Charlie and Jenny Papworth moved from an area of Georgia plagued with malaria to Texas after the Civil War. They settled on Green Creek at a deep water bend in the creek known as McDow’s Hole, near Alexander. The nearest neighbors, the McDow’s and the Keiths, helped them build their log cabin. Five years later, Charlie received word that his parents had died and he had inherited a wagon load of furniture, to be delivered at the railhead at Texarkana. Charlie set out to collect the furniture in a wagon pulled by oxen, a trip that would take six weeks. While he was gone, arrangements were made for Jenny and her six-year-old son, Temple, and baby, to stay alternate nights at the McDows and Keiths. One night she failed to show up at either cabin and a search the next day revealed signs of struggle in the cabin. Temple was too shocked to offer much information other than the murderer had spoken English. A quirt made especially for W.P. Brownlow, along with his emotional insistence that it must have been an Indian raid, made him a person of interest, but that’s as far as it went. When Charlie returned, he also began to suspect Brownlow. Brownlow began a rumor that Charlie was a cattle rustler which led to a vigilante hanging near McDow Hole. Charlie was one of six men strung up from a large pecan tree – still there as of 1979 – but Charlie’s end of the limb touched the ground and he was able to survive until his son Temple cut him down. The father and son fled the county and disappear from the story. Bill Keith and his son claimed to have encountered Jenny, they asked her if she was real and had she survived – her answer was a terrible scream that launched a dozen stories over the next century.

James Pylant. Sins of the Pioneers: Crimes and Scandals in a Small Texas Town, Jacobus Books: Stephenville, Texas, 2019; Mary Joe Clendenin. The Ghost of the McDow Hole: based on Stories Told by Joe Fitzgerald, New York: Carlton Press, A Hearthstone Book, 1979.