Devil's Pocket
DEVIL'S POCKET. Devil's Pocket is seven miles north of Deweyville in the southeast part of Newton County (at 30°27' N, 93°44' W). It is a flat, pie-shaped area bounded on the west by Nichols Creek, which runs southeast into the Sabine River, the eastern boundary of Devil's Pocket. The northern boundary is Slaydon's Creek, which also runs into the Sabine. Settlers of East Texas were late in coming into the area, and in the nineteenth century it was known primarily for being the home of brush-loving longhorn cattle. Later it became a noted hunting reserve. This land between the creeks was a maze of hummocks and swamps, and the cattle that lived there were wild and hard to gather. Local residents have at least three explanations for the area's ominous name. One holds that early settlers, already plagued by bad luck and poor weather, saw a meteor hit the earth in the dense basin forest. This meteor's impact is said to have formed a depression that became a small lake. A second version holds that outlaws and other unsavory characters used the area as a hideout. Still a third account argues that the Devil's Pocket derived its name from the large numbers of water moccasins that inhabited the stagnant pools left there by a change in the course of the Sabine River. Solomon Alexander Wright, recalling the area as it was in the 1880s, said that "it would be hard to find a country more desolate." He described it at the time he was working stock there around 1900 as "swampy, brush country, with some open pinewoods" where the cattle grazed and bedded down. He said that during the roundup the cowboys always worked the Devil's Pocket first because it was the hardest drive and "the very devil to work"-yet another possible source for its name. This part of Southeast Texas is still referred to as the Devil's Pocket, or the Pocket. Most of its inhabitants now live on a loop at the terminal east end of Farm Road 253, which circles an island of relatively high ground. The poorly drained bottomland is now dominated by eastern cottonwood and sweet gum trees, with understory vegetation that includes pine-hill bluestem, switch cane, and sedge.
Devils Backbone
Rancher Charlie Beatty, 57, on right, shares yarns of ghost horses with friend Bill Spears, 72, at the Devil’s Backbone Tavern. Photo by Jillian Bliss.
By Jillian Bliss
For Reporting Texas
Rancher Charlie Beatty first heard the ghost horses gallop across the Devil’s Backbone as he stood outside one night.
“The horses are a legend around here,” Beatty says. “That’s the only thing I think I can say, is, honestly, out of this world.”
Beatty, 57, says the sound unnerved him at the time, but he’s learned to live with it.
There are plenty of ghost stories along the Backbone, a limestone ridge that runs from Wimberley to Blanco through the Texas Hill Country, so many stories that the area is a regular stop for paranormal aficionados.
Local author Bert Wall, who sold Beatty the property next to Wall’s Chaparral Ranch in 1996, wrote eight books chronicling weird phenomena on the Backbone and was working on another before his death in 2010. These days locals gather at the Devil’s Backbone Tavern, on Ranch Road 32 near the little town of Fischer, to share the latest batch of puzzling occurrences.
The old stone tavern is a classic, a 1930s honky-tonk with a jukebox where people share yarns over cigarettes and beers. It is also widely believed to be haunted.
“The TVs in the tavern will turn off and on and switch channels on their own sometimes,” says Melaine Walker, 47, a bartender at Devil’s Backbone Tavern who began visiting the honky-tonk as a child with her father. “I guess whoever is doing it just wants to watch TV or doesn’t like what we’re watching.”
There’s a sign on the tavern’s mantle that says, “Ghost Warning – If Doors and Windows Open And Close By Them Selfs, Just Ignore It. It’s Just Our Ghost Trying to Get Attention. He Thinks It’s Funny.”
A stone that’s part of the fireplace is shaped like the devil’s face. It gazes across the bar from just above the hearth and is said to eavesdrop on conversations.
“We get a lot of tourists that come in here because of Bert’s books and the articles and the media,” Walker says. “They’ll type in ‘haunted bars’ on the Internet and see us and come out. We get a lot of college kids who hear about it and are looking for something to do.”
Like listen to stories about Robert Kelly, whose picture hangs on the tavern wall next to pictures of other departed customers. Kelly was known to have attitudes and perhaps still does. Twice, the story goes, his picture fell and hit his former girlfriend in the head as she told unfavorable tales about him.
Walker says the whole Backbone is haunted. Her ex-husband once came back from hunt on a ranch along the Backbone and said he would never return. He had been frightened, he said, by the sound of at least 50 thundering hooves, and by the apparition of a Confederate cavalry troop that accompanied the sound.
