- Patterson Road (Houston, TX 77002) The STORY: Patterson Road (which is also dubbed Blue Light Cemetery) is located between Highway 6 and Eldridge in Houston. This place is rumored to be the site of a Civil War battle and the bridge closest to Eldridge is haunted. If you park in the center of the bridge and turn your car off there will begin to be tapping noises all over your car. They aren't just the sounds of your car settling. They are mostly on the sides and the back of the car. It is said to be the spirits of the soldiers who died. Be careful, this road is absolutely pitch black at night, however you can see cars coming from either direction at quite a distance. The LOWDOWN: The tapping noises on your vehicle IS just your vehicle settling after a while, no biggie. Now if you are bold enough to park your car at the graveyard (yes, the graveyard) along Highway 6 and Patterson, and walk all the way down to the first bridge in the darkness; that tends to get a bit eerie. (circa 2005) A friend of mine and I tested the waters just to check everything out. Sure there are animals and insects out there making some rainforest noises, but there was one distinct, inhuman laughter/cackle of a sound, and it was nothing like an animal sound either. Our cell phones stopped working (no coverage possibly due to a crappy area), and something was following us step by step in the water surrounding the bridge area. Every time we'd step, something in the water would as well. The faster we went, the faster it went (not an echo, as something was physically mocking our pace and splashing) until we booked it on out into a lit area. A couple of more trips were taken there, but nothing as strange as that. There are many stories surrounding this road and its surrounding area, why not check it out and see what you find?
- Spaghetti Warehouse (Downtown, Houston, TX) The STORY: Reports of salt and peppershakers being moved and even fully or disembodied apparitions, strange feelings of not being alone, & photos of orbs and mists throughout the building. The LOWDOWN: Completely bogus. Unless you are somehow trapped inside this restaurant overnight or even work the late, late shift here; there's really no way that any true investigations can be held, certainly not during work hours. I've been here several times, and believe me, it was not for the food. I wanted to experience any type of ghostly activity, but I received was nice service, crying babies, and loud as lunch time chats. Anyone have anything interesting from this location?
- Oil Field Road (Sugar Land, TX 77479) The STORY: No real back story that I have been able to locate. The LOWDOWN: This was a road that my friends and I would frequent while growing up in Sugar Land. We would all hop in a couple of pickup trucks and SUVs, head down the dimly lit road engulfed by trees and sparse homes on open land, and even turn the headlights out and walk around. (circa 1998-2001) It truly is a pretty freaky area at night in almost total darkness. Watchout for tresspassing on private property, as some land owners DO have shotguns and are not afraid to scare off "intruders". There was one cul-de-sac that had a lone soda machine directly in the middle of it. No matter how many times we would drive around the soda machine, be fore we made a complete circle, this "ghost dog" of sorts would materialize out of what seemed like nowhere and begin to chase our vehicle! We dubbed it the "Ghost Dog" due to its manifested arrival, a long chain that was broken at the tail end, and the speed of this animal as it chased us down the road and seemingly vanished under the street lights. Now I realize how ridiculous this may sound, a ghost dog, and a haunted soda machine, yet this honestly happened. We even took a camera out one night while it was my shift to ride in the back of one of the pickups with some of the others. As we made our round of the soda machine, sure enough, El Perro de Phantasmo appeared and we took off! As I was snapping shots on the windup disposable camera, we hit a curb and it knocked the damn thing out of my hands onto the road. Never did recover the camera, or all of the good photos from other haunted travels around the suburb. We went back the next day (in the daylight) to see if the camera was there, but of course, it was gone. Now also close to Oil Field Road, was another long barren road that housed a small, small white chapel-like church, which after one night we dubbed it, "The Devil's Church". It was a Friday the 13th (at night of course), and we were doing our normal excursion of driving around before hitting up a party, when we decided to stop at the chapel. We pulled up in front and decided to check out the bare grounds around the small facility. Hardly any vehicles pass by, so we were destined to find "something" unusual. Walking around the back, we noticed the church was decaying/burned along the bottom and up the side. I took pictures and then took pictures of some of my buddies acting sophomoric as usual. There was some weird noise, that we heard, so we began to slowly walk around back to the front towards our SUV. One of the guys in the group decides to stay behind and walk up the steps of the chapel, as we populated the SUV. We whispered out to him to get his ass in with us, but that fell upon deaf ears. He made lewd gestures as he was on the front steps, then he stopped. He ran back to us and said that he heard chanting going on inside. Not believing him, the guys jumped out to go investigate, as the girls stayed in with the motor running. Indeed, there was some odd chanting sounds coming from inside the chapel. Just then, a light popped on in the window overhead, and the girls who could see it clearly, screamed for all of us to run back. Well when someone screams loudly at night in an already tense situation, you don't ask questions, you just run! So we did! As we were running back, the girls began to put the SUV in motion and drive off without us! They finally stopped once they realized what they were doing as we were yelling at them from a small distance, then we finally sped off as we noticed more lights illuminating the inside of the church. "What the hell did y'all drive off for?!" one of the guys frantically asked while gasping. I chimed in, "Seriously, that was some bullshit! You know the black guy is always the first to die in a situation like that!" They said that they saw a figure rise up in the window above us as the light turned on. The freaky part is, the window was a good 8 to 9 feet above us, so either someone had a ladder inside there, or there was some real freaky shit going on. We decided to ditch the party and head back to one of our friends' parents' homes. As we relaxed a bit and talked about what happened, there was a knock at the front door, and we all froze. It was like someone had skipped a record during an awkward moment. One of the guys went to the door to find that no one was there, but there was a note on the door reading "Happy Friday the 13th, we can knock too." We thought it was some of the stupid-ass neighboring kids jacking our chains, but the guy that first stayed behind to go check out the front porch of the church was pretty bothered by the note. Come to find out, he told us that while he was up there before we (the other guys) walked up; he knocked on the front door and said, "Hello? Happy Friday the 13th bitches!" 'Till this day, it could have very well been a nice prank played on us all, but thinking back on it, there was really no way that anyone of us could've placed that note on the door, seeing as how no one had left our site upon entering the house. The next day, I went to Walgreens to have the film developed, and to mine and everyone else's amazement, the back of the church in the photos was no longer burned or decaying. It was as if nothing had even touched the back and the sides.
