Big Thicket

The prosaic explanations are not a modern correction. They are as old as the fame, and it was the folklorist who printed them. Abernethy lists what people offered at the time: reflections of car lights going in to Saratoga, patches of low-grade gas, a reflection of foxfire or swamp fire, "or the figment of hysterical imaginations". The romantic explanations he collected alongside them are six, not one, and they are worth naming in full, because most retellings — including earlier versions of this entry — carry only two or three of them: buried conquistador gold, a fire never extinguished after the Kaiser Burnout, the ghost of a man shot during that burnout, a railroad man decapitated in a wreck whose body still walks the right-of-way looking for its head, a night hunter lost in the Thicket carrying a spectral fire pan, and — the one with the sharpest edge — the story Abernethy calls the Mexican cemetery: a crew of Mexican labourers hired to cut the right-of-way and lay the track whose foreman, rather than hand over a large sum of accumulated wages, killed them and kept the money, burying them in the woods beside the line. A sixth tells of a man who sold his farm to work on the railroad, became a brakeman on the Saratoga, lost his job when the Santa Fe cut its runs, died soon after, and still walks the bed with his brakeman's lantern. The decapitated railroad man is not local. The same explanation — a railway worker beheaded in a wreck whose lantern still searches for his head — is attached to the Paulding Light in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and to the Maco light in North Carolina. That matters because one of those lights has been tested with instruments. On 28 October 2010 Michigan Tech reported that Jeremy Bos, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering, and students from the university's SPIE chapter had taken a telescope to the Paulding viewing site and seen car headlights on US-45, about four and a half miles away. One team member stationed himself on the highway logging vehicle passages while the others logged appearances of the light: "every time the Paulding Light appeared, a car drove by the spot." They then reproduced it by driving the highway themselves, and when the driver switched on his hazard lights the watchers saw flashing yellow ones. Bragg Road is close to a purpose-built instrument for that effect. It is seven to eight miles of dead-straight former rail grade under a closed canopy: a long, narrow, level sight-line aimed through dense woods, which is exactly the geometry that lets a distant, moving light source appear as a single hovering point with no visible origin. One counter-argument circulates — that the light is usually seen looking north while the road traffic can only be seen looking south — but it travels without a source attached to it, and no published measurement of that geometry has been located. The dates are the part where the record has actually been damaged, and the damage is traceable. Abernethy says the light was reported while the tracks were still down, that is, before 1934. Almost everything else says the sightings began in the 1940s. That figure has a birthplace: a regional tourism page, "Bragg Road – The Ghost Road of Hardin County", archived on 24 January 2005, which paraphrases Abernethy's list of legends in his own order but writes that tales "gathered steam in the 1940's, '50s and '60s as more people traveled to the road" — a statement about crowds, not about first sightings. Ten days earlier, on 14 January 2005, an editor had written the "Ghost Road" section of the Wikipedia article on the Big Thicket from that page, and hardened the sentence into "In the 1940s, stories began to circulate about a mysterious light." That section has not changed since. On the way through, the chain also dropped Fullingim and the 1960 newspaper campaign that actually caused the crowds, dropped the Mexican railway crew and the laid-off brakeman, added a murdered bride at the Bragg Hotel that Abernethy does not have, and turned a roadbed whose rails came up in 1934 into a road "constructed in 1934". Retellings downstream of that chain, this entry's own earlier version among them, inherited the losses without the additions. The Big Thicket wild man is a separate claim and a weaker one. It is absent from Abernethy's 1994 inventory of the road's lore — zero occurrences of "wild man", "wildman", "Bigfoot", "Sasquatch", "creature" or "hairy" in its 1,521 words, against 19 for "light", 15 for "Thicket" and 4 for "Bragg" in the same text and the same reading. In the 11,325-word encyclopaedia article on the region the phrase occurs exactly once, and not in the body: it is a bibliography line for a book catalogued as Rob Riggs, In the Big Thicket: On the Trail of the Wild Man (Paraview Press, 2001, 188 pages). Riggs went on to co-write Weird Texas (2005), a mass-market series. So the figure has a nameable recent author and a date, which is a far more useful fact than the vague "popular Texas folklore books" it is usually credited to. Whether it appears in the county's earlier newspapers remains an open question: the digitised Hardin County press is held by the Portal to Texas History, which could not be consulted for this entry, so the point is unresolved rather than settled in the negative. Finally, there is no ticket here, which removes the usual argument. Bragg Road is a signposted Hardin County park and the preserve charges no entrance fee at all, so nobody in either place is selling the light. Nor is there any published instrumental investigation of the Bragg Road light itself on record. What can be said with a document in hand is that the phenomenon has a well-tested mechanism available to it, that the road's shape suits that mechanism unusually well, and that the sighting dates most often repeated are younger than the source they claim to come from.