Roadside court on route of Bankhead Highway was once a playground for a mischievous ghost

Bill and Sandy Brockman raise a garden, flowers and children in what remains of the structure and grounds of Mt. Pleasant's first motor court on The Bankhead Highway.

It was the 1920's and more than an overnight stop, the El Moro Motor Courts had a huge concrete-walled swimming pool with a gravel bottom, fed by a 500-foot well, remembers Clovis Williams, 87.

In the shaded valley between the railroad to the south and the highway to the north, a rock-lined stream fed by the well wound though the picnic area.

"They drilled the well to fill the pool," Mr. Williams said. An elaborate piping system fed the pool and provided water for the café, a pool-side shower and the facility's single flush toilet.

For a good part of the year, water simply flowed from the well. Flowers flanked the stream through the picnic area. The Brockmans raise a garden there now, and over the years he's moved bulbs and plants up from the little valley into the yard, closer to the house.

"It must have been beautiful," he says of the little valley.

It's closing on 20 years since the evening he managed to hack a trail through the undergrowth down to the edge of the pool.

Dark closed in as he worked and he heard the faint sound of children at play.

"It was strange because my kids were up at the house and there weren't anymore kids around," he said.

Standing in the driveway, telling the story, it was impossible, in the real light of a spring-like afternoon, to describe it as it was.

The world grew silent, still again. He went back to work and again, beneath the sound of a brush axe working, came the subtle, but distinctive sound of children at play, a sound coming from somewhere behind a curtain of willows that had overtaken the shallow end of the pool.

As if to erase any doubts, the voices came clearer, maybe closer, slowly taking on the unmistakable note of mischief, playful.

"I don't spook real easy, but I left and went to the house," he said.

How many years have passed since the pool was closed, he's never known, exactly, but later he heard a story about the pool closing after one of three boys swimming there one afternoon drowned.

The hotel kitchen and dining room, with quarters upstairs, is his home.

After the motel closed, a series of renters further defiled the place.

"One of the real shames - the upstairs part had hardwood floors. About the last of the people who lived here before we came had set up a meth lab - they got arrested and somehow water was left running," he said.

The picnic area in the valley had become a dump, the grounds a jungle.

In its declining days, bootleggers openly worked the old motel he's heard. In the years he's spent rebuilding the old rock retaining walls he's found evidence.

"Just about every kind of whiskey bottle there might have been," says Mrs. Brockman.

There wasn't anything like the swimming pool at the El Moro Courts within horse and wagon range of Clovis Williams home at Farmer's Academy.

"Daddy farmed, and the only road coming east into Mt. Pleasant ran right in front of the house. Whatever he grew, he'd set it out by the road to trade," said Mr. Williams.

His daddy, W.A. "Bud" Williams, raised peaches, plums and apples on 40 acres, all of it in cultivation.

He had a syrup mill.

"His goal was to make a thousand bushels of fruit and a thousand gallons of ribbon cane syrup, every year," Mr. Williams said. "I never knew of a year he didn't."

If Bud Williams ever had money, his son never knew about it.

"What we didn't raise, daddy traded for," he said. "I remember a man in a buggy - he'd built a box on back big enough to carry a number three wash tub. He'd kill a beef, wrap the meat in newspaper, put it in the tub and strike out on a peddler's route. That's where we got our meat."

The children in the family traded a fair amount of fruit to swim at El Moro.

"Whatever we had they he wanted, he'd get it," Mr. Williams said. "And we got to swim all we wanted."

Beside the picnic area there were hitching rails and a small parking lot. People from the neighborhood walked, farm families from neighboring communities came in wagons and buggies. People from Winfield and Mt. Vernon who had cars drove over, all of them blending with travelers.

Mr. Brockman's family bought the place from the second owners, a family named Buckner.

"A man named Rolf was the first owner," said Mr. Williams, whose brother-in-law F.E. Berry, did the concrete work for the pool.

"It's likely he built that stucco building that Mr. Brockman lives in," says 72-year-old Donal (sic) Berry, F.E.'s son.

Born in Cooper, F.E. Berry came to Titus County to work for O.L. Krigler, a contractor.

"Whatever there was to do with concrete, they did it," Mr. Berry said. "They worked for oil companies, utility companies, you name it. My dad went into business for himself later - I helped pour the vault at the old Guaranty Bank."

In the 1930's, a unique bootlegger lived across the highway from the motel, Mr. Williams said.

"He sold bonded whiskey," Mr. Williams said. On the three mile Saturday walk into town, Mr. Williams and his brothers were always on the lookout for liquor bottles in the bar ditch.

"The bootleggers who sold white lightning - which was all the rest of them we knew - would give a nickel a piece for those bonded whiskey bottles in the days when a pop bottle wouldn't bring but a penny. When we got to town, whatever we'd picked up we'd sell to the first bootlegger we could find," he said.

A mechanic by trade, Mr. Brockman has pieced together scraps of information about the water system. Though not working, system components were in place when he started cleaning up.

He's replaced the compression pump that pushed water with forced air to an immersible pump that pushes water straight to the surface - and he's measured the depth - 550 feet.

Water piped to the pool ran through two skimmers.

The light pole at the north end of the pool still stands. Mr. Berry's concrete work shows where the shower was by the picnic area, as do slabs where the picnic tables sat. On the north side, a concrete anchor that once held the pole for the sign facing the railroad remains.

Beyond his digging and working, Mr. Brockman got his information from a daughter of the Buckner family, the woman he bought the place from.

"People coming into town on the train would see the sign, the pool," he said. "When they got into town, they'd get a cab from the depot and come back out."

As for the ghost, he made believers of the family.

"I was cooking one night and had the lid to my skillet laying beside the stove," Mrs. Brockman said. "I must have turned away - when I looked back it was gone."

She hunted it until she gave up and took the skillet out to the store room. The next morning, the lid was back, sitting where she'd left it, beside the stove.

Working late one night in his shop, Mr. Brockman was repeatedly called to a knock on the door.

Finally, he called up to the house, demanding to know which of the kids was knocking on the door and then running.

"They're all inside," his wife told him.

Their ghost liked making himself known in an upstairs bedroom. He never revealed himself, but he liked moving things and over the years, he seemed to pop in and out.

It's been three years now since the last visit from the Buckner family daughter from whom they bought the place - as a child, she'd lived here a while.

She spent an afternoon recalling those times and when she left, it seems their ghost left.

"I don't believe he's been around since," Mr. Brockman said.