EERIE TALES OF THE OLD WEST by Tom Rizzo

Most people like ghost stories. I’m guessing among those reading this post are some who have their own ghost stories to tell. I’ve probably encountered a ghost or two without knowing it. In fact, a long time ago I experienced what I thought was a ghostly sighting—or something unexplainable...

Sheets of rain slammed against the windshield making driving difficult and treacherous while I navigated the narrow back roads of southwestern England. I had been trying to find refuge on what had been a sunny day turned gray and gloomy by heavy dark clouds. Between the hypnotic schwump shwump schwump shwump of the windshield wipers, I spotted the glow of stained glass off to my right and turned into the parking lot of a church.

Despite the heavy downpour, I grabbed my travel day bag, left the car, and ran to the front door and went in. I sat in the back alone and saw no one else. The church was small and quiet. Ten rows of pews bordered each side of the aisle.

 Minutes later, I took my camera out snapped a few photos of the altar and stained glass windows. Days later, I had the film developed (yep, way back then). When I reviewed them, one stopped me cold.

(Cue opening theme music from The Twilight Zone)

In front of the altar, an amorphous, somewhat transparent image, looked as if it was floating above the communion rail. Only one of the photographs revealed the apparition. 

I slipped the photograph into an envelope and carried it around with my other belongings during various relocations over the years. After I became a reporter, I was assigned to write a story on the paranormal and retrieved the yellowing envelope. The altar appeared as I remembered it.

The ghostly image, however, was gone. 
Vanished. 
Like ghosts often do. 

Ghost stories aren’t confined to any particular time period. People have shared them for years—at least the ones willing to confront skeptical listeners. The Old West was no different. Phantoms and legends and ghosts populated the frontier as much as any other time in history. Ghost towns, ghost camels, ghost trails. And, I’ve posted blogs about a few of these incidents.

Click here to read about the Ship of Death.

  

Click here to read about The Ghost of White Woman Creek. 

Click here to read about the Dance of Death. 

One of my favorite ghost story of the Old West is The Legend of El Muerto: The Dead One.

This story features a large black mustang that thundered across the brush country of south Texas holding a headless rider, upright and rigid, with a sombrero rocking back and forth on the saddle pommel. The cowboys who witnessed the ride of this headless horseman knew instinctively that the broad-brimmed hat covered the head that once belonged to the body.

The animal would often slow to a canter, buck, and stomp and snort before a gathering of stunned cowhands. Head lowered, it would rise up, give a mournful whinny and gallop away, horse and rider outlined against a bluish-gray sky.

The 19th-century legend of the headless horseman of South Texas dates back to the 1850s when a notorious Mexican bandit named Vidal began stealing horses from a rancher by the name of Creed Taylor, a Texas Ranger.

Vidal and his gang also stole horses from a Mexican rancher by the name of Flores, a neighbor of Taylor's. The two men decided to recruit a third and pursue the horse thieves to enforce justice in a way never to be forgotten.

William Bigfoot Wallace, also a Texas Ranger, despised horse thieves and wasn't about to pass up the chance for retribution. After the trio discovered Vidal's camp, they waited until nightfall and launched a surprise raid, killing Vidal and the rest of the gang.

But, as someone once said, vengeance knows no bounds. Wallace wanted to make an example of Vidal and send a clear and chilling warning that livestock rustlers would face harshest of consequences. 

Working together, Wallace and his companions severed Vidal's head from his body. They selected the wildest mustang amid the ranks of the stolen horses, tied it between two trees to steady it, and slung a saddle across its back.

They placed Vidal's headless body in the saddle, roped in a way to make it sit upright. The trio then lashed the bandit's hands to the saddle horn and legs to the stirrups. For the last step, they wrapped a length of rawhide through the jaws of the severed head and tied it to the saddle, the sombrero still atop his head.

They cut the ropes and released the mustang, sending it galloping into the land of legend and lore. The gruesome display seemed to resonate, and the number of horse stealing and cattle rustling attempts decreased. Taylor, Wallace, and Flores shared a laugh whenever they heard stories of a wild horse crisscrossing the Texas hills carrying a headless rider.

A group of cowboys finally corralled the mustang at a watering hole near Bent Bolt, Texas, and found the corpse riddled with dozens of bullet holes and arrow wounds. Beneath the sombrero was a small skull, dried up from too long in the unforgiving Texas sun.

Vidal's body lies in a small cemetery on the La Trinidad Ranch in Ben Bolt. The burial, however, didn't end the sightings—at least not for a while. In fact, people still tell stories of spotting a headless horseman racing across the South Texas plains on an untamed black mustang.

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Got a ghost story of your own? 

