Tale of the Ghostly Lights

By MURRAY MONTGOMERY
Staff Writer

“According to legend, the ghost, carrying a lantern, roams across the flat land of Brazoria County, Texas - at night, constantly searching for a jug of whiskey. It appears as a bouncing, white ball of light floating about four to six feet off the ground occasionally making an appearance somewhere between West Columbia and Angleton.” This quote is from a story I wrote over 20 years ago about something I witnessed one night while varmint hunting near the Brazos River.

This tale is about an early settler in Texas named Brit Bailey. Heck, old Brit was such a legend that he even has a prairie named after him. To make a long story short, in his will, he stressed that he wanted to be buried standing up, facing west, with his musket, lantern, and a jug of whiskey by his side. According to legend, the slaves that buried him stole the jug of whiskey. And the light? Well, that’s supposedly Bailey searching for his jug. From all accounts, Bailey treated his slaves badly – so who could blame them for having a drink while putting him six feet under?

Recently, I came across another story involving ghosts with a light. This tale comes from an area in Texas known as the Big Thicket, located in Hardin County. It seems that the “Big Thicket Light” appears near the town of Saratoga on a location known as the Old Bragg Road. This road was originally a seven-mile railroad bed for Santa Fe Railway. The rails were laid in 1901 and pulled in 1934, but the bed remained and became a well-used road through some of the densest woods in the Big Thicket.

The first report of the light came while the rails were still in place, but it didn’t become well-known until a newspaper began to run the story. The Handbook of Texas writes, “In summer 1960, Archer Fullingim, editor and publisher of the Kountze News, began running front page stories speculating on the nature of the light; these stories were picked up and carried in metropolitan newspapers in Texas and elsewhere. Light seers visited Bragg Road by the hundreds.”

Not unlike the Brit Bailey light, similar reasons were given for the existence of the phenomenon. “The lights were variously rationalized as the reflections of car lights going in to Saratoga, patches of low-grade gas, a reflection of foxfire or swamp fire,” one newspaper wrote.

Almost Immediately after the articles appeared in the Kountze News, all types of theories started to pop up about the reasons for the light. One story claimed that it was Spanish conquistadors searching for a hoard of gold that they had buried years ago. Another story tells of a railroad man who was decapitated in a train wreck; they found his body but never could locate his head. So now the headless body continues to roam up and down the right-of-way, with a lantern, looking for the lost cranium.

Continuing on, one tale says that the light comes from a spectral fire pan carried by a night hunter who got lost in the Big Thicket years ago. He still wanders, never stopping to rest, always futilely searching for a way out of the mud and briars. Now, I found this one very interesting because I was hunting at night when I saw Bailey’s Light. But I was using a headlight not a “fire pan.”

And finally, there’s the one about a railroad foreman who hired some Mexican laborers to cut brush to clear the right-of-way for the tracks. He cheated them out of their money and killed them. The Handbook of Texas concluded, “They were hurriedly interred in the dense woods nearby, from whence come their restless, uneasy souls, clouded in ghostly light to haunt that piece of ground that cost them their lives.”