Creature Encounters

West Texas ghost town flyer

September 28, 2015 |  6 comments
Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Mostlymade In 2005, my husband and I moved back to my early childhood town to care for a dying sibling. Soon after we arrived, he passed away. Due to the fact that there is a family ranch that my brother had previously cared for, we decided to stay and become the new caretakers even though the town we were in had become little more than a ghost-town and is located literally in the middle of nowhere. Through the years my family had endured many strange encounters in our previous home and I shared all of the tales with my husband who was amused, but, never really believed anything "weird" had happened. Then, early one morning I was awakened to him shouting down the hall in the living room of our current abode (another old family home).

I ran in to see him waving his arms around and shouting "get out of here". I looked around to see what he was shouting at and didn't see anything. He said, "watch out, there is a bat in here!" I laughed and questioned how a bat could possibly enter a well-sealed house/room? We waited and suddenly, a large creature came crawling up from behind the couch. Only, it wasn't a bat at all! It was the black-witch moth! That is a real creature that grows to be as big as a bat and has a distinct pattern on it's wings that look like a skull's face. My mother used to say if you see one, it means someone is about to die. Superstition, of course but, it made me remember the childhood experiences that I had related to my husband. Then, as it flew around us, at the front door that my husband had previously opened in his attempts to get it to fly out, a HUGE black rat suddenly appeared and walked right in! I screamed and jumped into the dining room which made the rat go under the couch. After quite some time (at least an hour), the rat suddenly came out from under the couch, looked straight at us, then casually walked right out the front door! I told my husband these creatures were present due to witchcraft. Someone in the town did not want us there and they were sending their "curse" to try and scare us away. I had already been warned by a neighbor that "someone" was "praying" that we would leave! After this incident, it was almost 4 am so my husband made a pot of coffee and we decided to leave the front door open in case the moth should also decide to find its way out. We took our cups of joe and went out the back door to our covered patio. The patio was about 30 ft long with a metal roof. My husband, trying to forget what we were experiencing, began to tell me a story from his work in the oil/gas business. As he was relating a funny story about a driver who wrecked his tanker due to his own nonsense, we suddenly heard a large flapping of wings and a loud thud right above us on the roof of the patio. I said, "Wow! How big is that bird?" We laughed and he continued his story when we realized that the "bird" was walking across the roof, ON TWO FEET! We could hear the footsteps and the timbers were spilling particles on us due to the weight of the "bird". My husband jumped up and whispered, "I have the flashlight so I am going to go down the sidewalk in front of the porch and shine it up on the roof and see what is up there. That is NO BIRD!"

When he shone the light, he suddenly shouted, "Quick, get in the house NOW!" I did not hesitate and before I could even get through the back door, he was at my back pushing me in! I asked him, "what did you see??!!" And he said,"A human head and a large black body with wings!" He ran to get his gun and I ran to get the video camera. We stayed outside until the sun came up shining the light on and around the house but, we found nothing. At daybreak, my husband climbed onto the house and walked the entire roof, including the porch roof and he said there was nothing. No "footprints" no feathers, nothing but dirt. In my photos, all I got were a million globes which one of my friends said were probably just dust particles but, he said, "the fact that there was so much dust in the air means something had to disturb it!" Around 10 am the moth finally flew out on its own.

MANY more incidents occurred during our stay in this haunted ghost town and at our ranch. We stayed 8 years and at the end, the activity had increased so much it was like living in a hollywood movie. Still, it wasn't fear that caused us to finally move back to "civilization", I needed to get closer to my Clients as I am a private Consultant and got tired of driving hundreds of miles for meetings and to conduct training classes. We still plan to move back there someday because we love the beauty and quiet of the isolation.

Comments (6)