The Haunted House of Hickory Creek: A Ghost, Four Disturbed Graves and Sam Bass’s Missing Gold
Almost 100 years ago, a Denton newspaper reported a ghostly figure wandering through an abandoned house, four graves opened in the darkness, and a fortune in gold that might still be buried somewhere in North Texas. And it all started with a story about a very strange neighbor.
Long before ghost-hunting shows and paranormal investigators, North Texans had plenty of spooky stories of their own. Some were passed around campfires. Others were whispered between neighbors. And every once in a while, one made it into the newspaper.
On August 21, 1926, the Denton Record-Chronicle published a story with a headline that sounds like something straight out of a Halloween mystery:
“Haunted House, Deserted, Is Silent Sentinel Over Looted Graves of Pioneers.”
The story described an abandoned house overlooking an old cemetery near Hickory Creek. According to local accounts, something strange had been seen inside the house. Meanwhile, four graves in the nearby burial ground had reportedly been disturbed, leading to speculation that someone was searching for a legendary outlaw’s missing treasure.
So, what exactly was going on out there?
Let’s start with the ghost.
The visitor in the white dress
By the time the newspaper published its story, the house associated with a man known as “Uncle Bill” Stinchcomb stood empty on a weedy hillside. It overlooked an old burial ground, and according to the stories circulating at the time, the house had a visitor that wasn’t quite alive.
The figure was described as slender, dressed in a woman’s white dress, but with the dark, sorrowful features of a man.
And it apparently had a habit of wandering through the house at night.
According to the newspaper’s account, when people occupied the home, the figure would move from bed to bed, pausing to look at whoever was sleeping. Then it would drift toward the fireplace, turn for one last look, and disappear.
No explanation was offered for who the figure might have been or why it appeared. The newspaper simply recorded the story people were telling.
Now, I’m not sure about you, but waking up to find a mysterious figure staring at me in the middle of the night would be enough to convince me to find somewhere else to sleep.
And yet, as unsettling as the ghost story was, it wasn’t the strangest part of this mystery.
That distinction belonged to the cemetery outside.
Four graves and a suspicious nighttime visitor
The newspaper reported that about six years earlier, around 1920, four graves in the old cemetery had been opened.
The trouble apparently began on a rainy night when Stinchcomb noticed a flickering light near the burial ground. In the days before the incident, two strangers had reportedly been seen in the area asking questions about the neighborhood.
One was described as a Mexican man and the other as an older white man.
The next morning, Stinchcomb went to investigate.
According to the account, he found that four graves had been disturbed. A skull and bones had been thrown up with the excavated soil, and wagon tracks led away from the burial ground toward a gate. The newspaper said the tracks resembled those associated with the two strangers and their horse-drawn vehicle.
Who were these men? What were they looking for? And why disturb a cemetery in the middle of the night?
The newspaper didn’t have definitive answers.
But local legend offered a possible explanation, one involving a notorious outlaw and a whole lot of missing money.
Did Sam Bass hide a fortune near Hickory Creek?
By the 1920s, stories about the Texas outlaw Sam Bass had become part of the region’s folklore. Bass and his gang were associated with train and stagecoach robberies, and rumors about hidden loot had circulated for decades.
According to the 1926 newspaper, the gang was said to have visited an old Texas Ranger station near Hickory Creek. The location reportedly had a dependable spring, making it a useful stopping point in the days when travel across the countryside was much harder than hopping in the car and heading down the highway.
The article also repeated tales of hunters being shot at by the gang’s lookouts because they were mistaken for spies. Those details were reported as local stories, rather than established historical facts.
Then came the claim that made the disturbed graves even more suspicious.
According to the legend, Bass had hidden $75,000 in gold near the spring after a Santa Fe Express robbery.
That was a staggering sum in the nineteenth century. And if people believed a fortune was buried nearby, it wasn’t hard to imagine someone becoming desperate enough to dig for it.
Was that why the four graves had been opened?
The newspaper couldn’t prove it. Nobody knew whether the supposed treasure had ever existed, much less whether anyone had found it.
Still, the idea that someone might have been digging through an old cemetery in search of an outlaw’s fortune added another layer to an already strange story.
And there’s a reason the location itself was so intriguing.
The real history behind the legend
Beneath the ghost stories and treasure rumors was a genuine piece of early Denton County history.
The newspaper connected the burial ground to Hickory Station, an early Texas Ranger outpost near Hickory Creek and Bald Knob.
In later research, the Denton Public Library’s archivist identified the station as a post associated with Lieutenant Alfred Chandler’s Ranger detachment, part of Captain William Fitzhugh’s company operating out of Gainesville. The burial ground was reportedly used before the Civil War.
The library’s research also uncovered a separate account of a reported killing at the station in 1848. According to that historical account, a Ranger named Teel shot and killed a man named Ramsey.
That incident adds historical context to the area, but there is no evidence linking the killing to the ghost described in the newspaper.
Over time, old burial grounds became harder to identify. Stone markers weathered away, vegetation covered graves, and stories about early settlers and Rangers survived in fragments.
By 1926, the newspaper was describing a forgotten cemetery, a deserted house, and a collection of stories that blurred the line between local history and legend.
It’s a reminder that some of North Texas’s strangest tales grew out of places that really did exist, even when the supernatural details couldn’t be verified.
A mystery that never quite went away
So, was there really a ghost in the abandoned house? Were the four graves opened by people searching for Sam Bass’s missing gold? And did anyone ever find the supposed fortune?
The surviving accounts don’t give us a definitive answer.
What we do know is that the Denton Record-Chronicle published the story in 1926, preserving a local legend involving a strange apparition, a disturbed cemetery, an early Ranger station, and a rumored treasure.
The exact location of the house and cemetery has not been established by the sources available for this story, and the reported haunting and treasure remain unverified.
But there’s something wonderfully eerie about imagining that hillside nearly a century ago: an empty house overlooking old graves, a strange figure said to wander through the darkness, and the possibility that someone was willing to dig through the dead for a fortune that might never have been there.
And somewhere in the middle of it all was the same question that keeps old mysteries alive:
What really happened at Hickory Creek?
Maybe the answer is buried in an old newspaper, a forgotten property record, or a story someone’s grandparents passed down.
Or maybe, as the legend would have it, there’s still a little mystery left in those North Texas woods.
Sources and further reading
- Original 1926 Denton Record-Chronicle article — the newspaper transcription is available online; the scanned image may require a subscription.
- Denton Public Library: Historical research into Hickory Station and related cemetery history
- Historic photograph of Sam Bass Cave near Pilot Knob, Denton County — an authentic regional historical image, not a photograph of the haunted house.
Editor’s note: This story draws on historical newspaper reporting and local folklore. The ghost sightings, grave disturbance account, and buried treasure have not been independently verified.