Wall and Beatty used to meet at the tavern, and the ghost horses came up once.
“I got to thinking about a story Bert wrote about the wild horses,” Beatty says. “I told him what happened, and he told me that from over here to a campsite in Blanco they hear horses from time to time — about 50 horses. He said the only thing it could be is Confederate soldiers riding through.”
Jackie Milligan, co-founder of Texas Paranormal Events, an online community that promotes ghost investigations, has looked into strange incidents on ranches on the Backbone.
“One family called us because their youngest son was talking to someone,” Milligan says. “They thought it was cute and an imaginary friend until he told them she was a little girl with a hole in her head.”
Milligan and her investigators knew of a family killed by Comanches in the 1800s on a ranch on the Backbone. Milligan says it was common practice for families being raided to commit suicide–something she noted when she heard the little ghost girl had told the son that her father had put the hole in her head.
Milligan says her team captured EVPs–electronic voice phenomena–of a little girl’s voice giggling in the family’s house. The giggling grew when she asked about the family cat.
“It was funny because the cat would act like someone was playing with him when no one was,” she says. “I was asking questions about the cat, and one EVP had the little voice saying ‘yes’ when I asked if she liked playing with him.”
Milligan has not looked into the haunting of Devil’s Backbone Tavern, though Walker says several teams have come with ghost-tracking equipment. One group showed her and her sister how to rig a flashlight to power on when a ghost entered the room.
Walker says she has been truly scared just once.
“I was closing up all alone one night when it was raining,” she says. “I was the only one here, but when I went to go out the back door, I heard something. I looked and I saw two wet footprints, but there was no one else around.”
Devils River
Devils River State Natural Area
If the Devils River were a woman, Willie would have married her twice and we would be crying into our beer as he lamented her wicked ways. You might be tempted to dismiss it as the Pecos lite, but the Devils packs a bigger punch into less than one hundred miles. It’s another pool-and-drop river that runs through rugged terrain similar to the Pecos, but the thirty miles or so that separates these two makes for noticeable differences in topography and vegetation. The gray-blue water is more blue than gray (the remote, hostile environment has successfully safeguarded the pristine water quality), the rocky hills are a little greener, and the banks are lined with trees. Though the dam on the Rio Grande that created Amistad Reservoir backs up the flow in the Devils’ lower reaches, this is the one river in Texas that’s never been dammed itself, and every blade of grass and snatch of birdsong resonates with unfettered exuberance.
But boy, getting down the Devils is hard work. They call it a “wet” river, which means that you’ll be in and out of your boat as you pull it through endless shallows and down rapids, all the time hanging on to that webbing for dear life while yelling at your partner. (Think twice before taking your significant other. The Devils is a jealous river.) The rapids are fast and pugnacious and come up on you quickly, so expect to simultaneously try to find the best line of approach and the right channel through the dense canebrakes before you are swept into a rock wall. If you go the wrong way, you can be lost in the cane jungles for half an hour. (We’re having fun, right?) In addition, the landowners along the Devils have a reputation for antipathy to boaters, so the first safe and legal campsite is at the Devils River State Natural Area, fifteen miles from Baker’s Crossing, which makes for a long day’s paddling.
Is it worth it? Yes, a hundred times yes, and the bonus is that you get to see the Devils’ great secret, the grand Dolan Falls, which is half a mile or so below the state park. Pay attention on your approach, as the drop is ten to fifteen feet into strong currents. Portage river right and lower your boat back into the water from the rocks. Before you leave, make sure you take your picture in front of the largest continuously flowing waterfall in Texas. Three miles later you’ll come to the last major hazard, Three-Tier Falls, which has a nasty blind entrance—stop and scout your line carefully. From there it’s only four miles to the take-out, which you’ll recognize by the rust-colored, gray-striped roof of shuttle operator Gerald Bailey’s house, one of several in this 1970’s-vintage subdivision. (If it’s not too windy, Bailey may also fly his large pirate flag.) The development is a surprising sight after a couple of days of seeing only five or six houses. As much as I would like to be able to afford a home here, I’m glad that the Nature Conservancy is working with local ranchers to protect the watershed, including nearly 150,000 acres in the Devils River basin. A river this beautiful needs proper care and attention.
