A spooky wooded track has a dark, recent history. Photo / Aleks Marinkovic, Unsplash
A spooky wooded track has a dark, recent history. Photo / Aleks Marinkovic, Unsplash
Ghost hunters might be encouraged to stay at home at the moment, but that hasn't stopped them trawling Google for ghouls.
In a quiet corner of a Texas field, outside Martha Chapel Cemetery, the Google street view has unwittingly captured a ghost. Possibly two.
The wooded lane outside Huntsville is fairly pretty if unremarkable. On street view, the cemetery road looks like any other of the sprawling country roads leading off around the woods. Until you zoom a little closer.
Look a little closer. . . Photo / Supplied, Google
Peering from behind the trunk of a tree is a spooky pair of eyes. These eyes belong to what appears to be a gaunt-looking child. (Or perhaps it's a g-g-g-ghost?) Redditors who spotted the figure have pointed out she has an uncanny resemblance to the children from the Shining.
However some online spook sleuths have gone a step further, suggesting there might be another ghost in the picture. Through the cemetery's wire fence can be seen a dark shape. A dark hooded figure appears to be wandering through the rows of gravestones. Creepy as.
What's in the woods? Photo / Supplied, Google
At this point one might argue the image stretches the bounds of credibility (and the bounds of the Google zoom function). What may or may not be a Texan ghost is more likely a leaf stuck in a wire fence. However it's not the picture that has Google's ghost hunters spooked but the history of the site.
Ghost hunters have been trawlin Streetview . Photo / Supplied, Google
The road which leads to one of the oldest burial grounds in Texas has a suitably creepy nickname.
Built in the 1830s, the road came to be known as "Demons' Road" according to local newspaper the Houston Chronicle.
The road earned the nickname due to a series of "disturbing encounters, and an eerie feeling that sweeps over anyone who dares disrupt the spirits said to be lingering," according to local ghost tour guide Dana Goolsby.
Historian and blogger Cristian Williams says the old country road earned its name more recently. During the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s there was a scare that "a nefarious coven of devil worshipers were calling up demons at the cemetery," according to Williams.
The local high school even got a warning from the County Sheriff about the road. During this era Texas and other parts of the US was swept by a mania around devil worship, with police being given "ritual crime" seminars and training on identifying Satanic imagery as "indicators of crime". According to Vox.com there were over 22 convictions connected to "Satanic rituals" in the 1980s and 90s.
Many of those implicated in this "20th century Salem Witch Trial" are still serving decades of sentences according to The Guardian, though some have had these convictions overturned since.
While there were real criminal repercussions for those implicated, some of the more sensational aspects live on in urban myth and legend.
Ghost hunters and bloggers are still obsessed with the site with stories of children with "glowing eyes".
One post – again by Goolsby – references a "strange, faceless, threatening creature is also said to appear to some people."
But. then again, it could just be a leaf in a fence.
