Dad's Stories: Ghost of Bosque Boulevard

THE GHOST OF BOSQUE BOULEVARD

The history of the Dunlap clan goes way back. It all started when my great-granddaddy, Levi Dunlap, moved to Meridian, Texas, and brought his rather large family with him. There were four boys and two girls. This would have been back in the 1890's. Levi Dunlap was pastor of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Meridian, Texas. One of his daughters, Minnie Dunlap, was my grandmother who married my granddaddy Sam C. Smith. She had a brother named Artie Dunlap. He wound up being a successful newspaper man in Meridian, Texas. In fact he was the founder and owner of the local newspaper -- The Meridian Tribune. Artie Dunlap, was very comfortable financially.

He owned a big a two-story house close to downtown. He and his wife Mary had several children. At one time they had a tennis court, full size croquet court with permanent wickets, a beautiful green-house and a large yard. There was a small cemetery in the back yard where some settlers passing through by wagon had buried a small child who had died while they were camped in the vicinity. Of course, this was long before Uncle Artie had built his house on the lot. As far as I know the little grave is still there. The small headstone with the name long since worm off, was always a curiosity to us kids. Every once in awhile we would put flowers near the crave marker and speculate on what had caused the child to die.

I remember my mother telling us that Uncle Artie would throw big parties for his family and friends, especially around Christmas. Every Fourth Of July he would put on a huge fireworks display that entertained the entire town.

The house that he lived in was one of the larger homes in Meridian. It was elaborately decorated and had expensive and rather ornate furniture. However, when I was a young boy all of Artie's children had long sinced moved away and the upstairs rooms were used mainly for storage. I recall one small room was used as a dark room by one of the boys and was still full of photography equipment. This equipment was very old. You could still see, and inspect old bottles and containers that at one time had contained various chemicals.

There was an old photo enlarger and other pieces of equipment still sitting on the shelves. The young man who used this equipment, Jay Dunlap, lived in Dallas, TX. I understand, after he graduated from College, he no longer had an interest in his boyhood hobby. He abandoned it to gathering dust in that small room which was not much bigger than a closet. In another room upstairs was several old and oddball pieces of medical equipment. They looked like something out of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. I had heard the stories about Uncle Artie buying all kinds of curious pieces of equipment in hopes that it would have a healing affect on his wife’s illness. Uncle Artie would buy any piece of new medical equipment that would come on the market. Most of the equipment was obviously designed by quacks and dealt mainly with electricity and magnetism. One piece of equipment had a console with several knobs and switches along with a couple of meters. There were ten wires coming out of the back and each wire was connected to a metal cup the size of a thimble. Evidently Aunt Mary would slip these “thimbles” over her fingers and inject small amounts of electricity into her hands. I’m sure it must have come with an instruction book, but I never saw it.

Aunt Mary had died when I was very young. I do not know what eventually happened to all this equipment. It was enough to fill a medical museum. After Uncle Artie died, I guess his children disposed of it. I wish now I had of asked for some of it. To my knowledge none of the children ever seemed interested in the house or its contents. I felt sorry for Uncle Artie, because he had several children, but they seldom visited him and he seemed very lonely.

Just about every night Uncle Artie could be seen at the small movie theater in downtown Meridian. He would usually sit on the back row and doze off during the movie and leave after the last show had ended. I remember seeing him sitting in the back nearly every time I went to see a movie. I couldn't help but think about all the parties, tennis court and all the fun things and excitement he'd provided for his children and their friends, now he was a lonely old man, all by himself. The main thing I remember was that the house was not a happy house, more of a dead house that always exuded a mysterious atmosphere of foreboding.

My great Aunt Leila's husband Virgil, was killed in an automobile accident, so she had moved in with her brother Artie, to keep house and cook for him. She maintained the downstairs area of the House, but seldom went up stairs. When you went up stairs, it was like walking back in time. I don’t think there was much love and affection in the house that I could see or feel. I found Uncle Artie to be very kind and gentle man, but he had a stingy side to his personality. My brother Billy and myself would work for him delivering funeral notices or sit and insert a middle page inside a double-truck. (Two pages together). There was something humorous about Uncle Artie. When you worked for him in the fifties he paid you the same as he did people who worked for him in the '20s. Because we felt sorry for him we never complained, but did finally quit working at the paper. It was obvious he had lost his zest for living and was just taking it day by day. My family would invite him over for Christmas dinner and other holidays, so he wouldn't be by himself. He would usually come but was very quiet.

His desk at the newspaper office was piled high with unopened mail. I recall a story circulating around town that a man once told Uncle Artie, “Artie, if you’ll let me have half of it, I’ll open all your mail and deposit the rest in your bank account.” According to the story, Uncle Arties just laughed at him and never took him up on it. He would open enough mail to get the money he needed. It must have been a terrible shock on his family after he died to know that most of the checks were not good any longer.