- See more at: http://www.texasmonthly.com/list/go-....ldeRJDh1.dpuf
DEVIL'S POCKET. Devil's Pocket is seven miles north of Deweyville in the southeast part of Newton County (at 30°27' N, 93°44' W). It is a flat, pie-shaped area bounded on the west by Nichols Creek, which runs southeast into the Sabine River, the eastern boundary of Devil's Pocket. The northern boundary is Slaydon's Creek, which also runs into the Sabine. Settlers of East Texas were late in coming into the area, and in the nineteenth century it was known primarily for being the home of brush-loving longhorn cattle. Later it became a noted hunting reserve. This land between the creeks was a maze of hummocks and swamps, and the cattle that lived there were wild and hard to gather. Local residents have at least three explanations for the area's ominous name. One holds that early settlers, already plagued by bad luck and poor weather, saw a meteor hit the earth in the dense basin forest. This meteor's impact is said to have formed a depression that became a small lake. A second version holds that outlaws and other unsavory characters used the area as a hideout. Still a third account argues that the Devil's Pocket derived its name from the large numbers of water moccasins that inhabited the stagnant pools left there by a change in the course of the Sabine River. Solomon Alexander Wright, recalling the area as it was in the 1880s, said that "it would be hard to find a country more desolate." He described it at the time he was working stock there around 1900 as "swampy, brush country, with some open pinewoods" where the cattle grazed and bedded down. He said that during the roundup the cowboys always worked the Devil's Pocket first because it was the hardest drive and "the very devil to work"-yet another possible source for its name. This part of Southeast Texas is still referred to as the Devil's Pocket, or the Pocket. Most of its inhabitants now live on a loop at the terminal east end of Farm Road 253, which circles an island of relatively high ground. The poorly drained bottomland is now dominated by eastern cottonwood and sweet gum trees, with understory vegetation that includes pine-hill bluestem, switch cane, and sedge.
Devils Backbone
Rancher Charlie Beatty, 57, on right, shares yarns of ghost horses with friend Bill Spears, 72, at the Devil’s Backbone Tavern. Photo by Jillian Bliss.
By Jillian Bliss
For Reporting Texas
Rancher Charlie Beatty first heard the ghost horses gallop across the Devil’s Backbone as he stood outside one night.
“The horses are a legend around here,” Beatty says. “That’s the only thing I think I can say, is, honestly, out of this world.”
Beatty, 57, says the sound unnerved him at the time, but he’s learned to live with it.
There are plenty of ghost stories along the Backbone, a limestone ridge that runs from Wimberley to Blanco through the Texas Hill Country, so many stories that the area is a regular stop for paranormal aficionados.
Local author Bert Wall, who sold Beatty the property next to Wall’s Chaparral Ranch in 1996, wrote eight books chronicling weird phenomena on the Backbone and was working on another before his death in 2010. These days locals gather at the Devil’s Backbone Tavern, on Ranch Road 32 near the little town of Fischer, to share the latest batch of puzzling occurrences.
The old stone tavern is a classic, a 1930s honky-tonk with a jukebox where people share yarns over cigarettes and beers. It is also widely believed to be haunted.
“The TVs in the tavern will turn off and on and switch channels on their own sometimes,” says Melaine Walker, 47, a bartender at Devil’s Backbone Tavern who began visiting the honky-tonk as a child with her father. “I guess whoever is doing it just wants to watch TV or doesn’t like what we’re watching.”
There’s a sign on the tavern’s mantle that says, “Ghost Warning – If Doors and Windows Open And Close By Them Selfs, Just Ignore It. It’s Just Our Ghost Trying to Get Attention. He Thinks It’s Funny.”
A stone that’s part of the fireplace is shaped like the devil’s face. It gazes across the bar from just above the hearth and is said to eavesdrop on conversations.
“We get a lot of tourists that come in here because of Bert’s books and the articles and the media,” Walker says. “They’ll type in ‘haunted bars’ on the Internet and see us and come out. We get a lot of college kids who hear about it and are looking for something to do.”
Like listen to stories about Robert Kelly, whose picture hangs on the tavern wall next to pictures of other departed customers. Kelly was known to have attitudes and perhaps still does. Twice, the story goes, his picture fell and hit his former girlfriend in the head as she told unfavorable tales about him.
Walker says the whole Backbone is haunted. Her ex-husband once came back from hunt on a ranch along the Backbone and said he would never return. He had been frightened, he said, by the sound of at least 50 thundering hooves, and by the apparition of a Confederate cavalry troop that accompanied the sound.
