The Devil's Backbone
The cache is NOT at the above listed coordinates. This is a night cache. You must use a flashlight to follow the reflectors throughout the park until you get to the "X"
My family and I have been coming to Rickle Park for a while now and thought it would be a good spot for us to place our first night cache. While doing some research on the park, we came across a few stories and legends of an old farm and haunted road that ran straight through this park. The road known as The Devil's Backbone used to stretch from Arwine Cemetary between Bellaire, down present day Bluebonnet, and up through Westdale Hills Golf Coarse.
The legend of Devil's Backbone is subjective depending on who you talk to or what urban legend you are told. There are many different versions but the base story has always been the same.
Basically it goes something like this....
Way back when Hurst was still a new settlement children would play around what was a river (now the stream/creek that feeds through Rickle) and throughout the woods there. One night (some would say halloween but most agree it was in October) during a fall festival there were several kids playing in the woods, the end of the celebrating came and parents tucked in without really checking on their supposedly sleeping children. It was during that night when a deranged man/mass murderer/homicidal ghost/witches/demons/killer ninja spirits (seriously someone said that) attacked the children in the woods and killed them all....the parents didn't find out till morning when they went looking for the kids. During the search they found the children hung and drained of blood....all dangling from trees around the river. It is called Devil's Backbone because it is said that when they found the children the river had run red with their blood and the curves of river banks along with the morning sun shining off the blood filled water gave a glowing appearance to the water and the shape looked like a crooked demon's backbone. It was also said that foliage and crops around the river turned a deep red and died within days.
Below is an article from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram of a few other strange occurences..
Now part of a Hurst park, ‘Devil’s Backbone’ is a ghostly road
Posted October 30, 2011 – Fort Worth Star-Telegram – Terry Evans
HURST — Mike Scoma believes that the most important elements of a ghost story are where and when it’s told. It’s always better told late at night and in places like a road called Devil’s Backbone.
Each Halloween he takes his sons, Tony, 13, and Matthew, 10, to Rickel Park, where the Backbone’s last brief, unpaved remnant slashes through weathered oaks and thick strangles of thorny vines. Scoma “scares them silly” with tales like one about a kid found hanged in the vines and another about a coven of black-robed, torch-carrying devil worshippers who prowled Devil’s Backbone in the dead of night.
The stories are a legacy from when he was a kid and went into the woods with his buddies to dare and scare one another. “We’d go camping in the woods and tell scary stories to see if someone would chicken out and go home,” he said.
Back then, Devil’s Backbone was a blocked-off, abandoned stretch of Bluebonnet Drive between Sotogrande Golf and Tennis Club and Bellaire Drive, slicing through the Rickel family farm in old Hurst. The Rickel family eventually donated the farm to Hurst for a park. If ghosts are born from tragedy, Rickel Park is a likely haunt. Scoma recalled a night when he watched police investigate a young man’s suicide at a spot that’s now near the park’s western edge, within feet of where Devil’s Backbone used to run. “That freaked me out,” he said. “I still had to do my paper route that night.”
Hurst Police Chief Steve Moore, who grew up in Hurst, knows of a similar incident near the Backbone. “We had a lady in Sotogrande who hung herself in the pump house near the golf course,” Moore said. “She had been there for quite a while before her body was found. That was about 20 years ago.”
On a night not long ago, Scoma was freaked out again as he walked through Rickel Park with his kids and other relatives. “We heard gunshots,” he said. “The police came out and didn’t find anything.” Could the gunfire have been ghostly? Scoma wouldn’t rule it out, because he once dodged shots from the land’s now-late owner. “We all feared Mr. Rickel,” he said. “He was a one-armed man with a shotgun. He’d yell, ‘Get off my property!’ And he shot at us with rock salt.” Euless Mayor Mary Lib Saleh, who raised her kids near the Rickel farm, knew the man disliked youngsters. “They’d bother his peacocks, and he’d come out with a shotgun,” she said.
Bluebonnet Drive still ran through the Rickel farm in 1971 when Bruce C. Rosecrans moved to Euless with his family. In 2007 he wrote to the Star-Telegram about what he’d seen when he was a teenager: a lady walking not on Devil’s Backbone, but above it. “It was a perfect, side-view silhouette of a short, slender young woman in a long pioneer dress,” he wrote. “She was floating motionless about 10 inches above the ground.” Rosecrans died last year, so he can’t be asked whether he was spinning a yarn. But his words read like he meant them.
***To find the cache, start at the listed coordinates and shine your light to find the first reflector. Continue following the reflectors, making sure to stay on the path, until you see 2 horizontel reflectors. At that point, leave the path following the remaining reflectors to find the final location. "X" marks the spot.***
Beware of the darkness and shadows of the night. Happy caching and may you live to see the dawn of light
Congrats to OR85OR450 on a very close race for FTF!
And a special congrats to NelsonWe3 for doing it right and getting the FTF! at night