Haunting San Antonio

During the Thanksgiving weekend, we along with a few friends went for a trip to Texas. We were in Irving, a suburb of Dallas for a few days and had planned to drive to New Orleans, Louisiana from there for a day. However bad weather in New Orleans forced us to change plans and we ended up visiting San Antonio instead.

While in Irving we spent most of the time at our friends place with their kid. Other than that, we visited an ice sculpture exhibition called ICE! and also went for a rodeo show at nearby Fort Worth. Due to time constraints, I was unable to go to a Nepali restaurant there but did manage to have a great lunch at my childhood friend's place. Nepali restaurants are a hard find in US, so I was excited about it. Well, maybe next time.

San Antonio, though a small city, turned out to be very beautiful and well planned. A canal runs through the downtown which is lined with wonderful restaurants and lively pubs. You can walk along the canal, aptly called the River Walk and can even take a guided boat tour. We reached the River-Walk in the evening and spent quite some time walking around, enjoying the view and the people. The great weather also helped. While in Texas, how could we not have an "authentic" Tex-Mex food? Tex-Mex is basically a cuisine from Texas that is highly influenced by Mexican cuisine. After a scrumptious dinner, we went to a pub and spent a good time there.

The next day we went back to the downtown and checked out some tourist attractions like the Alamo where the Battle of Alamo had been fought. I found it very interesting that the battle was fought right where the San Antonio downtown now stands. While we were having our lunch back at the River-Walk, a friend of mine called and when I told him we were in San Antonio, he asked if we had been to the historical haunted site yet! Haunted!! My ears immediately popped up! I did a quick search on my iPhone ;-) and sure enough, there was a haunted place near town where you can experience the "haunting" yourself!

It seems that some time in 1940's and bus of school children were passing through a railway track when all of a sudden the bus stalled right when it was over the tracks and unfortunately an oncoming train hit the bus and six of the kids along with the bus driver died. Now, legend goes that till this date if one takes their vehicle to the railroad crossing and stop right in front of it and put it on neutral, unknown forces move the vehicle until you have safely crossed the tracks to the other side. That happens in spite of the fact that the road just before the tracks is inclined upwards! And to top it all, many people swear that when they spread baby powder over their car's rear bumper and once they were across the tracks when they examined their car, they could see distinct baby palm prints all over the bumper!

After reading about such an interesting place, we had to check it out. So we went to the location and we saw another vehicle in front of us trying the same thing. We stopped our car at a safe distance and watched the vehicle in front of us smoothly crossing the tracks. Of course, from where we stood, we couldn't make out if they drove over the tracks themselves of did little invisible hands actually helped them? We had to find this for ourselves. So we drove towards the tracks (and trust me, the tracks in front of us are at a steep upward inclination), stopped the engine and put in on neutral. Sure enough! We could feel our car smoothly moving towards the tracks, cross the tracks over to the other side! We were flabbergasted! Of course, there has to be some scientific explanation behind all this! We made a quick u-turn and tried it again. And yeah, it happened for the second time too! There were other cars there who were also trying more than once. I even saw some families peering closely at their rear bumpers for tiny hand prints.

It was quite an out-of-body experience for us, but I am sure there must be some valid explanation for this all. Still it was a fun thing to do! Once I got back home, I did more research and found people have posted their experience with videos and pictures and some have even carried out experiments and provided explanations too.

On our way back to Irving from San Antonio, we stopped at Bandera which is supposed to be the cowboy capital of the world. However, we didn't have enough time to spare to explore the town and the ranches there. We did however stop at a saloon where I tried my very first (and second) tequila shot. It was fun!