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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. |
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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. |
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Junction of College
and Milam Street showing brush and trees directly in the Headless
Walker's path.
Photo courtesy Ken
Rudine, October 2009 |
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 Column |
Texas Books by
C. F. Eckhardt
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