Image taken from Flickr, by Rob Sneed
Ghost hunting had never been easy for us. Charlie and I had always struggled to find any ACTUAL proof of them – even when we went to the “most haunted places in America” and stayed overnight in way too many abandoned asylums, we had never made contact. Now, driving towards Woman Hollering Creek, I felt some trepidation. While the rumors that surrounded the creek were pretty much the same as all of the other places we had gone, there was a prickling at the back of my head saying, “TURN BACK, TURN BACK NOW.” I wasn’t the only one feeling this way – the way that Charlie was writing in his notebook was frantic, more so than usual. Charlie was the one that dragged me into this ghost hunting trek. He had always been fascinated by the paranormal, perhaps hoping that he could connect to ghosts better than he could with the people around him. You see, Charlie’s mom had died right in front of him when he was around eight. She had been stabbed and left for dead in a mugging gone wrong – when the police arrived at the scene, they found Charlie, catatonic, lying next to his mom in a pool of her blood. Ever since that time Charlie had been an oddball. Who could blame him? Seeing that kind of atrocity when he was so young – it would mess anyone up.
So here we were, with me driving (since Charlie never got his license) towards some unseen destination that Charlie had heard about on one of his ghost forums. We were out in the middle of nowhere in central Texas, it was 2:30am, and I couldn’t see anything.
“Hey, Charlie, could you go over again what happened at this creek?” He flinched as if he had been shocked when I asked this – we were both on edge.
“Um, yeah, Mark, I can. Basically a woman’s two kids were brutally murdered by Native Americans since her town had slaughtered ten of their chiefs. She found their bodies, screamed a bunch, and then drowned herself in the creek. People say they can still hear her screams – if you get too close to the water, she’s supposed to drag you in.” He said this almost in one breath. Once finished, he went back to his notebook, writing who knows what.
I asked him next, “Have there been any strange occurrences recorded?”
He replied without looking up, “No, there’s just been a bunch of disappearances.”
Lovely. We were rolling up to a scary creek, that we knew little about, where people have gone missing, AND we both were unnerved by it.
After another twenty minutes of driving in silence, Charlie yelled at me to stop and pull over. We were here.
After getting out our flashlights and some light recording gear, we set off. Charlie was the sound man, as he had a microphone attached to headphones he wore. Since I was less involved with these ghost treks, I got placed on camera duty (Charlie thought that we would never be able to SEE a ghost).
The area around us was filled with flat plains, but cutting through the landscape like a scar were tons of trees, all right alongside what would be the creek. I could hear it walking up, a trickling coming from within the heavy foliage – the creek bed sunk down deeper than I would have thought.
As we entered the trees, the ground instantly began to slope downward towards the creek. It was more of a river than a creek, but I guess the settlers here thought differently. My senses were on alert. There was something wrong with this place. Everything seemed heightened. I was looking behind every tree, seeing people that weren't there. "You're being stupid!" I whispered to myself.
Charlie got to the riverbed first. I asked him, “What do we do now?”
“We call out to her,” Charlie whispered
With a hushed tone of almost reverence, Charlie waded out, waist deep, into the murky water and began to hum, “Dum dee dee dum dee.”
“How is that going to call out to her?” My voice sounded out of place here. It was too loud, too harsh to truly belong.
He answered, “This is the song she would supposedly sing to her kids before bedtime.”
This was pointless. Charlie had dragged me out to the middle of nowhere, again, on some pointless ghost chase. I don’t even know why I continued to go along.
After another fifteen minutes of me watching Charlie wade through the edge of the river, I started to shout, “Hey, man, lets call it a ni-“ but before I could finish, I felt all of my hair stand up on end as if there was some force through the air. The wind rustled through the trees. I thought I heard someone whispering at us, from where we just came from. As I turned my light towards the noise, I heard splashing.
Turning back around, I saw Charlie, unmoving, waist-high within the water in a state of absolute horror, looking down into the water. He whispered, “Mom?” With less than a second passing, bubbles began to appear on the surface, surrounding Charlie.
“GET OUT OF THERE” I screamed, without realizing. As Charlie looked up towards me for the last time, I could see the extreme sorrow in his eyes. Without another word, he sank beneath the surface. The bubbles stopped.
I treaded carefully to the edge, making sure to avoid the water. I couldn’t see anything. I’d need to call for help. I sure as hell wasn’t going in. I needed to run for the car.
Dropping my camera, I started to sprint back up the slope. As I got part of the way up, a figure stepped out from behind a tree and shouted, “WHERE ARE MY CHILDREN?” I was pushed backward. I flipped and rolled down the hill, splashing into the water.
I looked around frantically through the murk. I saw her children. They were reaching for me, with mangled arms and fleshy white skin. Their eyes were gone. Only deep pockets of darkness remained. One final thought crossed my mind before I was pulled into the deep, “Was that Charlie floating behind them?”
This short story was based upon the urban legend in Texas, Woman Hollering Creek. This story deviates from this legend pretty heavily. The urban legend spawns from a real historical event, The Great Raid of 1840. It was the largest raid ever mounted by Native Americans in the United States. This event occurred after Texans killed 33 Comanche chiefs who had come to negotiate a peace treaty, along with two dozen more Comanche people. After hearing about such an atrocity, the war chief, Buffalo Hump, went to war, raiding Texas towns.
In one of these towns, a woman discovered her two young sons dead (and mutilated) by the shore of a creek. She screamed so loudly that it resounded throughout that region. Now, people believe that she still remains within the creek, and will reach out to grab any foolish enough who get too close to join her sons.
I tried making this story a bit more ghost like instead of urban-legend-esque, but I still think this conveys some of the ideas that the original story tries to put across. Regardless, I think we should all be careful to avoid the Woman Hollering Creek.