Ghosts along the Texas Coast Read Online Free PDF

chests ashore and digging those deep holes in which to bury them. We can’t blame the pirate-specters for not wanting to give up their loot! They must still be out there, patrolling the beaches, guarding their treasure, so that neither you, nor I, nor even the IRS will discover their secret hiding places!
    The pirates’ gold is still around
    The legends will not die.
    In holes dug deep within the ground,
    Their treasure chests still lie.

The Three-Master
    I am indebted to Yolanda Gonzalez, librarian at the Arnulfo L. Oliviera Memorial Library at the University of Texas at Brownsville, for sending me this story. It was told by a fisherman, John Garreau, on Padre Island’s levees to a group of fishermen in 1967, in the presence of Peter Gawenda, who wrote it all down. Later the story appeared in
Studies in Brownsville History
, edited by Milo Kearney.
    â€œWhen the full moon lights up the sky, when the Gulf is choppy, and when shreds of clouds chase each other through the sky, it is possible to become witness of a beautiful but ghostly sight.
    â€œSeveral times in the past century, fishermen would return from the Gulf with the following story:
    Usually at a distance between two to three miles off the coast, straight to the east of the entrance to the former port of Brazos de Santiago (close to today’s Port Isabel), a strange object would appear from the direction of the Rio Grande’s mouth, moving swiftly towards the open sea. It would seem to be very large and high, and the absence of any noise would make the vision very mysterious. It would move as if pushed or carried through the water. No living soul would be seen. Then, when it would come close, one could clearly recognize a three-master, or French corsair, with every sail set. All the cannon hatches would stand open. The ship would be loaded so heavily that the choppy sea could not influence its course. At one time, the fisherman said, a lieutenant with the U.S. Army from the former Fort Texas saw that spectacle and described the scene to him, saying, “. . . on it went, glacial white, mountain high, deathly still, a spectral, gliding glory of moonlit space . . . it passed, vanished, and made no sign . . .”Whose ship it was, nobody knows. Some people say it carried Jean Lafitte’s ghost to the place where he had buried his (never-found) treasures. Other people who saw the ship insisted that it was a Spanish galleon having three masts. It is very possible that it was returning to the area where it was sunk by a storm centuries ago, or that it really did carry some soul’s ghost that was not able to find its rest.

El Perro Negro
    Another story having to do with pirates and treasure appeared in the collection of stories entitled
Studies in Brownsville History
edited by Milo Kearney. The story, as told by Felipe Lozano in his Brownsville barbershop to his customers, was written down by Peter Gawenda. I am indebted to Yolanda Gonzalez, librarian at the Arnulfo L. Oliveira Library at the University of Texas, Brownsville, for sending it to me:
    It is common knowledge that many treasures are still hidden along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and maybe in some of the riverbanks of the Rio Grande, Nueces, or San Antonio rivers. But nobody knows the exact locations where those treasures were hidden by pirates like Jean Lafitte, by Spanish nobles who had traveled along the coast like Cabeza de Vaca, and others.
    Some small valuables have been found and one large treasure has been stumbled upon at several times, but it has not been recovered. And if someone finds it he will try to take it only that one time. This treasure, so it is told, is in a large iron chest, a type of chest that was used by the people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To find this chest you would have to dig into the riverbank until you come into a grotto. But everyone who has succeeded in finding this large chest has not dared to