THE HEADLESS OUTLAW

Two Texas Rangers, W. A. A. “Bigfoot” Wallace and Creed Taylor, both used to tell terrifying tales of a headless rider who rode between the towns of Waco (once spelled Hueco, Spanish for fresh-water pool) and San Antonio, the oldest town in Texas. Wallace had come to Texas in 1836, and became a Ranger after his brother was killed at the Goliad Massacre. The Republic of Texas needed to track down outlaws with its newly-created law enforcement agency, the Texas Rangers, founded during the Texas Revolution on November 24, 1835. The Rangers had a complement of fifty-six men in three companies.

One of the outlaws, an hispano whose name has been lost to history, had a price on his head. The reward was for bringing in the outlaw, dead or alive, so he could be identified before payment was made. One Ranger caught up with this outlaw and killed him in a fair fight. He cut off the outlaw’s head to take back for identification because he was too lazy to struggle with the entire corpse. This practice was frowned on by the other Rangers and even more so by the ghost of the outlaw. Since the lazy Ranger didn’t bury the body, the ghost began to ride the ghost of his dead horse in search of his head.

The headless outlaw can be seen riding the few tracts of remaining grassland between the Guadalupe River and the Brazos River. He is usually seen on dark nights when storm-clouds hide the sky and the only illumination is by lightning. Glimpses of him are brief. Some who see him claim he has found his buried head near the Ranger’s headquarters in Waco, dug it up, and carries it tied by its hair to his saddlehorn. The eyes of the swinging head glow red like the fires of Hell where, it is presumed, the outlaw has spent some time in the Devil’s calaboose.

One cattleman who said he had seen the headless rider remarked, “Why doesn’t he stay down in Hell, it’s cooler there than it is in Texas!”

This revised variant, based on hearing new oral renditions by San Antonios, is copyrighted 2008 by Richard and Judy Dockrey Young and all rights are reserved. An earlier, less accurate variant appears as Number 48 in “Ghost Stories of the American Southwest” August House, Little Rock, 1991, in which the informant thought Wallace became a Ranger after statehood, and misidentified the Guadalupe River.