Baled in a Bale. (original) (raw)

I first ran onto this folklore strain in 2004, when I found a 1909 story published by an Erath County newspaper in which the solution to a missing child case was reported.

The previous fall, the newspaper said, a two-year-old boy had disappeared without a trace. He had last been seen playing near a cotton gin. The following spring, the toddler turned up in England � dead in a bale of fine Texas cotton.

Recently, I got an email from 75-year-old James �Butterbean� (�I love butterbeans,� he says, �but you just can�t find �em anymore�) Carpenter, who raises miniature horses near Valerain Coleman County. Though admitting he got it second-hand, he offered another body-in-a-bale story. He says it supposedly happened during the 1950s somewhere in West Texas, possibly Ralls.

His Uncle George�s brother (his dad�s sister�s husband�s brother) disappeared along with his elderly mother, Carpenter writes. The man had a reputation as a boozer and his mother suffered from senile dementia.

�About three years later my uncle�s sister got a call from [the] sheriff�s department informing her of an elderly woman who had the sister�s address on a letter in her possession,� Carpenter continues.

The deputy who contacted Carpenter�s relative asked her if she had any missing relatives. The sister described her mother and the officer said it sounded like the woman they had in protective custody.

The elderly woman had been found wandering in the yard of a rent house and someone had called the sheriff, the deputy explained. Investigators looking into the matter learned that the house had been rented by a man who had his mother living with him, but no one knew where he had gone.

Finally, a deputy found a witness who recalled having seen the man walking in the direction of the cotton gin when it was ginning.

Checking there, the deputy learned from the operator that he had given the man a job oiling the bearings above the point where the cotton was pushed into the large blades that stripped away the burrs and seeds.

�The man had not been seen again and the operator figured that he had quit,� Carpenter says.

Later, when the bales produced that fall were being moved around, someone noticed a dark stain on one of them.

�It was blood,� Carpenter goes on, �so they checked some other bales and found more blood, seven bales in all.�

The gin operator called the sheriff�s office to report the grisly discovery. No trace of the missing man�s body could be found, but the officers concluded that the man, likely drunk, had fallen into the machinery. Pieces of his body had ended up in multiple bales of cotton.

The gin burned the stained bales, a practical if inelegant funeral pyre for a man who paid a hard price for his addiction. At least that�s the story.

Whether the man actually tumbled into a swirling maw of sharp blades and got baled or merely disappeared into the mist of alcoholism, this and the other body-in-a-bale story sound like a rural variation of the old body-in-a-large-dam legend.

The best example of this folklore category is the persistent legend that several construction workers fell into the concrete when the Hoover Dam was being built back during the 1930s in Nevada. Unable to rescue the unfortunate souls, the story goes, their still-healthy colleagues just kept pouring more concrete on them.

While the Hoover Dam tale has been quite credibly debunked (for one thing, engineers say a body could not be left to decompose in concrete because that would weaken the structure), similar stories are told of the Grand Coulee Dam on Washington�s Columbia River. I�ve also heard the legend associated with Lake Travis� Mansfield Dam and I�m sure there are other dams in Texas with reputed construction worker burials.

One thing is indisputable: Working in a cotton gin or at a major construction site has a few more risks associated with it than sitting in an office.

� Mike Cox "Texas Tales"

September 11, 2009 column