Uncle Artie told us a story once about when he was younger and his wife Mary was still alive. They had quite a scare one night. Here’s the story as Uncle Artie told it. One night while he and Mary were in bed asleep, Mary woke him up and said, "I hear an angel singing." He lay there in the bed and listened quietly. Sure enough he could hear a faraway angelic voice wafting through the house singing "Nearer My God To Thee". Uncle Artie said it was a real bizarre situation and he was quite startled by it. He got out of bed and traced the sound to the stairwell that led upstairs. To quote Uncle Artie, "It scared the dickens out of me!" He said he didn't get his gun because if it truly was an angel he certainly didn't want to be guilty of shooting it. He crept slowly up the stairs, as the Angel continued singing a haunting rendition of "Nearer My God To Thee".

At the time there was no one living in the upstairs rooms in the large house. After climbing the stairs, he purposefully walked down the upstairs hall to a room at the north end and slowly opened the door. He reached in and turned the light on. The music still sounded muffled, but much louder. He followed the sound to a small closet located in the room. He opened the door quickly and looked inside. It was then that he discovered the source of the music was an old Victrola that had once been wound too tightly and some years ago had been stored in the closet. That night, inexplicably, it had suddenly become unstuck and started playing the recording cylinder that was still on the machine. Uncle Artie turned the aged Victrola off and went downstairs and told his wife Mary that it wasn't an angel singing after all, it was Enrique Caruso...they both laughed with deep relief.

One of the upstairs rooms that I loved to explore and snoop around in, was at one time the family Music Room. There was an old accordion in the room, which we'd been told not to touch, along with a beautiful gold cornet and some other percussion instruments of different types. When the kids were young, they had a orchestra that featured each member of the family playing a musical instrument of one kind or the other. The thing that held my attention however, was an orchestral size xylophone. This is a percussion instrument consisting of a series of wooden bars graduated in length to produce the musical scale, supported on belts of felt, and sounded by striking the bars with two small wooden mallets. There was no telling how much the instrument had originally cost. The only other time I'd seen one similar to it was on TV or in the movies. I loved to play the strange looking instrument that made such a melodious sound.

Over time I had managed to sound out a couple of simple nursery rhyme tunes. Mostly, I loved to just bang away at the wooden bars... making all sorts of racket while visualizing myself as the next Lionel Hampton, except I played faster and harder. These impromptu concerts could only be truly appreciated by the composer, me. I would whack away on the old xylophone until I was sweating like a field hand. Remember, I was upstairs with no air-conditioning and with all the windows closed. Most of my performances took place on hot summer afternoons. However, all was not as it seemed to be.

My Aunt Leila, would tell us Ghost stories every now and then. Her family was Irish and I believe they must have seen more ghosts than the average family had, or they had over active imaginations. The stories were always told as the “gospel truth.” One of these stories I vividly remember was the one about how Aunt Leila’s husband, Virgil, who had been killed in an automobile wreck… appeared to her one night at the foot of her bed and told her to stop crying and mourning for him. The spectral image told her that he was very happy where he was and looked forward to seeing her one day in the future. This story took a toll on our nerves, listening while we sat in the very room where it had all taken place.

My Grandmother Smith and my Aunt Leila were the wrong persons to ask, “Have you ever seen a ghost?” Yes, they had and they were more than happy to tell you all about each and every sighting. Grandmother Smith told me a story once about sitting on a death vigil at the bedside of her mother. Along toward early morning, an “angel” suddenly appeared at the foot of her mother’s bed and told her not to worry or cry because her mother was going to be with Jesus. I don’t know if that would have given me relief or not.

I personally believe one reason for them telling ghost stories was that they frequently had to participate in death vigils with their loved ones. Very few hospitals existed in the mid-west when they were young and these were very expensive. Most families exercised their own version of Hospice. As young girls my Grandmother and Aunt Leila, would sit by the beds of dying loved ones and wait for the moment of death to come. I can only imagine, if I were in their place… what tricks my active imagination might have played on me.

Anyway with all these ghost stories dwelling in our active little minds we were easy pickings for a paranormal event. As I seemed more curious and adventurous than my siblings, why not me? One summer afternoon when I was about ten years old, I was bored out of my mind with nothing to do. I walked down to Uncle Artie’s house to see if Aunt Leila was home. She was always good for a visit, story telling and a cookie or two with some homemade punch. We also enjoyed playing the old wind-up RCA Phonograph that sat on top of a cabinet full of old thick Edison Records. A favorite of mine was, The Death Of Floyd Collins. It was a song about a young man who got trapped by a rock slide deep inside a cave and died while workers tried for more than a week to get him out.

