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Holidays in the state's spookiest places
As Halloween rolls around for another year, your thoughts inevitably turn to
jack-o-lanterns, kids in bedsheets,candy and dental bills. And, maybe, if you've got a little kid left in you, to creepy old houses, lonely fields in moonlight, and whatever the heck it is making that scratch ing sound outside the bedroom window.
Texas' story is filled with drama and largerthan-life characters, all the ingredients you need for a rich collection of shivery tales. And many of our best ghost stories are set in places you can visit, perhaps to get up close and personal with the spirits of the past. Ghostly legends are notoriously unreliable, but we can certify that these are all authentic rumors-and an authentic stimulus to the Texas tourism industry.
Any spooky tour of Texas should include San Antonio, the setting for nearly three centuries of eventful history Surprisingly the Alamo, scene of tragedy, horror and heroism in 1836, has been fairly quiet in this century,
but older stories told of a phantom sentry and of spectral forms that prevented various demolition efforts around the old mission complex. The battle, furthermore, sprawled well beyond the relatively small enclosure of the shrine we see today, and ghostly phenomena have been reported in a number of nearby locales, including the Rivercenter Mall.
The Menger Hotel, an elegant cowboy palace just across from the Alamo, has several spirits of its own. These include a Lady in Blue seen occasionally on the second floor, a ghostly chambermaid one more flight up, and a specter dressed in Rough Rider attire who makes late-night appearances in the Menger's wonderful carved-wood pub, the scene of one of Teddy Roosevelt's recruiting appearances in 1898. And in Brackenridge Park, the green jewel at San Antonio's heart, the fleshand blood staff of the Witte Museum has reported typically atypical phenomena-objects moving by themselves and a "gray figure" walking the halls-that some attribute to the shade of Ellen Schulz Quillin, the museum's founder.
This dog will haunt
Austin has accumulated more than a few ghosts since its infancy as a tiny...