Q. Are there ghost towns in Hays County?
A. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines a ghost town as “a once-flourishing town wholly or nearly deserted, usually as a result of the exhaustion of some natural resource.”
In the library’s Tula Townsend Wyatt collection is a paper written by Maude Walling titled “Ghost Towns in Hays County, Texas,” which lists 17 towns that no longer exist, or exist now under different names. These are “ghost towns.”
However, when most people think of ghost towns, they think of… ghost stories. At the library, around Halloween, we get quite a few questions about ghost stories in Hays County. Fortunately, we have quite a few resources to answer these questions. The library even has a file on “legends and ghosts” as part of the Tula Townsend Wyatt collection. If you can’t make a trip to the library to view these resources, everything we have is in our online public catalog at https://bit. ly/3MneDdx Just search for “TTWC Ghosts” and a list of items come up. Under the listing for “Legends and Ghosts” are several electronic resources that you can click on and an article or paper (like the one mentioned above) will open on your computer.
One of my favorite ghost stories is about Gary Job Corps Center. The history of Gary Job Corps goes back before it was a Job Corps site — back to 1942 and World War II. The center, originally built as the San Marcos Army Airfield, was a training site for pilots. Thousands of young airmen passed through this airfield on their way to the theaters of war in the Pacific and Europe. Many of them did not come back. In 1964, the air base closed, but under President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who created the Job Corps, the facility was turned into a Job Corps Center. Now, students live in dorms on the very same property that housed those young WWII airmen. According to the book “Supernatural Texas: A Field Guide” by Brian Righi, “Many of the students who live on campus encounter the apparitions of men in military uniform wandering between the rows of barrack houses. In some buildings, people report hearing strange noises, including invisible footsteps and whispered conversations.”
Also in the same book is the legend of the San Marcos Bridge which is located 47 miles northeast of San Antonio on Interstate 35 where it crosses the San Marcos River. In “Supernatural Texas: A Field Guide,” Righi wrote: “Legend has it that the bridge (also known as the Thompson Island Bridge) is haunted by the ghosts of Confederate soldiers stationed there during the American Civil War. For those driving across the structure late at night, when the fog rises from the water below, spectral sentries can be seen pacing back and forth across the span of the bridge. Most describe them as wearing gray and yellow uniforms with a cap and cape and armed with Kentucky Long Tom rifles held at attention.”
For a longer story about the bridge, see a chapter about it from Suzy Smith’s book Ghosts Around the House at https://bit. ly/3Ci7BCn This article is straight from the library’s TTWC Legends and Ghosts file.
Suzanne Sanders is the columnist for the library. She is the Community Services Manager for the San Marcos Public Library and came from the Austin Public Library in 2015 after having served there as a librarian for over 20 years. She gratefully accepts your questions for this column.
