Waco's Cameron Park keeps a grabbing ghost on the 88 steps of Jacob's Ladder, and by the stories the woman in a couple is the first to feel the hands. Deeper along the trails, a burned stone house has been carrying three different witches for a century.
Jacob's Ladder is a stair of 88 steps in Cameron Park, in Waco, Texas, climbing almost 100 feet up a bluff. The story on it is that something grabs at you on the way. Not a push. A tug, at a sleeve, at the hem of a jacket, at a handful of hair. When a couple climbs it after dark, the way it gets told, the woman is the one who feels the hands first.
People have been reporting it since the 1980s, and they have a name for whatever is doing it. They call him Grabby. The account attached to the name is that he was a man who murdered dozens of pregnant women and put their bodies in the Brazos, where the current carried them off and no one ever found them. No such case exists. There is no victim named, no year, no arrest, nothing in the newspapers. Just a name for the hands on the stairs.
In 2023 a KWBU reporter climbed the ladder at night with a guide working a pair of dowsing rods. Cindy, the paranormal investigator on the segment, calls Cameron Park the most haunted place in Waco and describes people getting poked and grabbed going up and coming down. "There's been a lot of poltergeist activity out there," she said. "Jacob's Ladder, very haunted."
The ground under all of it is 416 acres where the Bosque runs into the Brazos, deeded to the city in 1910 by the widow and children of a Scottish lumber man named William Cameron. The stair was cedar then, built by a man named James H. Sturgis. The concrete went in in 1963.
Further into the park, behind the broken remains of a stone archway, sits a ruined house. People who go looking for it come back describing a smell like decaying flesh, screams and gasps and banging in the trees, shapes moving near the walls. A Waco land surveyor, John Kamenec, traced the building to a stonemason named Levi Coombes who put it up as a family home in the early 1900s. It stood empty for decades and burned in 1961.
None of which has slowed the witch. The Waco Tribune-Herald counted three of her in circulation: a recluse who cured her neighbors with home remedies; a mother who went insane after her only son was killed by the cannons of the First World War; and a woman who sacrificed her own children to the devil, then went into the woods after more souls.
Brad Turner, a McLennan Community College science instructor who gathered the park's legends into a book, thinks she was none of them. He thinks she was the Cameron children's nanny, a Victorian woman who ran vagrants off the family land by coming at them with a switch. "Legend is, she was probably called the witch while she was still living," he said.
Then she died, suddenly. And the vagrants kept saying they saw her, coming after them through the park.
