Being
a cotton farmer was not the easiest way to make a living, but if a man didn’t
mind working from can see to can’t, he could get by and maybe save a little.
Texas
farmers tilled the black soil to bring forth white fiber, battling the boll weevil
and the vagaries of Texas weather to produce a crop each year. But some years,
no matter how many hours a man and his family and hired hands put in grubbing
and picking, forces beyond his control could suddenly control his life. When the
price of cotton went down, all a man could do was hope the market rebounded next
year. When it didn’t rain enough to keep his plants alive, he could pray for more
rain next season, providing it didn’t all come at once in a flood.
But
as the Depression began to worsen in the early 1930s, cotton didn’t come back.
In 1929, cotton brought 16.9 cents a pound. Two years later, the price had fallen
to less than 6 cents. Many farmers lost their land, their homes and finally, their
spirit.
Maybe
that’s what made Jake snap. No one seems to know his last name, but many people
in Williamson County know
about Jake.
For whatever reason, according to the story, Jake killed his
wife and two children. When the reality of what he had done set in, he took his
own life as well, hanging himself from a back road wooden bridge between Hutto
and Pflugerville, near the Williamson-Travis county line.
That’s
one story. Another has Jake being a young man who killed his parents, pushing
the car containing their bodies off the rural bridge. Later, this story goes,
Jake died in a house fire.
Whoever he was, and if he ever was, Jake seems
not to have been a happy person. His spirit, some say, lingers around the bridge
(since replaced by a more modern concrete structure) that figures in both versions
of the tale.
Somewhere along the line, the story arose that Jake’s ghost liked to mess with
cars on the bridge, trying to push them off.
Supposedly, if you stop your
car on the bridge and shift into neutral, you can feel the vehicle begin to move.
If your car happens to be dusty, the story continues, you’ll find handprints on
the back. Some claimed to have “proven” Jake’s efforts to move their wheels by
spreading flour on their trunk.
Those who like rational explanations for
unusual phenomenon have argued that the bridge must not be level, having enough
of a slope for a car to roll if it’s not in gear. Since it’s a relatively new
bridge, that doesn’t seem too likely.
An old house in the vicinity also
is supposedly haunted by Jake. A Web site devoted to Texas ghost tales says visitors
have reported hearing footsteps, children screaming and a voice yelling, “I am
coming for you.”
A variant of the Jake story has to do with a friendly ghost – or ghosts – given
to moving vehicles off railroad tracks. The story occasionally grows around a
particular grade crossing where a busload of children supposedly died when a train
plowed into their bus. If a modern day vehicle stops or stalls on the tracks,
the story goes, the spirit of the children will push the vehicle to safety.
Retired Taylor journalism teacher Susan Komandosky remembers hearing the friendly
ghost story attributed to a rail crossing in the Round Rock area, and a
similar
story is popular in San Antonio. (In the San Antonio case, someone
did some research and found that a bus-train crash never occurred at the site
of the supposed haunting. But the researcher found the telling of the tale dated
to the late 1930s, when a bus-train crash in Utah received considerable newspaper
coverage in the Alamo City.)
Twenty-seven-year-old Jeremy Boehm, a graphic artist with the Texas Department
of Transportation, grew up in Pflugerville and first heard of Jake as a high school
student.
“Looking for Jake was a great way to get your date out in the
country at night,” Boehm smiled. “What better way to promote a spirit of closeness
than to tell a spooky story and then comfort your scared date?”
Boehm says that if you ever go looking for Jake, to be sure and check out the
glowing tombstone in the Hutto Cemetery.
According Boehm, when you
drive south on FM 1660 at night and approach the cemetery, one tombstone will
appear to light up.
The perfect ending for this Central Texas folk tale
would be to report that the solitary “glowing” grave marker belonged to someone
named Jake, but that wouldn’t be true.
“It’s just the way the graves are
arranged,” Boehm said. “None of the other graves catch the light when a car passes.”
But no one has such a pat explanation for the stories about Jake.
©
Mike Cox
"Texas
Tales" -
January 17, 2005 column |
