With Halloween upon us you might be interested in taking to the roads and visiting some of the many places in the Lone Star State famous for their ghost sightings. If you are, we're here to helpfully point out the five you absolutely should not miss.
Yorktown Located just 2 ½ hours southwest of Houston is Yorktown. It's a quiet small place whose claims to fame include having one of the oldest oak trees in the state and being the birthplace of Harlon Block, one of the soldiers seen in the famous picture of the flag raising on Iwo Jima. It also contains one hell of a haunted abandoned hospital.
The Yorktown Memorial Hospital was built in 1950 and run by the Felician Sisters of the Roman Catholic Church until the late 1980s. Several violent and dangerous spirits are said to inhabit the building. On the second floor is rumored to be the ghost of a nun that chokes people, usually targeting men, especially if they have tattoos. Another specter is that of a knife-murderer in the basement who suddenly went berserk and stabbed a female counselor and a fellow patient. Aaron Goodwin of Ghost Adventures captured an EVP (Electronic voice phenomena, sounds and voices that appear on recordings but were not audible when the recordings were made) that said, "Get to the hallway. The killer is coming." when he visited the site.
The hospital is not open to the public, being private property, but guided tours and even haunted sleepovers are available if you contact the owners of the hospital ahead of time.
Jefferson Also well within a day's driving distance is the legendary Grove house, possibly the most haunted house in Texas. The house is more than 150 years old, and draws ghost hunters from all over the United States. Some of the stories are truly terrifying.
One owner fell asleep reading her Bible only to be awakened by a swirling, black, demonic mass of air in her bedroom. During the period when it was a restaurant a waitress was attacked by a spectral black dog that knocked her down and promptly vanished. Wet footprints mysteriously appear and disappear on dry days, and the ghost of a woman in white is often seen wandering the grounds.
Tours of the house usually take place on the weekends, and run $6 a person. Make sure you call ahead for a reservation. Port Isabel Some folks will tell you to visit Camp Lula Sams (Sometimes called Camp Lulu) in nearby Brownsville, where the ghostly screams of raped and murdered campers still shriek on the night winds after a counselor went mad and killed them. Don't. It's not a true story, and all you'll get out of the journey is a nice time in a nature preserve, or possibly shot at if you trespass on the wrong property.
Instead, keep going down to Port Isabel, which has some fantastic haunted sites. The Port Isabel Lighthouse (The only lighthouse in Texas open to the public) is said to house a ghostly angel who whispers warning to people as they climb the steps. Looking out into the bay some people have seen ghost ships. Down in the square more than one person has struck up a conversation with a "local" only to have the stranger vanish into thin air. There's also nearby Fort Polk, at one point the largest field hospital in America. Port Isabel saw a large amount of death in two separate wars, and sightings of spectral soldiers are common.
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