The ever devoted Mr. Oddbooks took me to a used book store on my birthday (my birthday was back during the summer, but you all know I run behind on things) and I didn’t have particularly high expectations. The store, Recycled Reads, is sort of a compromise store. You see, a few years back Austin […]
Recycled Reads in Austin, Texas
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Halloween Week – Dead Man’s Hole
Up US 281 in Marble Falls, TX, there is a site called Dead Man’s Hole. Dead Man’s Hole is a natural limestone cave many ghost hunters insist is very haunted. It’s hard to rattle me and I self-identify as a skeptic. But even as I maintain that I am a skeptic, I have had strange […]
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Halloween Week – Baby Head Cemetery
In the summer of 2012, Mr. Oddbooks and I drove out to Baby Head, Texas. A real place. I swear. It’s a ghost town now, more or less incorporated into Llano, Texas, and Llano was a weird place in its own right. We drove around forever trying to find the remaining Baby Head post office […]
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Halloween Week – My Favorite Cemetery
One day Mr. Oddbooks came home and told me about a cemetery near Jarrell, Texas that was evidently very interesting. It was located in a ghost town called Corn Hill. Old Corn Hill Cemetery boasts the graves of people of historical importance in Texas, so I wanted to check it out. Cemetery, ghost town, historical […]
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Halloween Week – Slave Cemeteries
I was born in Dallas and have lived in Texas all my life. When I was a little girl, I can remember seeing “colored” entrances, restrooms and drinking fountains in older downtown buildings. Jim Crow was dead, in legalities at least, so no black person was forced into using these lesser amenities, but they had […]
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Halloween Week – The Servant Girl Annihilator
Finally, something truly creepy and scary for Halloween week. At some point during 2000, I read a book called A Twist at the End: A Novel of O. Henry and the Texas Servant Girl Murders of 1885 by Steven Saylor. I’m not entirely sure how I came to have this book because I’m not really […]
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The Liberty Hill Witch Grave: Bad Legends and Cemetery Desecration
I’d known about the legend of the infamous Liberty Hill witch grave for a while but only recently managed to drive up there and have a look around. It seemed a perfect thing to document for Halloween, because the legend, though unlikely, is fueled by witchcraft, cruel death and creepy graveyard stories. But this was […]
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Halloween 2017: Ben Thompson’s Grave
Ben Thompson doesn’t have the level of posthumous fame as his exploits should have earned. I think it’s because he didn’t have a catchy nickname. In the early days of Texas statehood, among impulsive, gun-crazy men with a violent streak, he was first among equals. But fame is fickle and it’s hard to pin down […]
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Halloween 2017: Abandoned Hotel in Corn Hill, Texas
The photos I am going to share in this Halloween 2017 entry are old, in Internet years. I had intended to share some photos I took over the last month depicting some dark Texas history as well as a lovely old cemetery up the road from my house, but I’ve had a significant equipment failure […]
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Happy Halloween!
Well, I had intended to follow up yesterday’s entry about the WKCR radio broadcast hijack with some new information I found about the names uttered in the chant in the audio clip. I have, predictably, fallen down a rabbit hole. Like I think maybe I’ve solved the link between the names but need some more […]
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More Pages to Explore .....
