its most respected citizens, was awakened by a machine noise. Looking outside, he saw a heavy, lighted object land in his wheat field. He walked toward it, was stopped by two men who asked permission to draw water from his well. He then had a discussion with a half-dozen men, the crew of the strange machine. He was told how it worked but could not follow the explanation.

In Operation Trojan Horse, Keel says that the crew told Nichols that “five of these ships were built in a small town in Iowa. Soon the invention will be given to the public. An immense stock company is now being formed and within the next year the machines will be in general use.”

Passport to Magonia also reports a case from Merkel, Texas, that makes me think of the case with the man’s cow being pulled up into the craft via a wire:

Apr. 25, 1897 evening
Merkel (Texas). People returning from church observed a heavy object being dragged along the ground by a rope attached to a flying craft. The rope got caught in a railroad track. The craft was too high for its structure to be visible but protrusions and a light could be distinguished. After about 10 min a man came down along the rope, cut the end free, and went back aboard the craft, which flew away toward the northeast. The man was small and dressed in a light-blue uniform. (194; Magonia)

There’s also a story in Passport to Magonia from Aquila-Hillsboro:

Apr. 26,1897
Aquila-Hillsboro (Texas). Approximate date. A lawyer was surprised to see a lighted object fly over. His horse was scared and nearly toppled the carriage. When the main light was turned off, a number of smaller lights became visible on the underside of the dark object, which supported an elongated canopy. It went down toward a hill to the south, 5 km from Aquila. When the witness was on his way back one hour later, he saw the object rising. It reached the altitude of the cloud ceiling and flew to the northeast at a fantastic speed with periodic flashes of light. (195)

Denton-area UFOs

The whole reason why I know about this flap is because of the writing of Shaun Treat, a former professor at the University of North Texas who at least at one point ran a ghost tour company called Denton Haunts. The website for the company chronicles some of Denton’s ghost stories and weirdness, and I stumbled across it during my research for my Old Alton Bridge/Goatman’s Bridge series. A lot of the information that I found for this next part is based on his research.

The first Denton, Texas, 1897 sighting was on April 13, 1897. In rural Denton, a man saw a strange dark object move across the moon. According to Texas Escapes:

A man ‘stargazing’ with a pair of powerful field glasses spotted a dark object against the moon. At first he assumed it was a meteor that had not yet hit earth’s atmosphere, but then realized it was moving much too slowly. He described the object as being about fifty feet long, cigar-shaped with two large ‘mugs’ sticking out from either side, a ‘beak’ like a ship’s cutwater at the front, and a large rudder or steering sail at the rear. Where the ‘beak’ joined the main body of the object there was a light that ‘paled the moon’ in its brilliance. Along the body of the thing there were more lights, which he assumed meant windows. No smoke was visible from the object. It moved slowly, in a southeasterly direction, for about twenty minutes, then accelerated ‘to terrific speed’ and vanished from sight.

A woman in Denton said she saw a very similar thing, so there did seem to be more than one witness. The editor of the newspaper said that he knew both of them very well and found them credible.

Also, the Dallas Morning News published a drawing of what this airship looked like; it resembled a giant flying fish.

The next day, on April 14, multiple people in Weatherford, Corsicana, and Cresson said that they saw a winged, cigar-shaped airship with a bright light beaming down from it. On April 16 and 17, there were reports of airship sightings throughout the general area, from people in Stephenville, Greenville, Granbury, Ladonia, Ennis, and Waxahachie. In the April 19 edition of the Dallas Morning News, all of the reports took up four columns in the newspaper and were from twelve different towns in Texas and Oklahoma.

According to Operation Trojan Horse, one of the April 19 stories said that when an airship flew over Farmersville, people could hear someone someone singing on the ship. One person claimed that the three people in the airship were singing “Nearer My God to Thee” and passing out temperance tracts. The Farmersville city marshal said that he was able to see inside the ship and he saw “something resembling a large Newfoundland dog”. He also claimed that he heard people in the airship speaking Spanish, though that might just be because the Spanish-American War was brewing at the time.

In Waxahachie, on April 17, dozens of people saw an airship that they said was piloted by a young woman using something that looked like a sewing machine. In Stephenville, twenty-five people, including Sam Houston’s nephew and the mayor, said that they actually met the people in the craft, because they had to land to make repairs.

I love the very steampunk descriptions of all these airships:

Describing “a cigar-shaped body about sixty feet in length” with immense aero-wings, and upright rotors fore and aft “like a metallic windmill” powered by storage batteries, the two-man crew of Tilman and Dolbear revealed they were “making an experimental trip to comply with a contract with certain capitalists of New York.”

Other people who saw these airships said that they met the inventor, whose name was Wilson, and who was, naturally, from Fort Worth. A telegraph line repair man said that he went on a tour of the airship and that it was carrying US soldiers and dynamite on the way to Cuba to bomb the Spanish. Socialites in North Texas had lawn parties in the evening hoping to see the airships. I just love the image of these fancy southern ladies all standing out in their gardens looking for UFOs.

The excitement and stories about the airships lasted until about May 1897, when they seemed to peter out.

The Aurora, Texas, UFO Crash follow up

Before I close out this episode, I wanted to talk a bit more about the Aurora UFO crash case. As soon as I finished recording last time, I realized I’d completely forgotten to include the information from the MUFON report about the crash.

Reportedly, wreckage from the crash site was dumped into a nearby well located under the damaged windmill, while some ended up with the alien in the grave. Adding to the mystery was the story of Mr. Brawley Oates, who purchased Judge Proctor’s property around 1945. Oates cleaned out the debris from the well in order to use it as a water source, but later developed an extremely severe case of arthritis, which he claimed to be the result of contaminated water from the wreckage dumped into the well. As a result, Oates sealed up the well with a concrete slab and placed an outbuilding atop the slab. (According to writing on the slab, this was done in 1957.)

MUFON also pointed out that it was strange that there was never any sort of follow up to the original news story. Some people claim that’s evidence that it was a hoax.

During a UFO Files episode (aired on December 2, 2005), MUFON found some people who witnessed the crash:

Mary Evans, who was 15 at the time, told of how her parents went to the crash site (they forbade her from going) and the discovery of the alien body. Charlie Stephens, who was age 10, told how he saw the airship trailing smoke as it headed north toward Aurora. He wanted to see what happened, but his father made him finish his chores; later, he told how his father went to town the next day and saw wreckage from the crash.

I also found a somewhat unique description of the pilot’s headstone. This is from a Texas Monthly article:

According to local legend, the grave was marked only by a headstone bearing a cryptic insignia: several small circles drawn inside the Greek letter delta. The stone has since disappeared.