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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (March 1, 1979)
Whether fact or fiction, ghost stories seem to be fun By Rhonda Watters Battalion Reporter “We do not believe in ghosts, but to talk about them scares us." E. W. Howe The house looks like it could come straight out of an old horror film. Set far back from the street, its huge yard is overgrown with weeds and tangled bushes, and large trees cast, shadows on its old Victorian frame. An unnatural silence, broken only by the creak of a board or the sudden howling of the wind, surrounds the house. And the many windows are so dark that someone could be look ing out and the outside world would probably never know. Perhaps its the atmosphere alone that makes some people believe the house is haunted. This house may sound like one out of “The Legend of Sleepy Hol low,” but it can be found right here in Bryan. The story sur rounding it is one of several local stories of ghosts or strange phenomena that, common in most small cities and towns, have intrigued some of the residents of the Bryan-College Station area. Are the stories true? No one knows for sure, but if they aren’t, maybe someone should tell the ghosts... Although there are several houses in this area that are ru mored to be haunted, the one de scribed above is more well- known than the others. It is lo cated in an older section of Bryan, around 29th Street, and has been empty for some time. As the story goes, the house belonged to two sisters who lived in it by themselves until they both had to be committed. By looking in the windows one can see magazines and newspapers lying about waiting to be read, clothes hanging up and even place set tings still out on the table. It looks as if one day the residents just vanished, right in the middle of a day’s activity. Some local high school stu dents claim that at times they see lights going through the house. There is one light in the back of the house that stays on all the time, though by looking in one can’t tell where it comes from. The house has never been sold. It remains in the two sisters’ fam ily, exactly as they left it. Not all ghosts like living in houses, or so it seems from a story about a ghost in the base ment of an old local church build ing. According to a former janitor of the church, every time a per son got down to the bottom of the stairs in the basement, he could hear footsteps. No one could explain the phe nomenon until one day when the cleaning woman was down there and saw an apparition of an older lady who had gone to that church for more than 40 years. The cleaning woman spoke to the ap parition, but it did not answer her. Instead, the image turned and went slowly up the stairs. No collection of ghost stories is complete without a story about a cemetery, and Bryan-College Station has one of those stories too. According to some local resi dents, if one goes out to a certain cemetery on Leonard Road late continued Photos by Lee Roy Leschper Jr. THE TUMBLING PORCH of this uninhabited “haunted” house in Bryan, left, is in contrast to the inside, which is arranged as if someone is living there. These benches, be low, may have been the favorite summertime knitting spots for the two sisters who used to live in the house.