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 Baby Head Cemetery.
You heard that right, folks. Baby Head Cemetery. This is something you can only read about on a Tuesday. Not only is it a real place, but it’s actually got its own historical marker.
The rural cemetery takes its name from the erstwhile town of Baby Head, which, according to legend, got its name from an incident surrounding the disappearance of a young girl. She was supposedly kidnapped by Indians, and her head was placed at the foot of the local mountain. Thus was named the mountain, the town, and eventually, the cemetery.
Baby Head Cemetery was among the places I visited on my recent trip to Texas. It’s located a few miles north of Llano, Texas, on the east side of Route 16 between the two intersections with County Road 226. It isn’t hard to find as long as you don’t look for Baby Head on a map–if you do that, you’ll end up at Baby Head Ranch, which is an interesting homage, but isn’t particularly Spooky. (However, it’s basically just around the corner from your real destination.)
So, what is the cemetery like? Well, it’s a rural cemetery, which means that the graves are untended and nature more or less grows wild. In this case, that means that the dead lie in a field of grass that looks in all honesty quite peaceful. The oldest grave is that of Jodie May McKneely, which I think I may have found, but I did my walkthrough and took my pictures before reading the sign so I didn’t take a picture of it as I didn’t understand the significance of it.
So let’s start with that sign. This is what it says:
“According to local oral tradition, the name Babyhead was given to the mountain in this area in the 1850’s, when a small child was killed by Indians and its remains left on the mountain. A local creek also carried the name, and a pioneer community founded in the 1870’s became known as Baby Head. The oldest documented grave here is that of another child, Jodie May McKneely, who died on New Year’s Day 1884. The cemetery is the last physical reminder of the Baby Head community, which once boasted numberous homes, farms, and businesses. (1991)”
Keep the gate closed; keep the spirits in.
Beyond the sign lies a fence, with a gate. There’s a nice chain holding the gate closed, but it isn’t locked, so the general impression is that this place is open to the public. Just make sure you close it behind you when you leave so that the ghosts don’t run out into the street.
The main cemetery is much, much larger than it needs to be to contain all of the graves. There is a ton of open space here, which makes the existing graves, located more or less in the north end, seem a tad lonely. There is one cluster of graves that has an inner enclosure surrounding them, but I wasn’t able to figure out why. I only spent a few minutes there, but I didn’t discover a genealogical pattern to it.
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- Lots of empty space in this cemetery.
Do you see it?
The evidence that this place isn’t maintained is clear, as evidenced by Mr. J. H. Wilbern’s (1860-1887) gravestone, which has toppled from its base and rested there long enough to become embedded in the ground. Curiously, someone with either a playful nature or a sick sense of humor placed an elaborate wooden statue on the fallen gravestone at what I can only describe as a deliberate angle. The effect seems to say “Yes, I did put this little wooden construction of a building, complete with roof and fence, on top of this gravestone, so that you would know that I know that this gravestone is here.”
The rogue wood carver strikes again?
Other than that, the place was very quiet. We could hear the gentle wind through the surrounding bushes and trees. The road was mostly obscured by vegetation, and the place is set back from the road a bit. All things considered, this wouldn’t be a bad place to be buried. Just not on a Tuesday, and not until the rogue woodcarver has been brought to justice.
Have a Spooky Tuesday, everyone. I’ll see you in two weeks (realistically it’s too difficult to post every week at the moment).
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