(84) Lou Hudson Everybody’s got a ghost story, some better than others. Here’s one: The Screaming Bridge. Lots of different stories about it, some not entirely correct. On a night in 1961 (the exact date is in question) in North Central Texas, a group of teenage boys set fire to one end of an old wooden bridge on Arlington-Bedford Road, a sparsely traveled narrow road north of Arlington, dallasterrors.com reported.

(83) Lou Hudson What can you say about Buc-ees? I can think of a few things, most of which would likely get me in trouble. I am not a fan, as you may have suspected. But I do have to give credit where it’s due: They know how to market. Boy, do they know how to market! They’ve already got the Guinness World Record for largest convenience store (ugh!) _ 75,593 square feet of floor space in Luling, south of Austin.

(82) Lou Hudson Like to swim? Let’s say you’ve stumbled onto the local neighborhood Time/Travel Machine, and decided to zap yourself to the highest spot in Texas, 8,751-foot Guadalupe Peak, only in prehistoric times _ say, oh, 265 million years or so ago. First of all, you would not be at 8,751 feet. You’d be under water. Like to swim?

(81) Lou Hudson I've been posting about animals a lot lately. It wasn't planned, it just worked out that circumstances seemed to call for it: Migration timing, new discoveries, correcting wrongly held beliefs. So here's another: chickens. OK, I lied. Just chicken. More specifically, a chicken ranch. The Chicken Ranch. At the time of its demise in 1973, it was the longest running operation of the World's Oldest Profession in Texas (as far as we know).

(80) Lou Hudson Question: When is a nine-banded armadillo, the Texas State Small Mammal, not a nine-banded armadillo, the Texas State Small Mammal? Answer: When it's an armadillo in Texas (and elsewhere in the U.S. and Mexico). How's that again? Why, right there in the Bullock Museum's Story of Texas website, it says the nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus) is the official Small Mammal of Texas.

(79) Lou Hudson From all appearances, it is more commodious. I mean, the old location was just the inside of a residential garage. The new one takes up a whole floor of the Truck Yard Bar and diner in The Colony, north of Dallas. So let’s just get right to the point: Why would anyone create a museum of toilet seats?

(78) Lou Hudson As civilians, they were, at best, discriminated against, mocked, yelled at, refused service, treated as second-class citizens. At worse, they were beaten or killed. As regular Army, it was often pretty much the same. So why would they serve at all? It was perhaps a way to prove their worth to society. (Narrator: Sadly, it didn’t work very well at the time.)

(77) Lou Hudson One of the stranger things about the Texas psyche is a love affair with, of all things, a grocery store. But there it is: As a Texan it’s OK (possibly even required) to “insult our government, Buc-ees, Whataburger, my momma," a TikTok commenter wrote in response to a complainer. "But don’t you Ever!! ever ever ever!! Insult H-E-B." (From a Nov.

(76) Lou Hudson Note to fellow Texans: There are bears among us. Some of us, anyway. (If you’re in Germany, where I have a few readers, you can pretty well ignore this missive). “People are pretty excited that bears are coming back to Texas,” graduate student Matt Hewitt said in the January/February issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine. Some of us, anyway.

(75) Lou Hudson Theodore Roosevelt Jr., aka Teddy, or just TR, had a love affair with the environment in general and Texas in particular. (Not to mention, public attention as well. More on that, and something on his dark side, later.) “Roosevelt had a special mythological view of Texas,” Clay Jenkinson, a professor at Bismarck State College in North Dakota, said in a November 2019…

(74) Lou Hudson For reasons I don’t understand, not that it matters, there has been a mysterious number of opossum videos show up on my Facebook feeds lately. I don’t particularly mind them _ they appear to be Artificial Intelligence anyway _ they just seem random. Mostly, they involve someone frightening one or more opossums (a bit rude!) _ one video involves maybe a dozen young ones _ which immediately fall over in a dead faint.

(73) Lou Hudson When I was a kid, my mother would sometimes break into a song that I never could understand the meaning of. The refrain was "The Campbells Are Coming, Tra-la, Tra-la" which I later learned was a song associated with Clan Campbell in Scotland dating back to at least the 1700s. But at the time, I thought she was singing “The…

(72) Lou Hudson He’s the 2nd Amendment Cowboy. And yet, he appears to be unarmed. It seems a bit incongruous that a rather large statue named the 2nd Amendment Cowboy would have been erected without a bit of … um … armament. Well, there is a pair of revolvers below him on the ground added in 2023, but they seem a bit difficult to reach.

