The murder of Alice Benoit in 1957 remains one of the most monstrous crimes in Beaumont, Texas. The young prostitute was a favorite among the sailors, dock workers and wildcatters who visited the Hotel Rouler, the city's most colorful bordello. But one night in 1957, Alice Benoit (at left in only known photo) was literally slaughtered by a jealous sailor when she spurned his marriage proposal. Her macabre slaying ignited a firestorm of public intolerance for Beaumont's famed red light district, which was soon shut down by police.
Last summer, a local TV crew (the station manager asked that it not be identified) embarked on a story about the 50th anniversary of the murder that changed the face of Beaumont forever. As the crew prepared to videotape a reporter at the long-abandoned hulk of the Hotel Rouler, the videographer was startled to see a misty figure in an empty window. Later, he noticed that an open mike also picked up an eerie sound: A disembodied human voice whispering what sounds like a name.
If you want a real-life scare for Halloween, take a look at the video and judge for yourself if this ghost really exists.
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Southeast Texas' newest ... and toothiest ... blog
You never know what you'll find in The Bayou, where some of the tastiest local and national news gets digested in rather entertaining ways ....
Link to it ... if you've got the guts.
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Hurricane Dean is lining up to "thread the needle," to shoot the Caribbean gap between Cuba and South America where it will encounter few of the land masses that sap a tropical storm's energy. That means it's getting a running head-start into the Gulf of Mexico, churning and boiling ever-harder and ever-faster as it approaches.
Two years ago, I began to watch then-Tropical Storm Rita as she lined up to shoot the Florida Straits. She did, became a hurricane ... and rammed Southeast Texas. Rita's physical reverberations are still being felt today, 23 months later. The low-grade nervous fear will last a lot longer.
Dean is probably 6 days away from hitting anywhere in the western Gulf, but Southeast Texans -- who had always sniffed at approaching storms before Rita -- are already considering where they might land in an evacuation. They are playing "contraflow chess" in their minds, trying to guess which roads a couple million Houstonians will clog if they, too, evacuate in another Texodus. They are calling grandma in Texarkana, auntie in Midland and old college roommates in Tulsa. Rita was the hot stove and nobody wants to touch it again.
I wrote here two years ago that you know you live on the Gulf Coast when you don't feel the least bit guilty about hoping that a hurricane hits somebody else. It's not unneighborly, malicious or uncharitable. It's an all-too-human prayer. You simply don't want this catastrophe to be visited upon you or your neighbors. Your mind wants to see the squiggle on the weatherman's map whip a U-turn back to open water, or to simply fizzle out over open water. Anywhere but here.
Once you've huddled in the humid dark beneath a growling storm that is ripping your roof out by its roots, you never want to turn off the lights again. Once you've come home to find a 100-foot pine sliced through your living room -- and another through your bedroom -- you never want such a homecoming again. Once you've spent two year wrangling with insurance agents and roofers, you cannot imagine wasting another two years of your life in such a frustratingly endless loop.
Yet, here comes Dean. In all likelihood, he'll miss Southeast Texas. Still, everybody is watching, hoping to see the squiggle careen elsewhere. A hot stove creates powerful memories.
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By all accounts, G.W. Davis was a solid citizen in life, but in death, he was apparently as solid as they come.
Back in 1900, the Beaumont railroad mechanic’s kidneys failed and he died at age 46. He was temporarily buried in Magnolia Cemetery while the family hunted for a permanent grave.
Three months later, when they dug him up, they found his corpse had mysteriously turned hard as stone. His own son described petrified dad as being “as solid as marble.”
In the next few weeks, Davis’ widow rebuffed several cash offers for her husband’s rocky remains, including one for $4,000 – that’s more than $93,000 today. Then she had a brainstorm: If her husband’s stone-faced carcass was so valuable, why not just bring him home where she could keep an eye on her investment?
But when the family dug him up again, he was gone. Maybe his hardened body was snatched … or maybe he just felt he was being taken for granite.
And in 2007, he’s apparently still gone.
The disappearance of the late G.W. Davis is just one of about 300 odd stories literally ripped from the headlines of Texas newspapers between 1860 and 1910 by Chad Lewis, author of the new book, “Hidden Headlines of Texas.”
Among the Southeast Texas stories retold in the book is the tale of “Baby Jim” Simmons, a 750-pound Beaumont man who might have been the world’s biggest man in 1907. As the genial Simmons traveled with a huckster circus promoter, gawkers were allowed to come aboard the train (for a small fee) to see a morbidly obese man that a Dallas reporter coarsely labeled “the mastodon” and “the monster.”
In all, Lewis reprints four stories with Southeast Texas roots, including the news of a mysterious 1902 oil gusher near Beaumont that nobody could explain, and an outbreak of bizarre coincidences on one day in 1897 Orange.
But those are tame stories compared to historic reports of a 40-foot tapeworm uncoiled from a Hillsboro toddler’s innards; the Denison “cemetery” where only the amputated legs, fingers and hands of injured railroaders were buried; and the San Antonio locksmith who built his own iron coffin … then grew too fat to fit in it.
Quirkiness comes easy for Lewis. The Wisconsin ghost-hunter has written a series of travel guides for ghost buffs and hosts a radio and TV program called “The Unexplained.”
“Hidden Headlines” is broken into several chapters, such as “Medical Anomalies,” “Peculiar People,” and “Bizarre Deaths.” It’s filled with verbatim newspaper stories about people rising from the dead, various freaks and mutants, extraordinary discoveries, and sundry hauntings.
“I have simply presented them to you exactly the way you would have read them on the day they were printed,” Lewis says.
He warns his readers that he doesn’t necessarily believe all the actually published stories he collected, mostly from the Dallas Morning News, but they reflect century-old rhythms and sensibilities.
“These Texas stories will provide you a glimpse of the state in its simpler, slower-paced, much weirder past,” Lewis writes.
And, oh, if you also happen to get a glimpse of well-preserved G.W. Davis around Beaumont, tell him we’re still looking for him.
Originally published in the Beaumont Enterprise 8/10/2007
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The murder of Alice Benoit in 1957 remains one of the most monstrous crimes in Beaumont, Texas. The young prostitute was a favorite among the sailors, dock workers and wildcatters who visited the Hotel Rouler, the city's most colorful bordello. But one night in 1957, Alice Benoit (at left in only known photo) was literally slaughtered by a jealous sailor when she spurned his marriage proposal. Her macabre slaying ignited a firestorm of public intolerance for Beaumont's famed red light district, which was soon shut down by police.
