10/26/2026
Just in time for Halloween, here's a spooky tale from Ed Syers, collected in his book, "Ghost Stories of Texas." I highly recommend you search out a copy if you're a fan of Texas folklore.
"The Fiddler"
The river crept along, slack and dark; and its mouth, opening secretively into the Gulf, was already obscured by twilight.
Slowly the man rowed his boat into the current, pulling against it just enough to keep station on the point marking river’s end. He took care to dip his oars noiselessly, for he was waiting for the other sound.
He knew the legends of this “Singing River,” the San Bernard. If you search near its mouth for buried treasure, beware of the ghost music that will rise with darkness, and rise and rise until . . . Well, no one had stayed to hear it mount to crescendo.
If that were true, the men had concluded, the treasure still must be somewhere about.
What was it that he heard now? Surely, the working of tidal currents against a shell bottom. Yet there was a thinness, a reediness . . . like the sawing of a fiddle at some forgotten sea chantey. Indeed, from the near dark, he could distinguish some antique tune; still, he was listening less to its melody than to its volume.
Unquestionably, the sound was swelling.
The man stopped rowing; it was quite loud, clearly that of a fiddle now, an enormous one, and from the black water all about, it seemed to envelop him, threateningly discordant.
It pressed upon him like a wall, something that you could almost reach out and touch or—was it possible?—something that reached out for you. Was something about to rise from the water?
From the bank, they saw the boatman last when, not waiting to beach his craft, he scrambled out, leaped on his horse and whipped it away into the night. There had been just enough light to see his face—pale with terror.
This happened, they say, more than a century ago and, at the San Bernard’s mouth, near nowadays Brazosport and yesterday’s Velasco, it has been repeated many times since—to those who have been willing to dare the haunting of Fiddler’s Island.
In its brief, upper reaches, the San Bernard is a tenuous and inauspicious stream, gathering to full, dark flow only near the old Brazoria coast, a hundred miles from its head. You can reach the mouth by farm roads that follow the river from Churchill Bridge, west of the Brazoria-Freeport highway. There are some well-groomed houses, then cottages in sparse timber, finally the reedy, open coast and the Gulf beyond.
You come finally upon a cluster of stilt-legged beach houses and a well appointed River’s End camp. Just inshore, opposite a small white grocery are some fishing sheds where, some years ago, the weathered tavern of Henry and Nettie Overbay stood—it has long since burned—and where I learned of this story.
Behind the Overbay’s place, then, was a slip for small craft; now everything is dredged across to a low, treeless island. If fishing is your aim, you have reached sheltered moorage.
However, if you taunt it, this is also the center of old, old haunted ground where something once was hidden and guarded by fearful music that no one—so far as is known—has dared to endure to its end.
Just across, you are looking at Fiddler’s Island.
The legend of its naming varies with the teller. One account remembers colonial days when this coast landed Stephen F. Austin’s first colonists. A young musician was to bring his bride home here, but he lost her just hours before their wedding.
Grief-stricken—perhaps jilted—he shut himself away in his cabin. The girl disappeared; some suggest that she may have been buried in this loneliness. Passing by, early travelers could see the faintest light from the island cabin, and from it they could hear the cry of that man’s violin. He was never seen again, and time took his cabin as—over the years—it has modified the size and appearance of the island.
Yet on dark nights, his music remained. For the intruder who insisted on searching about, that music rose in volume until it became overwhelming.
A second version retreats even earlier in time to an 1816 pirate sloop, hurricane-driven to haven here, but crushed in the storm. There was a treasure chest from the Spanish brig, "Santa Rosa", sunk off Matagorda Island. There was a survivor—some say two: one who killed the other, then fled with a crude map of the treasure’s grave.
In time, a strange recluse appeared and contrived a shack near the river mouth. He fiddled the nights away with his jug and sea chanteys and through the days he searched the changeableness of shoreline. Hostile eyes watched; the ferocious Karankawa roamed this coast. Was it the Indian who killed this one? Did one pirate kill another? For it was told that the man was found on his pallet, head and fiddle split, and everything scoured by a searching ferocity.
Into the dark waters went that man’s body and, with it, his fiddle.
By the turn of this century, coastal Oldtimers could remember many who had come to Fiddler’s Island. Some came, joking and laughing, just to dare the ghost. Others seemed more intent; but with all, the story was the same: these intended to row out past the island and beyond it to the mouth, where they would await the windy dark. Then they would see what happened.
Some few, it was suspected, intended more: perhaps the beaching of their boats beyond the bend, then a search of the ground. But always they came back in haste, tightlipped and pale, left hurriedly, and were never seen again. So goes the story.
Now one man must have believed these legends, for many years ago—before the river’s lower reaches built up—a recluse turned up near the San Bernard’s mouth. He wanted no boat; he managed a shack and kept to himself; few knew anything of him beyond the name he gave them—Sandy. The Overbays knew him best, and therein lies this version.
Of indeterminate age and an obvious loner, still he came up to the tavern, comparatively new then, for something to drink. Once when he may have had too many, he threw a handful of Spanish reals on the counter, and then—as though alarmed with what he had disclosed—he scooped them up, lapsed into silence and shortly left.
Not long after, he was dead in that cabin—natural causes, it was determined. They could find none of the Spanish gold; however, it did leak out that the stranger came from the East, that he came looking for this specific river mouth, and that his bank account back home labeled him a wealthy man.
I wish I could resolve this story for you, but, as always with yesterday’s most intriguing legends, the music of Fiddler’s Island is little spoken of these days—those who haunt us must come, computer operated, from outer space.
In any event, the only recent account I know is that of a young friend who persuaded his father to run their fishing boat into the San Bernard. The boy—with his father along to share bravery—wanted to test the ghost music.
“Did you hear it?” I asked him.
“We didn’t even look,” he said. “It got stormy instead. The wind got higher and higher; it made an awful sound.”
“So you didn’t really look for anything?”
He shook his head vigorously. He knew the legend: you have to search before the fiddler rises to beset you.
On the other hand, maybe there’s nothing for the fiddler to guard. Maybe the recluse Sandy dared his music to the end and found that treasure.
If he hadn’t died, no doubt he could have told us.