I rang the doorbell and when no one answered I went around to the back and tried the kitchen door. It was unlocked. People back then seldom if ever locked all their doors when they left for just an hour or so. I walked inside and went directly upstairs to bang out a couple of musical compositions on the old xylophone.
I removed the cover and picked up the mallets and commence to bang around on the instrument and run the mallets up and down the wooden “sound bars.” Underneath each wooden block was a long round metal tube that produced the different notes as you struck the wooden bars. I was playing up a storm when I thought I heard a door shut downstairs. I walked to the top of the stairwell and hollered my Aunt’s name a couple of times. There was no response, so I went back into the blistering hot music room and continued playing the xylophone.

While I was playing a rather raucous little ditty, I felt a definite cold breeze on the back of my neck. I stopped playing because only minutes before it was hot as the dickens in the small room with all the windows down and I was sweating. I looked around and thought, “Where did that come from.” While I stood stock still looking around a shade on the window next to the xylophone suddenly crashed upwards and started flapping. I jumped a foot off the floor and fell sideways and had to grab onto the xylophone to keep from falling to the floor.

Now, I was really spooked. Things were getting strange in a hurry. I felt the cold breeze on my back again. I turned quickly and looked behind me. When I had stopped playing I had placed both of the mallets on top of the xylophone. Without warning, they both rolled off onto the floor. I could feel blind panic growing in my chest and my imagination was racing a hundred miles an hour. I decided it was time for little ole Sammy to beat a fast retreat. I walked quickly toward the door and it suddenly slammed shut right in front me. I didn’t feel any breeze and couldn’t figure out why the door would shut on its own.

At this point I truly believed I was being harassed by some sort of supernatural entity. I ran to the door, twisted the knob and tried to open it, but I couldn’t. It was at this point that I totally lost it. I started crying and pulling on the door while the room grew colder and colder. Just as I was about to open a window and crawl out on the roof, the door suddenly flew open! I ran down the stairs taking them three at a time. I quickly ran through the kitchen and out the back door and made a bee line for the backyard. It was then that I heard Aunt Leila’s high pitched voice yelling, “Sammy, come here!” I stopped and turned around to see my Aunt walking up the gravel drive at the side of the house with a sack of groceries.
She said, “Come here to me this instant.” I walked to where she was standing and said, “Yes, ma’am.” My Aunt looked at me and asked, “Are you crying?” I replied, “Yes.” “Why,” she wanted to know. “I got scared,” was my answer. Then my Aunt asked me, “What were you doing inside the house when you knew I wasn’t there, I ought to tell your Mother.” The only thing I could think of was, “I’m sorry.” She had me walk back in the house with her and asked me again why I had been crying. I told her I got scared while I was playing the old xylophone upstairs.

“I’ve told you before not to go up there when I’m not home,” she scolded me. It was then that I told her I’d seen a ghost upstairs. Actually, I hadn’t seen one, but I sure had felt the effects of one.

Aunt Leila, told me I was silly, that there were no ghosts in the house. I started to remind her about talking to her dead husband’s ghost, but thought better about it. Finally she got the whole story out of me. She took me by the hand and said, “We’re going back upstairs and I’ll prove to you there’re no ghosts up there.” Going up the stairs I strategically placed myself a little behind her just in case there was something supernatural hiding upstairs.

When we walked into the music room, I noticed that it was really hot. She looked around and said, “Now, you see there are no ghosts up here and it’s anything but cold.” She was right in both instances, but I’ll bet if she’d been with me a little earlier, she’d beat me down the stairs. Looking around, she said, “Well, I see you put the cover back on the xylophone.” I’m sure my eyes did a “Tex Avery cartoon bit,” where they pop out and roll down your cheeks, when I saw that the cover had been neatly replaced on the old instrument.

For certain, it wasn’t me that put the cover back on. Then, I also noticed the outline of the two mallets under the cover. They’d been returned to their rightful place on top of the xylophone. That was enough for me. I told my Aunt, “I want to go back downstairs, please.” She said, “Okay, let’s go to the kitchen.” We left the room and walked back to the top of the stairs. I paused and took a quick look back into the room one last time and everything appeared sane and completely normal. In the Kitchen, my Aunt gave me a cup of punch and a couple of tea-cakes (homemade sugar cookies) and told me never to come in the house again when no one was home. I assured her that I wouldn’t.

In case you’re wondering if I ever played that xylophone again. No, I didn’t. My xylophone playing career had definitely come to an abrupt end. To this day, I have no idea what all went on in that upstairs room, on a hot summer afternoon. But I do know that I never want a repeat performance.

A few years later, the old xylophone disappeared and the upstairs rooms were cleaned up and one made into a guest bedroom. Of course, you would’ve had a difficult time getting me to spend the night in it. The Music Room remained a storage room, minus the “haunted” xylophone. Over the years I visited the upstairs several times without incident. When I was a senior in High School, Aunt Leila gave me Uncle Virgil’s double-barrel shotgun. It worked great, shot straight and never once gave me a problem. One thing for sure, I probably wouldn’t have taken that old xylophone if you’d given it to me... along with a million dollars!