| Title | : | Weird Texas: Your travel guide to Texass Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1402732805 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781402732805 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 |
| Publication | : | First published July 25, 2005 |
Our weird quotient is so high that it took three expert chroniclers of the weird to put this book together. With notepads and cameras in hand and steeds of one sort or another at the ready, Wesley Treat, Heather Shade, and Rob Riggs traveled the highways, byways, back roads, and all roads in between in search of the odd and the offbeat. They tracked down impossible-to-believe tales only to discover an odd grain of truth that gives the stories just enough credibility to make one feel a little...uncomfortable. Whether it's a goatman, a mystery airship, haunted cemeteries, or bouncing ghost lights, our authors have researched and chronicled the stories and present them here for you, fellow admirers of the weird.
So turn the pages and visit the Munster Mansion, chat with the Big Thicket Wild Man, coast up Austin's Gravity Hill, and drive down Demon's Road (after that road trip, see if mysterious handprints appear on the outside of your car). Check out the Lonely Ghost of Old Greenhouse Road, lean against the Leaning Tower of Texas, motor on out to Cadillac Ranch, enter the cave of the White Shaman, get healed in Sour Lake, and travel across, if you dare, the Screaming Bridge.
A brand-new entry in the best-selling Weird series, Weird Texas is packed with all the good stuff your history teacher never taught you. So join Wesley, Shady, and Rob on their great adventure. You won't regret it. And that's a Texas-style promise.
Weird Texas: Your travel guide to Texass Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets Reviews
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A little too heavy on all the hearsay Ghost Stories but, being from Texas, I found the monuments, art and other unusual artifacts across Texas worth reading about and also potential places to explore.
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I am pleased to have documentation that Texas was weird before I arrived.
This is a great book to reference when we have guests from out of town stay with us and ask the question "Well, what is there to do in Texas?" -
I love books like this with offbeat real-life stories. Well, at least stories of where some of the legends come from. This book is heavy on ghost stories, but even ghost stories give you a look in to history and hoe people think.
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This book makes me proud to from the greatest nation in the world, TEXAS. Great pictures, great stories and a fun discussion piece.
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interesting. picked this up on a jaunt to schulunberg, tx at Frank's. read it all night to finish....
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Enthralling - makes me want to hop in the car and explore the state for the next few months. Well, maybe not the Big Thicket in the dark...
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What do you do when you can't take a road trip? Read about a road trip! Not the introspective self-discovery metaphor laiden novels where the road trip reflects a personal journey. No, I mean a book with photos and text describing ghostly activity on lonely roads, bigfoot sightings, chupacabras, the Marfa lights, a Stonehenge replica, forgotten buildings, old cemeteries, and general weirdness to be found throughout Texas.
A mix of the unusual (the Cadillac Ranch), nonfiction (bats living in downtown Austin), and folklore (ghost children strong enough to push your car uphill), this book is a wonderful escape until the COVID vaccine is distributed and a road trip is once again an option. -
Fun and fascinating.
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Fun, quick read; purchased at BookPeople in Austin.
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It has taken me 13 months to read this catalog of eccentricities of Texas. I already knew some of the stories, and I suppose this conforms to the genre of Weird fill in the blank.
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Unorganized haphazard stories. Reads like a magazine from the 90s.
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Strange tales of Texas. Fun ghost stories and sightings, help you feel like a local, but a lot of similar stories told slightly different ways
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No stars. DNF.
My review of this book can be found on my YouTube Vlog at:
https://youtu.be/HzKqTrDy2Y8
Enjoy! -
this was interesting and well done.
It included local weird stuff like the Cathedral of Junk in Austin (a future field trip, for my charge, i think) and some dated stuff like Leslie Cochran
who has died since the book's publication
I was more interested in what it had to say about other weird stuff around other parts of texas
A quick light read -
I picked this up a few years ago when I was still living in Texas, but it sat unread on my bookshelf for four years. I'm not sure why I decided to read it now, except, as those who know me well can tell you, I have a mild obsession with Texas. It was heartwarming to read about some of the sights I had seen and happened upon during the countless miles I logged on Texas backroads and highways.
