A city without history is a city without texture, without character. What you see is what you get, nothing more. Freeways, businesses, apartments — everything just happened, just now.
Brad Ford Smith is looking for the hidden, the lost or forgotten. It's generally been lost or forgotten because we prefer it that way. The longtime Dallas artist is researching sites where violent death or strange catastrophes have happened: lynchings, bus accidents, unsolved murders.
"Sudden, unexpected death and tragedy," Smith said, "to me, that -- especially when it involved foolishness or carelessness — that would generate a ghost, I'd think."
Traditionally, ghosts represent the unresolved past, the memory that won't go away — despite the bulldozers and developers. Smith visits the location and draws it as it is today. Sometimes it's just a home, an empty street or a new office building.
There's the house on Jefferson where a married couple was found shot to death in their bed in 1920 in their upstairs room. The police thought only one shot was fired. No one was ever charged. Or there's the White Rock Creek bridge where a bus drove off in 1915 during a sleet storm. Six died, including the driver.
Of course, Dallas already has a few ghostly legends. The Adolphus Hotel reportedly has several. ("Some of the true stories are of people who ended up falling down the elevator shafts," said Smith).
And the Lady of the Lake is probably our best known haunting. A young, wet woman gets picked up by motorists near White Rock Lake and climbs in the back seat — only to disappear when they ask her where she's going or what happened to her. The story first appeared in print in 1943.
But Smith shrugs off that particular spectral visitation.
"For the Lady of the Lake to be such a popular local ghost story, I thought was kind of sad for Dallas, really," he said. "It's a little wishy-washy [meaning: not historically based]. I looked into it, and there are three women who are supposed to be the ghost, and one of them drowned before the lake was even made."
All of this death and drawing may seem a little macabre. And the macabre hardly fits Dallas' preferred image of shining winners and bustling business. But if the city can obliterate something so pervasive as the cotton farms that once stretched to the horizon (why do you think the Cotton Bowl is here?), then some isolated 'unpleasantries' are easy enough to forget.
So Smith is simply noting the places where Dallasites once died — violently — and then he posts his pen-and-ink drawings on his Facebook page and Instagram feed (@BradFordSmithPics).
One picture a day — until Halloween.
Some locations he's chosen are well-marked. Dealey Plaza, of course. Or Freedman's Cemetery — an entire Black community's historic burial ground was 're-discovered' when the widening of Central Expressway uncovered several graves.
But most sites are not so known or identified — like the Conrad Street location where, in 1949, the wife of gangster Herbert "The Cat" Noble was blown up in her car. Noble was once infamous: He was called "The Cat" for the many times his gangland enemies in Dallas failed to kill him — like this time.
But the next time, they succeeded — and Smith notes, because of that, Noble and his wife may well be the only Dallas couple to be killed in explosions. Separate explosions.
One of Smith's sources of inspiration and information, he said, was the online'Dallas Death Map'created in 2020 by a special collections archivist and a data visualization librarian in the UT-Arlington library. The map used 1915 and 1920 data (from the Dallas Public Library, including Texas Death Certificates, City Directories, historical maps, newspaper, and inquest records) to pinpoint the locations of area deaths. The map is no longer accessible online, but it provided the background for a number of unusual deaths for Smith's drawings.
"It excluded deaths that were hospital-related," Smith said, "which would be, you know, normal illness. Or old age. So there were a lot of poisonings, explosions and some unusual suicides."
UPDATE: Priscilla Escobedo, the UTA special collections archivist who helped create the 'Dallas Death Map,' has transferred it to her personal website. So it's available again here.
For all of the history of destruction and death behind Smith's drawings, the drawings themselves are fairly peaceful, even pastoral, despite their urban locations.
Several scenes look as though they're simply waiting for something else to happen, something to break the stillness. Perhaps a gunshot. A car wreck.
A ghost.
Brad Ford Smith's ghost drawings can be found online here and here.
Got a tip? Email Jerome Weeks at jweeks@kera.org. You can follow him on Twitter @dazeandweex.
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