A few miles north of town, off Texas Highway 220 after Mike’s Half-Fast Automotive Repair, then up a caliche road, across a creek bed and over an old, rusted bridge, stands a bed-and-breakfast with a twist.
Indian Mountain Ranch is not a standard quaint, antique-filled, upscale hostelry. The wood-and-glass lodge is well-appointed, but paying guests can find themselves sleeping on a foam futon mattress on the second-story landing-after communing with what they’re told is the spirit world.
“More people got messages than you can shake a stick at, and the spirits would say things that the people . . . would recognize,” insisted the inn’s owner, Vallie Taylor, 61, speaking of the seances-called “development circles”-held here.
“A woman from Plano (Texas), well, she had everybody she knew come through. Seemed like she had a family reunion,” said Taylor, a writer, former schoolteacher and firm believer in ghosts and psychic phenomena. “A local lawyer who was very skeptical had a spirit describe his gun rack. I welcome skeptical people because I was the most skeptical.”
Seances have become a periodic occurrence in the wooded hills above Hico, a cattle-and-pecan-growing area where folks, mostly Southern Baptist and Church of Christ, indulge themselves on peanut butter pie at the Koffee Kup Kafe.
Their close-knit community restores faded brick wall signs for all-but-forgotten products like Bright & Early Coffee and Hooper’s Tetteremedy anti-itch powder; generally ignores the occasional Ku Klux Klan rallies; and insists that Billy the Kid didn’t die in a New Mexico shootout, but lived in Hico to a ripe old age while hoping for a governor’s pardon that never came.
Some welcome the diversions created by Taylor’s seances, talks on alternative medicine and creative writing seminars, and are pleased by the assortment of outsiders drawn to homogeneous Hico, about 70 miles southwest of Ft. Worth.
“We don’t even have Jewish people. We don’t have a Catholic church. Now we have all races and religions coming through here for Val’s seminars,” said Cherry Searcy, 43, a paralegal who practices her own cultural diversity by moonlighting as a ballet, jazz dance, yoga and aerobics instructor.
“Let’s face it,” said Searcy, who grew up in Hico and returned with her lawyer-husband after attending the University of Texas at Austin. “Metaphysics is new to Hico. I know. I had a hard time when I taught hatha yoga. They thought it was anti-Christian.”
Others don’t quite know what to make of Taylor, her “development circles” and talk of ghosts.
“She’s a psycho, isn’t she? Fortuneteller-type thing?” asked Margie Decker, 61, proprietor of Hico’s Western Auto. She apparently meant “psychic.”
“They say she can even look into your `other world,’ ” Decker said. “I don’t know what they mean by that. I’m really not deep-minded.”
Harold Thurber, the Church of Christ minister, said Taylor’s ranch “is pretty well ignored. I certainly believe in the spirit world, but not in the world of disembodied spirits.”
Recently, Taylor has had to turn away people clamoring to attend a $150 “healing dream” course given by Liberty Hill, Texas, chiropractor Jerry Casebolt and Don Mannerberg, an Austin physician and “attitudinal healer.”
“Leave your diagnoses and your intellectual biases at home,” said Casebolt, 53, a student (like Mannerberg) of shamanism, the sort practiced by American Indian healers and Hawaiian “kahunas.” “Bring a drum or other musical instrument, your open mind, your willingness to participate and a good heart.”
Tim Gorski, an Arlington, Texas, obstetrician/gynecologist and an adviser to the North Texas Skeptics, a scientific group that works to debunk the claims of paranormal channelers and deliverers of miracle cures, called seances that produce spirits of a whole family “a fraud.”
But as for medical people like Mannerberg and Casebolt, Gorski said, “If all they’re saying is `we’re going to make you feel good’ and not claiming to affect your health in an objective way, it’s hard to say how a reasonable person could have an objection.”
Moreover, he noted that Western, mainstream medicine had used various remedies and procedures for years that are now discredited.
Taylor’s seminars, bed-and-breakfast ($75 to $110 for a private room with bath), free-lance writing and work on a book on “real” ghosts are not all that she offers.
“There are people here who love the fact that her place is out there and they are counseled by Val,” Searcy said. “If they have a problem, she’ll give it her best shot and very often she’s right on the money. She’s predicted a serious heart attack. She predicted something life-threatening to somebody and it did (happen). She’s a visionary. She’ll amaze you.”
According to client Peggy Parks, who paid $75 for a psychic reading, Taylor was “90 percent right.” Parks declined to catalog the 90 percent right and the 10 percent wrong.
“I think she was kind of hesitant at first to let people in Hico know she possessed those powers,” Parks, a former journalist and garbage contractor, said at the Bosque River Catfish & Steak restaurant. “But she’s good.”
Taylor lives on what she believes is sacred Indian land east of Hico. She had no intention of buying the land, building the hunting lodge-like B&B, or even moving from Austin when she tooled up in her silver sports car to visit a friend who had settled nearby. But she suddenly pictured the property in her mind and described it to a local real estate agent, Derel Fillingim, who had just received the listing.
“She just described the place,” said Fillingim, a former pecan farmer. “I wish people would do that more frequently. Would make my life easier.”
Taylor, a trim woman with blue eyes almost unworldly in their transparent depth, said it was no accident. Something had led her here. Just what, she declined to say.
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As yet, there is limited access for the handicapped at the ranch, although its owner is planning future buildings that will be fully accessible. Three rooms are partially outfitted for the disabled.
