Your Tuesday Dose of the Spooky: The Ruins of the Branch Davidian Carmel Center

It’s Tuesday again!  Time for your weekly dose of the Spooky, culled from around the web, the world, and life.  Every week I’ll have something new to send a shiver down your spine.

This week’s theme is the abandoned Branch Davidian Compound.

While exploring the area surrounding Waco, Texas for our Society expedition, we of course made a stop at the Branch Davidian compound.  What happened there is of course controversial, but I want to sidestep that discussion and focus on our exploration of the compound ruins.

I’m not exactly sure what I expected the surrounding area to be like, but what I found wasn’t it.  The roads you take to get there seem so ordinary, so peaceful.

There isn’t much of an indication that you’ve arrived.  I’d expected either a roadside monument or nothing at all.  Instead, there’s a large, white stone box that houses several mailboxes, presumably for the people who still live there (I didn’t know that they did, and still don’t technically know that they do, but we did find houses, some with cars in front of them).  Beyond the mailboxes was a fence, and just inside was a memorial of sorts, so we figured we were in the right place.

The gate was open, but we didn’t want to park our car inside if we could help it.  We opted instead to park off the side a few feet up the road, but a man who lived across the street began shouting to get our attention almost immediately.  He told us we needed to get our car “out of the ditch.”  We didn’t see a reason that our car sitting there was going to be a problem, and it wasn’t his property we were parked on, but he followed this up with an assurance that it was okay for us to drive into the compound when the gates were open.  We realized that he must see a lot of people drive by there.  We thanked him and got back in our car.

I couldn’t help while sitting out on that road that I felt a mild sense of unease.  The road was pretty quiet, but not deserted.  I think I had expected the Branch Davidian compound to be at the terminating end of a dirt road or something, ominous and imposing, not on the side of a rural but otherwise normal road, like it was just any other section of property.  With each car that drove by, we—or at least I—felt like we were doing something wrong by being there.  The reaction of the man across the street had made it clear that this was a tourist attraction, and I didn’t know if I liked being a tourist there.  I’d expected a quiet, abandoned section of land that was more or less forgotten by all except the locals.  Upon reflection, it doesn’t make much sense to have gone in with that impression, but that’s what I thought at the time.

As we turned our car around, a dark gray Camaro crested the small hill a few hundred yards back the way we had come, heading towards us.  I must admit to experiencing a mild thrill when I saw it, both because of the coincident timing of our interaction with the local man and the fact that we’d been exhibiting obvious signs of out-of-towners with our stopping, parking, looking around, and map consulting.  I had fleeting thoughts that the last lingering followers of David Koresh might be guarding the place, and that the Camaro was part of the rapid response force these followers used to chase visitors away, open gate be damned.  This fear was reinforced by the fact that the Camaro was driving so slowly.  I had started our three point turn just about the time the Camaro crested the hill, and I completed the maneuver quickly, expecting the Camaro to want me out of the way as quickly as possible so as to let him through, but when I was back on the road facing back the way we came, the Camaro had hardly moved.  I hesitated. He hesitated.  I didn’t really want to confirm our intentions if the Camaro belonged to whom I feared, but the only way to avoid that was by moving along and making a U-turn somewhere down the road out of sight of the Camaro.  I didn’t really want to do that, so I put on my left blinker, confirming the obvious, and waited to see what the Camaro did.

The Camaro rolled quietly to a stop not twenty yards from my front fender.

I don’t really know a lot about the Branch Davidians, and as I’ve said I’m deliberately not going into a discussion of what happened at their compound, but I must admit that I really was worried that there might be residual cult members around who were going to be angry at us for being there.  Ultimately, the Camaro started moving again and passed us at slow speed.  I avoided making eye contact with the occupants.  The windows were tinted, so I didn’t get a good look at the people inside.  Remember this car; it made an appearance later in our expedition.  We made our turn into the compound.

It felt mildly surreal to be in the exact spot where the events of Spring 1993 had occurred.  There was a light breeze, a slight rustling of the leaves, but overall it was just supremely quiet.  The sensation that we shouldn’t be there only became more intense as we ventured further inward.

Originally, I’d intended to simply park behind the memorial near the gate and walk in, but the man across the street had said it was permitted to drive up to the church (there is still a church on the compound; I assume it was built after the events of 1993), and I didn’t really want to be separated from our car.  We gave the memorial a somber glance and rolled slowly up the dirt road.

On our right we passed a few markers that had plaques, and in one spot I saw what looked like it might have been a cornerstone or something—the entire compound was basically demolished and the burnt rubble removed, so all that’s left is some of the foundation.  On the left was what looked like a very peaceful pond or stream.  Honestly, the place looked like a wonderful piece of land, and if not for what happened there I’m sure this would have been a lovely place to live.

A few yards past the markers was the white church.  We couldn’t tell if it was still in active use, but it had a donations box, and if not still active it would have been an uncanny replica of one.  We did not try the door.

