In February, the Waco, Texas, City Council rejected a proposed 70-foot-tall rifle-toting statue that would have stood outside of the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame. It may turn out to have been a prudent decision.
A lengthy article in the March 23 Waco Tribune-Herald reveals that the property occupied by the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame was formerly Waco’s First Street Cemetery. This was not some ancient Indian burial ground. The last interment took place only two years before the Hall of Fame was built, which was when the City supposedly relocated all of the bodies. But workers digging a trench for a utility line on the property have run into 160 corpses thus far, and it’s estimated that a couple hundred more may lie just within its narrow path.
A city worker who said that he worked on the Cemetery crew is quoted in the article with the classic line, “We didn’t move any bodies. We only moved the headstones.” Anyone who has watched a horror movie in the last 30 years knows that that’s just asking for Big Trouble.
Did the Waco City Council perhaps know something that the rest of us didn’t? Did they reach their decision in part to thwart the angry ectoplasm of hundreds of dead Wacoans, which would have rushed into a 70-foot-tall gunslinging colossus, and animated it into an unstoppable instrument of revenge?