Ghosts along the Texas Coast by Docia Schultz Williams Page B

over the place, and that is one reason why the horses so often get spooked when they are out riding over the place.
    The Purcells, like cousin Charlie, often have seen what they refer to as UFOs flying over their property, often hovering for some time over a certain spot. And then, there’s the strange little “man-creature” wearing a heavy long brown coat! When Susan’s son was just a toddler, she used to take him for walks in his stroller. One time the infant gurgled and smiled and put his little arms out in front of him as if he was amused or delighted at something he saw. A look in the direction in which the baby was looking revealed a glimpse of a “small creature, about four feet tall, wearing a very long brown cloak, which appeared to be quite heavy.” “It,” whatever it was, was about sixty feet away from Susan and she didn’t get a good look. Just one glimpse, then it was gone. A couple of weeks later she saw the same figure again.
    Then, a few days later, Kim Purcell was out working on the place on his tractor. About noon one day he saw the same “little person” peeping around from behind a tree. A small figure, clad in the same clothing Susan had described, has also been seen around the banks of a pond on the property which is called Shell and Trigger Lake. Although there were stories around for a while that an old hermit was living around there, the Purcells don’t think this person, or “thing” they have seen, quite fits that description. They wonder. Is he a midget, and if so where would he have come from and where does he live? Or is hea ghost? Or is he a creature from another planet, in view of there being so many sightings of UFOs in the vicinity?
    Susan has seen the strange figure three times in all, while her husband has seen him twice. The second time Kim saw him was early one morning, about 2 a.m., as he prepared to depart on his morning paper route. He says he saw something and believed it was the same small figure that he had seen before. It was running away from Kim’s parked pickup truck.

The Spirits at Sutton’s Mott
    What? A “mott?” When I first heard of Sutton’s Mott, I must confess I wondered, what in the world is a mott? The word just wasn’t in my vocabulary! It didn’t appear in either my Webster’s Collegiate or New World dictionaries. I finally found the word “mott” in my new Reader’s Digest Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary. A “mott” is a Western U.S. term referring to a “small stand of shrubs or trees on a prairie.” It apparently comes from the Mexican-Spanish word, “mote,” meaning “shrub.” So much for clarification!
    Susan Purcell, about whom I wrote in the previous story, who lives over at Reeves Thicket near Victoria, told me for years people living in those parts have considered the thick stand of oak trees off Highway 77 that they call Sutton’s Mott to be a “very haunted place.”
    Susan told me that lots of people have said hunting dogs, who usually love to get out in the open country and range around, won’t go near the place to retrieve a dove or flush a quail. They’ll just back off and whine and whimper, and the hair stands up on the backs of their necks when they get close to the place. And horses become terribly agitated, spooked, whenever they are anywhere near the grove. In fact, many cowboys who live in the area are not ashamed to admit they’ll ride for miles out of their way rather than pass by the grove they call Sutton’s Mott.
    It seems a long time ago, sometime around 1850, there was a goat herder named William Sutton (they called him Old Bill) who lived up there where the thick stand of trees grew on an otherwise pretty barren area. He wasn’t a particularly pleasant character to start with, and goat herds were not considered socially acceptable in a country where cattle ranching reigned