Ever Seen a Ghost?

She doesn't say anything more about the apparently fatal head wound, so I decide it's time to do a little exploring by myself. Down at the Parker cabin, a two-room log house split by a wooden deck, a woman stands in the bedroom next to an old washbasin and tells a visitor the famous story of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was kidnapped by Comanches. The woman resembles Mrs. Claus, with jaw-length white hair neatly tucked under a navy headband and kind blue eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles. Her name is Dorothy Poole, and she's one of the museum's historical interpreters. When another costumed employee walks up and tells her we're looking for ghosts, I expect her to nod politely and turn away. Instead, she smiles. "Well, I think the whole world's haunted!" she says with a hearty laugh. "Are you from Dr. Barth's class?" I shake my head and learn that Dr. Tim Barth teaches a parapsychology class at Texas Christian University and that many of his students visit the cabins for research papers.

Poole rattles off ghost stories as if they're part of her family tree. "Someone took a picture in the Foster cabin, near the gift shop, and it was a white orb that looks like a woman. They say that's Jane. I think Jane was the housekeeper for Mr. Foster. Bill is the one who lives in the Howard cabin—sometimes you smell his smoke."

Has she ever seen evidence of the ghosts herself?

She nods and points across the dog trot to the kitchen. "One day I came over here and the soap in the kitchen had been moved onto the floor. Then the next time I went in it was in the fireplace. My daughter said, 'It's a spirit, it just wants to be acknowledged.' So the next day I went in and said, 'I'm gonna be spending quite a bit of time here in the kitchen, so it's time we got to know each other.' It never happened again. But every once in a while I see someone standing there, and I look up and they disappear."

"Does it scare you?"

"No, they're benign. Did you ever read the poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning?" Before I have time to answer she's reciting it: "'Earth's crammed with heaven/And every common bush afire with God/And only he who sees takes off his shoes/The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.' Sure, I think the ground is holy and there's energy all around us. It's just not everyone's tuned into it." She waves toward the other room again. "There's a string of garlic hanging over in the kitchen in there. The kids always ask, 'Is that to keep the vampires away?' I say, 'I guess it's working because I've never seen any vampires.' Then there's always some pert little girl who says, 'There's no such thing as vampires.' And I say, 'How do you know?'"

"Ghosts are a phenomenon you can find in humanity since the beginning of time," says Francis E. Abernethy, professor emeritus at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches and former head of the Texas Folklore Society, a position he held for 33 years. "There's this hope that there's something beyond this physical reality." Abernethy has written more than 20 books, and many include Texas ghost stories. One of his favorites is the one about Britt Bailey, a settler who told his friends to bury him with his rifle by his side and a jug of whiskey by his feet and then haunted them because they drank his liquor before putting him in the grave. Abernethy told me he has at times thought he saw or heard a ghost, but he doesn't believe he actually did. "The phenomenon of ghosts is the same everywhere because man is the same everywhere," he says. "We can't believe we're here for just a short period of time. We try to get a reason for everything, and if we can't come up with a good rational reason, then we attribute it to some supernatural power."

To TCU's Dr. Barth, the professor who teaches Parapsychology: Weighing the Evidence, it's crucial to assess the debate over paranormal phenomena scientifically and objectively. Doing so, he told the campus magazine several years ago, it becomes clear that not only are supernatural claims often unsupported by science, but so is the knee-jerk debunking practiced by critics. "They often are trying to embarrass believers or convince people how absurd it is," he told the magazine. "The nonbelievers are often as biased as the people they're trying to discredit."