A few hundred yards beyond that there was a No Trespassing sign stuck into the road.  This made us question again if the local man had been correct that we were allowed to be there.  We stopped the car for a moment and discussed what to do.  We decided that since the memorial looked so obviously public that it couldn’t have been a mistake to think the open gates meant it was okay to come in; certainly it was reasonable to interpret the sign to mean “don’t come any further,” and I rehearsed that in my head in case someone came to bother us.  Still, I didn’t like being there, since I saw what clearly were peoples’ homes and cars along the road past the No Trespassing sign.

I had to go past the sign to turn the car around.  As I did so I watched the houses nervously to see if anyone was going to react, but I saw no one; as a matter of fact, we didn’t see a soul on the entire compound—with one exception, but I’ll get to that momentarily.  We parked the car in front of the church, because what I really wanted to see was the concrete swimming pool, and my curiosity got the better of my caution.  We got out of the car—the beep of the keyless entry system as we remotely locked it made us feel more secure, pointless as it would have been if anything truly bad had happened—and approached.  I said I didn’t really want to stay very long, and it was clear we were in agreement.

The swimming pool had water in it, which I wasn’t expecting.  I’d heard from the teenagers we met at Goatman’s Bridge that there had been a torrential series of storms a few weeks back, so it’s possible that two hours south the swimming pool could have been filled by rainwater.  There were a series of blue barrels cut in half and lying on their sides around the corner of the pool closest to us, filled with earth and rocks.  There were some irrigation hoses mounted in some of the barrels, which made the whole thing seem like some sort of unsettling garden project.  I don’t know for sure how deep the pool was originally, but there can’t have been more than a few feet of dirty water in the bottom; in any event I couldn’t see the bottom through the water.  On the far end was the shallow end of the pool, which consisted of a concrete ramp sloping down into the gray water.
Swimming pools are always somewhat uncanny when they are empty; even more so when partially full.  There is something about a thing, obviously in a state unable to serve its original purpose but partially reclaimed by something else, that puts one off balance.  The swimming pool was like that.  And yet, I still felt a sense of “is this it?”  I found it hard to believe that it was really real, after the reputation it has.  I guess I’d describe the “ruins” as underwhelming, though by no means did this lessen our sense of trepidation.

We took one or two pictures, and the time it took to do that worried me.  I felt like every second we tarried might be the second that mattered.  I would be lying if I said I didn’t want to take more pictures, but we felt like we’d been there long enough.  When we moved a few feet back toward the car and our line of sight cleared the church, my pulse quickened.  The Camaro was back, and it was moving slowly up the compound’s single dirt road.  I wanted to break into a run and yell to Krista to run too, but instead I calmly walked toward the car, and I hope I was able to keep the urgency out of my voice when I said “we should go.”  As scared as I was, I knew that unless the Camaro increased its speed significantly we would have thirty seconds at a minimum before it got there, perhaps as long as a minute.  Nothing about the situation would fundamentally change in that time as long as we were inside the car and ready to move before the Camaro pulled up.

As we hurried nonchalantly to the car I rehearsed what I was going to say if aggressive cultists got out of the car—“sorry, we turned around when we saw the No Trespassing sign”—and what I was going to do if they threatened us: gun the car and take advantage of the maneuvering room we’d gained by allowing them to get close to us and hope that they couldn’t remotely close the gate quickly enough to stop us.  I guess in the moment I was relying on the fact that I believe that ain’t-nobody-can-catch-me-on-the-open-road; not once did I consider the fact that they’d be chasing me in a Camaro; besides, Krista’s Corolla S has racing stripes—she plasti-dipped them herself.

Needless to say, I was a bit tense as they got closer.  As we began to inch forward, I realized the Camaro was not moving in an aggressive manner; if anything it appeared to be moving slowly as if to view the same plaques that we’d admired as we drove in—was it possible that the Camaro was just another sight-seer like us?  I guess the big green pants were nothing to be scared of after all.  Still, I didn’t make eye contact as we rolled past them.  The Camaro stopped in front of the church, and we used this opportunity to take some more pictures of the plaques.  I was careful to keep hold of my car door and not move in their direction, lest they think I was the angry cultist.  Ultimately, I wanted to spend more time taking pictures than the Camaro wanted to spend on the compound; he was trying to go around me when I put us in drive for the penultimate time and drove us back to the gate.

Our final round of pictures in the compound was at the main memorial.  The memorial is composed of two walls with names and ages of the dead flaring out from a central plaque dedicated by the Northeast Texas Regional Militia of Texarkana, Texas.  At the bottom of the central plaque sits a teddy bear wearing a cross around his neck.  Atop the plaque are coins and rocks left by visitors (presumably mourners—we did not leave anything).  The Camaro silently passed us, and did not again play a role in our Waco adventures.  We pulled out of the gates, I dismounted, took a final series of pictures of the gates, and we drove away, leaving the compound and all its ghosts behind us.

---

Do you like Spooky Tuesday?  Then please help me out by sharing my posts with your friends and on Facebook.  Consider subscribing to my mailing list so that you’ll get the latest articles as soon as they come out.  I also welcome comments, and I would love to hear suggestions about things to make all of our Tuesdays Spookier.