(71) Lou Hudson "When you are walking down the street at night"And behind you there's no one in view."But you hear mysterious feet at night,"Then the Munsters are following you." It’s a good bet you've never heard those lyrics (perhaps a blessing). They were the words to the theme song of The Munsters TV show from the 1960s, but they were never sung on the show (so can it still be a "theme song" if it was never sung?).

(70) Lou Hudson Take a look at this map: Monarch Spring-Summer (March-June) migration map. Map from MonarchWatch.org If you live anywhere in the migration routes of Monarch butterflies, you have an obligation: Plant milkweed if you don't have any already. Seeds now (soon as possible), or plants early next Spring. It is vital to their life story. Throw in native pollinating plants while you’re at it.

(69) Lou Hudson There’s a Pearl. She’s a squirrel. With a PE-cahn bigger than your head. (Weird accent to make meter correct). OK, that’s enough of that stuff. But it’s true, nonetheless. I give you Pearl: Pearl the Squirrel and friends at the Berdoll Pecan Candy and Gift Co. in Cedar Creek. Photo lifted from Pearl’s, 'scuse me, Ms. Pearl's Gallery at Berdollsquirrell.com.

(68) Lou Hudson When is a tree not just a tree? When it’s an Indian Marker Tree. It’s yet another of those things my Anglo-centric upbringing and education failed to alert me on. (To be fair, they were pretty much unknown to modern folks when I was being somewhat educated). Marker trees were created by Native American tribes _ mainly Comanche in Texas _ to serve as directional markers, the Parker County Historical Society says.

(67) Lou Hudson There are some pigs in Texas the Big Bad Wolf would be best advised to avoid lest he be huffing and puffing in the other direction. And Charlotte likely would have webbed a warning. Sus scrofa. Wild hogs. Mean looking suckers. Shaggy. They’re not even native to Texas. They originated in Southeast Asia millions of years ago, migrated to Europe and were domesticated, but generally were free ranging, Texas A&M University says.

Oh, Yeah! (66) Lou Hudson In the annals of weird, I may have just stumbled across the grand champ. Not surprisingly, it’s in Austin, city slogan “Keep Austin Weird”: I give you The Museum of Natural & Artificial Ephemerata. Frankly, it’s hard to describe. It has or has had items ranging from the butt of Marilyn Monroe’s last cigarette to a lock of Elvis Pressley’s hair (“on loan from Graceland”).

(65) Lou Hudson How old are we? Maybe a better question would be, how long have we been here? That is, how long have we humans been kicking around in what is now known as Texas? Hint: It’s a really, really long time. It’s even longer than we thought for a … um … long time. The traditional story has been that peoples have been in North America for about 13,000 years, having crossed from current day Siberia to Alaska via a then-available land bridge.

(64) Lou Hudson Why would anyone want to erect a not-quite-full-size, but astronomically accurate, replica of Stonehenge? “Well, why not?” is the answer sometimes given by Chris Stanley, art professor at the University of Texas Permian Basin in Odessa, speaking to the Texas Bucket List TV travel program. So there you go. He and retired businessman Dick Gillham guided the construction of the edifice on the UT campus, and every Summer and Winter Solstice, the sunrise appears at just the right spot, same as at the nearly 5,000-year-old _ maybe even 6,500-year-old _ circle of stones on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire England.

(63) Lou Hudson For some reason, a lot of Texas folks still can’t seem to accept that our admission to statehood did NOT come about by some special deal because we were an independent nation at the time. This keeps showing up on social media (so it must be true, right?), so once more for the folks in back: Texas did NOT come into the United States by treaty.

(62) Lou Hudson What? There’s something that’s not bigger in Texas? Yikes! It is big, just not quite the biggest. But it can claim partial, even principal, ownership of the biggest. That would be the University of Texas McDonald Observatory on Mt. Locke, way out there in far West Texas, near Fort Davis and on the state’s highest highway at 6,790 feet.

(61) Lou Hudson There’s a body farm in Texas! There’s TWO body farms in Texas! Take that, America! It's true. Two of the nation's eight accredited body farms are in Texas, including the world's largest facility dedicated to the study of human decomposition. (No, you can't go look, they're not open to the public, which is probably for the best.)

(60) Lou Hudson They’re called mediaologists, and they want you to click on their social media posts. Why is that? Public education? Public warning? Advance preparation? Money? Pick one. It came as a great surprise to me, but it is possible for some of the folks posting dire bulletins about forthcoming weather possibilities to actually make a decent living from the income generated by your Facebook et al clicks.