No one seems sure if it’s swamp gas, car headlights, a dead railroad worker’s ghost carrying a light, or what, but Bragg Road to this day has the nickname “Ghost Road.” The legend is understandable. The Thicket, in southeast Texas, was a huge and forbidding region of piney woods, bayous, swamps, and backwoods, more like Louisiana than the Texas prairie. It stood out against the largely flat and arid background of the Lone Star State. Remote and untamed, it dominated five rural counties at its largest and covered between two and three million acres. The Brazos River bordered it on the west, the Sabine River on the east. The town of Nacogdoches marked the northern border. It once ran south until not far from the Gulf Coast. Nature, not man, held the cards. Dense woods and wild creatures within the Thicket made it a sort of terrestrial black hole, a place that explorers and even Native Americans largely avoided due to the potential for entering and never exiting. The area has seven types of hickory trees, according to a Department of the Interior survey, not to mention multiple types of oak and cypress.