- The Von Minden Hotel (Schulenburg, TX) The STORY: Many ghosts are said to inhabit this 1927 hotel in this small (almost forgotten Texas town). If you would like to read of the various ghosts that inhabit this quaint hotel, click here. The LOWDOWN: (circa 2002-2004) Six of us took a trip out to Schulenberg (on the first trip) and it was like no other. Cell phone service went down, the small, dank, 4-story hotel was like something out of a 1930's country setting-like thriller, as we were the only occupants staying that night aside from the staff, which consisted of Garrett (owner at the time) and the lady who ran the adjacent Pizza Kitchen.We had originally read the stories of a haunted hotel from the local Houston Chronicle periodical and decided to check it out. Jumping straight to the incidents; we first made it upstairs to the 2nd floor to our rooms and decided to celebrate and chill with a bit of weed to break the tension of the long trip. Leaving the door open to the hallway, we didn't realize just how much we had smogged out the room and the hallway as well. Garrett enters the room, scaring the hell out of us and says, "Now I hope you guys have enough of this Scooby Doo mystery smoke to party with me also?" We laughed a chuckle of relief and let him hit as well.He indulged us in various stories of the hotel and its history of activity. The he took us around to several rooms. There was one room on the 4th floor where the numbers had been switched around, and we were told by Garrett about the occurrences of the room: "A gentleman hanged himself in the room, for reasons unknown. He didn't leave a suicide note, but the hotel help entered through the transom to notice him hanging by an extension cord from the ceiling fan..." He also informed us that people have a tendency to feel faint and shortness of breath while staying in the room overnight. A friend of mine and I decided to scope this out. Garrett led us up stairs to the humidly thick aired hallway and smack dab in front of the room, no.33. He asked us if we were sure we wanted to go in and investigate, to which we replied, "Hell yea dude." He walked down the hall to grab the key from the holder, and one of the guys and I tried to sneak a quick peek first:
After retrieving the key and letting us in, Garrett told us to close the door behind us, as he and the girls and our other friend stayed in the hallway. We looked around the room and it looked just like the other old fashioned rooms; nothing had been updated in decades, outdated drapery, rickety wood flooring, footed tub in the lavatory...but then we noticed a silhouette along the walk. Not just any silhouette; it was in the form of a medium sized man, hanging by a noose-like deal from the fan above us. The freaky thing was is that the image was swaying slightly back and forth. Now either that was a very elaborate illusion that Garrett had created, or that room was fairly active! It was very cold upon walking in there, and the small a/c unit was not capable of creating such a frigid temperature. We left out of the room and journeyed around the rest of the hotel. Later on after leaving the parking lot from getting more sustenance from one of our vehicles, one of the girls came back in the room to tell us that something was following her up the first set of stairs. he guys and I went out to see what was going on, but saw nothing. She told us that she could hear footsteps following her as she walked. We tried to debunk it as just old stairs creaking and shrinking, but we tested the theory and came up stumped. Something was definitely screwing with us coming up and going down the steps at different walkthroughs. Different visions (possibly our minds playing tricks on us) materialized before our eyes down certain hallways, and surely it wasn't the weed we had been rocking earlier that night; nevertheless, it was an interesting trip to say the least. The subsequent trips are absolutely something to discuss, but those will be saved for a separate article. One last instance that was a bit odd, was the cemetery located a block down from the hotel and symposium itself. The grave was full of infant-graves...that was really creepy.