You're invited to share it below. 

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Tom@TomRizzo.com

www.TomRizzo.com

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El Muerto: the Headless Horseman of Texas

 

Serial published in 1865

First published in 1820, Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” has been frightening children for generations. Though the tale of a hapless schoolmaster’s midnight gallop through the New York woods made the phrase “headless horseman” a household term in America, by the time Irving’s story appeared, headless horsemen had been staples of European folklore for centuries. German, Irish, Scandinavian, and English legends all offered versions of the ghoulish phantoms, who usually were said to appear to proud, arrogant people as a warning.

South Texas has its own gruesome headless horseman legend. Unlike Irving’s unforgettable spook, however, Texas’ decapitated desperado rode among the living once upon a time.

Some say he still does.

Creed Taylor, 1890s

In the summer of 1850, a Mexican bandito by the name of Vidal made an egregious error: He and several compadres rustled a sizable herd of horses from several ranches south of San Antonio. One of the ranches belonged to Texas Ranger Creed Taylor, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence and a man not inclined to suffer fools gladly. (Taylor later would participate in the Sutton-Taylor Feud, a bloody, years-long running gun battle that rivaled the better-known fracas between the Hatfields and McCoys.)

Rustling cattle already had earned Vidal’s head a dead-or-alive bounty. Stealing a Texas Ranger’s horses proved the proverbial last straw. Together with fellow Ranger William A.A. “Big Foot” Wallace and another local rancher, Taylor set out to put a stop to Vidal’s unbearable insolence.

As a group, the early Texas Rangers were hard men. Tasked with protecting an enormous patch of land rife with outlaws and Indians, the early Rangers were expert trackers, accomplished gunmen, and not opposed to meting out immediate — and often brutal — “frontier justice.” Vidal was about to discover that in a very personal way.

After tracking the bandidos to their camp, Taylor, Wallace, and the third man mounted a surprise attack while the outlaws were asleep. Killing the desperados was not enough for Taylor and Wallace, though. The entire Ranger force was fed up with the rash of rustling plaguing Texas at the time. Not even leaving bodies hanging from trees or hacking them to pieces and using the bits for predator bait had made a strong enough statement.

Big Foot Wallace c. 1872

So Wallace got creative. After beheading Vidal, he secured the corpse upright on the back of the wildest of the rustled horses, lashed the bandido’s hands to the saddle horn and his feet to the stirrups, and tied the stirrups beneath the animal’s belly. Just to make sure anyone who saw the ghoulish specter got the message, he looped a rawhide thong through the head’s jaws and around Vidal’s sombrero, and slung the bloody bundle from the saddle’s pommel. Then Wallace and his friends sent the terrified mustang galloping off into the night.

Not long thereafter, vaqueros began to report seeing a headless horseman rampaging through the scrub on a dark, wild horse. As sightings spread, some claimed flames shot from the animal’s nostrils and lightning bolts from its hooves. Bullets seemed to have no effect on the grisly marauder. They dubbed the apparition el Muerto — the dead man — and attributed all sorts of evil and misfortune to the mysterious rider.

Eventually, a posse of cowboys brought down the horse at a watering hole near Ben Bolt, Texas. By then the dried-up body had been riddled with bullets and arrows, and the head had shriveled in the sun. The posse laid Vidal’s remains to rest in an unmarked grave on the La Trinidad Ranch. Only then did Wallace and Taylor take public credit for the deed. The episode contributed to Wallace’s reputation as a man nobody wanted to mess with and had the intended effect on rustling.

Even the revelation of the truth behind the legend did not end el Muerto’s reign of terror. Until nearby Fort Inge was decommissioned in 1869, soldiers reported seeing a headless rider roaming the countryside around Uvalde, near Taylor’s ranch. Thirty years later, a rise in the ground 250 miles to the southeast, near San Patricio, Texas, was christened Headless Horseman Hill after a wagon train reported an encounter with el Muerto. A sighting occurred in 1917 outside San Diego, Texas, and another near Freer in 1969.

El Muerto reportedly still roams the mesquite-covered range in Duval, Jim Wells, and Live Oak counties — still fearsome, still headless, and still reminding those who see him that Texas Rangers didn’t come by their tough-hombre reputation by accident.

A rabble-rousing Texan to the bone, Kathleen Rice Adams spends her days chasing news stories and her nights and weekends shooting it out with Wild West desperados. Leave the upstanding, law-abiding heroes to other folks. In Kathleen’s stories, even the good guys wear black hats. Her short story “The Second-Best Ranger in Texas” won the 2014 Peacemaker Award for Best Western Short Fiction.

Visit her home on the range at KathleenRiceAdams.com.