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Seguin's
Headless Ghost
THE GHOST ON MILAM STREETby
C. F. Eckhardt
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Milam
Street in Seguin is a quiet,
peaceful byway with some beautiful Victorian homes lining part of it. They share
the street, come some nights, with a most unusual ghost.
Nobody knows
where he originated, this ghostly figure that walks the east side of Milam Street.
The street ends--or once did--at Riverside Cemetery, one of the oldest cemeteries
in Seguin. It's pretty obvious, then, where the ghost's walk starts, but why he
walks so purposefully to the north, no one knows. No one, in fact, has any idea
who he was. Or why he has no head.
It's rumored that he was a Confederate
soldier whose head was lost to a cannonball during some battle in the East, and
the remainder of his body was shipped home by rail. He walks Milam hoping to catch
a train back East, to find his head. However, the railroad didn't reach Seguin
until 1877, when the War had been over for 12 years.
At College Street
Milam makes a slight jog to the west, then continues on north. The ghost doesn't
make the jog. He continues to walk straight north, alongside the west wall of
a small house owned by friends of mine. Their cats apparently ignore the apparition,
but their dogs take definite notice of it. Friends of theirs have stayed with
them, sleeping--or trying to sleep--on the living room sofa. Nobody's done that
more than once. There's a certain effect when the ghost walks along the outside
of the wall the sofa sits against that no one, apparently, wants to experience
twice.
Yet who was this headless--well, he's not a horseman, so maybe
he's the 'headless walkman'--walker? Nobody, apparently, has any idea. There seem
to be no stories--other than the Confederate soldier one--about him. No one has
attached a name to him, though it would seem to be obvious that he's buried in
what was once the town's finest cemetery. I have never found a story about a headless
person being buried there.
©
C. F. Eckhardt
"Charley
Eckhardt's Texas" -
October 12,
2005 |
|
Books by C. F. Eckhardt |
| Texas
Tales Your Teacher Never Told You | | |
| Tales
of Badmen, Bad Women, and Bad Places | | | | |
| |
| |
