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MONSTERS IN TEXAS by J. Rhett Rushing  Are there monsters in Texas? In the interests of time and avoiding fistfights, this paper will not cover elected officials, high school math teachers, or the Houston Astros relief pitchers. It will cover a wide range of bogies and boogers, some real and some imagined, plus enough beasties, nasties, and ghoulies to keep you sleeping with the light on tonight. I am going to define “monster” as an aberration—to civilization , to morality, to Judeo-Christian ethics, to Mom and apple pie, bluebonnets, baseball, and chicken fried steak. Monsters exist to define societal boundaries—to embody those traits that ordered society cannot abide or allow. They are frequently inversions, existing in our Folklore as opposites and object lessons of how NOT to behave. Monsters have withstood the test of time, passed down narratively from person to person in the best tradition of Folklore. They serve as our Boogey Men, Cucuis, and things going “bump” in the night to warn us away from behaviors that our home culture doesn’t want us messing in. You’ve told the kids to go to bed and they’re still wrasslin’ around upstairs? Bring on the Boogeyman that lives under their bed and eats the feet of children who dare to get out after hours. You’ve got a wayward husband? Bring on La Llorona. You’ve got frisky, adventurous, curfew-stretching teens? Bring on La Lechusa or the Donkey Lady, or the Hook. For every kid-crime there is a narrative monster warning in the Folkloric arsenal. But Texas Monsters serve other functions for us as well. For the emerging adult they are tests of maturity—proof positive that the childhood belief is no longer scary. They serve as targets of human thrill-seeking—things to be conquered through direct 285 contact, or perhaps captured and sold on eBay. They serve as tourist attractions, Chamber of Commerce claims, endless fodder for bad “B” movies, and sometimes, yes, sometimes, those Monsters just may be real. Texas’ earliest monster stories came from the earliest Texans. While the Apache tell of a dragon in the Guadalupe Mountains, the Caddo tell of water monsters in the Sabine River—one that turned over canoes paddled noisily and another stretching for miles down the river whose presence warned of an impending flood. Early Spanish settlers coming into Texas told of a DragonSerpent whose breath could suck wandering souls straight down into hell, and of the famous basilisk—the dreaded serpent-monster born of an egg laid by a rooster. Everyone from North Africa through Spain and into the New World knew that it was instant death if the basilisk’s eyes met yours. In 1837, settlers around the Navidad River claimed to spot a wild woman covered in hair and faster than a horse. Of course, settlers along the Red River and the Neches River claimed a few wild folks as well. Still do. It is no great stretch to imagine a wild man or wild woman as the possible source for a Bigfoot sighting, but believe me, we’ve got Bigfoot in Texas. According to the Texas Bigfoot Research Center, Bigfoot has been in Texas—and especially East Texas—for a very long time. There are literally thousands of sightings, news accounts, one top-flight museum exhibit, and even a couple of movies to attest to this, and hundreds of dutiful believers out shaking the trees and setting camera traps and whatnot in attempts to prove the creature’s existence. After twenty-plus years as a fieldworking Folklorist, it is in my professional opinion that there cannot be many a Bigfoot between the Sabine and the Neches simply because my relatives would’ve eaten or married them a long time ago. There was a flurry of activity around Lake Worth in the late 1960s when a monster—half goat, half fish-man—jumped onto the hood of a car full of teenagers “minding their own business” in the wee hours of the morning. There were other reported sight286 Everything But the Kitchen Sink ings of the fishy man-goat, or Lake Worth Monster, but most fell away to the mists of time. Texas has vampires as well. Among the early Czech settlers stories of the upir and the mura abound. The upir comes out of the ground to suck people’s blood like any good vampire. The mura is described as a live man or woman whose soul comes out at...

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