The main reason I kept reading is because the book reminded me of all the ghost story books I used to read when I was a kid. I came to realize ghost stories are a lot scarier to me now than they were then!
The writing is not great. The book is essentially a webpage in hardcover. I guess I shouldn't expect much from what is really a coffee table book/travel guide, but I thought it was a little thin on information, and the illustrations were mostly someone's fantasy of apparitions.
Also -- where is the MAP???!!! Even having lived for six years in Texas and traveled extensively in the state, many of the remote locations were unknown to me. I found it shocking that there wasn't a map showing the locations where these wonders were located.
Anyway, I wouldn't recommend buying this one. And, for the record, the Marfa lights are not car headlights. No way. -
It isn't that Texas isn't Weird. But I feel like this book could of gone weirder. The two most troubled areas of the book would be "Unexplained Phenomenons" and "Abandoned in Texas."
Unexplained Phenomenons is almost purely about the ghost lights in Texas. These lights are in fact interesting, but it seems a bit lazy to not feature anything else in the chapter. What makes the "Weird" series so interesting are the small blurbs about a wide variety of topics.
The chapter on abandoned structures started out interesting up until they closed the book with an essay. Although the article was well written, it felt vague and therefore out of place. It didn't seem to give any specific places to go, or anything out of the ordinary. Maybe if the essay was shorter, it would of felt more appropriate as a closing.
Putting these two chapters aside, the book was great. The places and stories featured in the book gave a lot more depth to Texas. Like any of the "Weird" books, I recommend it to any tourist or anyone who lives in the state. -
I first heard of this series a couple of years ago. I thought about purchasing it last year but it was too pricey at the time. This year our school district is making a big push for students to read expository texts and 7th graders are strongly encouraged to read about Texas. I found a cheap copy on eBay and am now adding it to my classroom library.
Some of the tales I've heard before; I enjoy watching "Country Reporter", a show about quirky Texas. Some I hadn't. I wish the authors, editors, or publishers wouldn't photoshop the pictures. I don't like their illustrations intruding on my imagination. A common gripe of mine was realized in this book when they included descriptions of photographs rather than the photographs.
Still, it's a fun book I wouldn't mind showing visitors. Next time I travel around, I'll check with the book. As it turns out, I've missed a few opportunities to experience Texas' quirkiness the last time I left the Metroplex. -
This book got left at my house about four years ago by a friend. He's been over multiple times and shrugs about it, so it got organised into my books. I've thumbed through it over the years, but only recently actually sat down and read it. It's pretty entertaining. Personal stories and bits from the author keep it fresh.
I also was finally able to find a "haunted" road we'd tried to find when I went to school in Huntsville. Because this book was able to tell me the actual name of the road. (We only knew it was called "Demon's Road.") We found our own creepy road, however, that was not in this book.
But besides the ghostly stuff, there was a lot of interesting "weird" stuff about my state. A lot of them I knew, a few made me want to go visit places I found out are actually near me, and some made me glad I live nowhere near those places. -
This is another Weird book I can check off my list now, however this one was disappointing. Texas is such a huge state, but most of the material in the book was quite boring and not all that interesting. Many of the tales were ghost related and recorded from a bunch of kids who went to this place or that because of a legend. If I wanted that I would just talk to people and listen to their stories that are completley outrageous and full of tall tales. There was some historical stuff, but very little and what was put there did not seem to be researched all that well. It also seemed like they only hit certain areas and said the hell with the rest of the state. It was not all bad, I did enjoy a few of the findings. The cemetery part was pretty cool, LaLorna legend I had heard of but still liked, and the Museum of funeral history is something I would love to visit.
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I've glanced through many similar books but loved this one the most. It helps that so many of the places or stories seem familiar to me, as a West Texan.
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Fun read. Wish they'd added some maps.
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A great book full of interesting tales of alleged hauntings all over Texas. You can search for stories by the type of story or use the index to look up specific cities or counties.
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Cute Strange Texas Culture Underground
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Fun, light-hearted read, with the emphasis on the unusual legends and sights to be seen... or not... in the Lone Star State.