Wall and Beatty used to meet at the tavern, and the ghost horses came up once.
“I got to thinking about a story Bert wrote about the wild horses,” Beatty says. “I told him what happened, and he told me that from over here to a campsite in Blanco they hear horses from time to time — about 50 horses. He said the only thing it could be is Confederate soldiers riding through.”
Jackie Milligan, co-founder of Texas Paranormal Events, an online community that promotes ghost investigations, has looked into strange incidents on ranches on the Backbone.
“One family called us because their youngest son was talking to someone,” Milligan says. “They thought it was cute and an imaginary friend until he told them she was a little girl with a hole in her head.”
Milligan and her investigators knew of a family killed by Comanches in the 1800s on a ranch on the Backbone. Milligan says it was common practice for families being raided to commit suicide–something she noted when she heard the little ghost girl had told the son that her father had put the hole in her head.
Milligan says her team captured EVPs–electronic voice phenomena–of a little girl’s voice giggling in the family’s house. The giggling grew when she asked about the family cat.
“It was funny because the cat would act like someone was playing with him when no one was,” she says. “I was asking questions about the cat, and one EVP had the little voice saying ‘yes’ when I asked if she liked playing with him.”
Milligan has not looked into the haunting of Devil’s Backbone Tavern, though Walker says several teams have come with ghost-tracking equipment. One group showed her and her sister how to rig a flashlight to power on when a ghost entered the room.
Walker says she has been truly scared just once.
“I was closing up all alone one night when it was raining,” she says. “I was the only one here, but when I went to go out the back door, I heard something. I looked and I saw two wet footprints, but there was no one else around.”
Devils River
Devils River State Natural Area
If the Devils River were a woman, Willie would have married her twice and we would be crying into our beer as he lamented her wicked ways. You might be tempted to dismiss it as the Pecos lite, but the Devils packs a bigger punch into less than one hundred miles. It’s another pool-and-drop river that runs through rugged terrain similar to the Pecos, but the thirty miles or so that separates these two makes for noticeable differences in topography and vegetation. The gray-blue water is more blue than gray (the remote, hostile environment has successfully safeguarded the pristine water quality), the rocky hills are a little greener, and the banks are lined with trees. Though the dam on the Rio Grande that created Amistad Reservoir backs up the flow in the Devils’ lower reaches, this is the one river in Texas that’s never been dammed itself, and every blade of grass and snatch of birdsong resonates with unfettered exuberance.
But boy, getting down the Devils is hard work. They call it a “wet” river, which means that you’ll be in and out of your boat as you pull it through endless shallows and down rapids, all the time hanging on to that webbing for dear life while yelling at your partner. (Think twice before taking your significant other. The Devils is a jealous river.) The rapids are fast and pugnacious and come up on you quickly, so expect to simultaneously try to find the best line of approach and the right channel through the dense canebrakes before you are swept into a rock wall. If you go the wrong way, you can be lost in the cane jungles for half an hour. (We’re having fun, right?) In addition, the landowners along the Devils have a reputation for antipathy to boaters, so the first safe and legal campsite is at the Devils River State Natural Area, fifteen miles from Baker’s Crossing, which makes for a long day’s paddling.
Is it worth it? Yes, a hundred times yes, and the bonus is that you get to see the Devils’ great secret, the grand Dolan Falls, which is half a mile or so below the state park. Pay attention on your approach, as the drop is ten to fifteen feet into strong currents. Portage river right and lower your boat back into the water from the rocks. Before you leave, make sure you take your picture in front of the largest continuously flowing waterfall in Texas. Three miles later you’ll come to the last major hazard, Three-Tier Falls, which has a nasty blind entrance—stop and scout your line carefully. From there it’s only four miles to the take-out, which you’ll recognize by the rust-colored, gray-striped roof of shuttle operator Gerald Bailey’s house, one of several in this 1970’s-vintage subdivision. (If it’s not too windy, Bailey may also fly his large pirate flag.) The development is a surprising sight after a couple of days of seeing only five or six houses. As much as I would like to be able to afford a home here, I’m glad that the Nature Conservancy is working with local ranchers to protect the watershed, including nearly 150,000 acres in the Devils River basin. A river this beautiful needs proper care and attention.
- See more at: http://www.texasmonthly.com/list/go-....ldeRJDh1.dpuf
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