Location Description and History

At night, the tower is surrounded by the glow from distribution centers on Henrietta Creek Road and from the mammoth office complexes on Texas 170. Power lines hum from above, and the streets are lined with manmade ponds and fire hydrants connected to nothing. Called the Lakes of Brookstone, the neighborhood featured a water tower at its center, hidden inside a stone facade topped with a fancy clock. Now the stone is a pile of rubble and the wooden frame stands burned by vandals. After Bradley's project went sour, developers Donald and Phillip Huffines planned a 297-home neighborhood complete with swimming beaches, using the name Bradley gave it: Lakes of Brookstone. It never materialized.

We don't have all the facts on the tower's background other than its is a abandoned subdivision in far north Fort Worth

Johnatan Nerbes had bought some land near Dallas and proceeded to build the tower despite warnings that he should not build there. The myths say this is due in fact from everything from Indian burial grounds to a sacred place of sorts. Some have even suggested that it is a portal to the "other side". Some satanic activity has been reported there and the signs of that are apparent on the remaining pillars of the house and foundation.

Now somewhere in this line of events, stories differ, this guy goes crazy, kills his wife and hangs her inside the tower, then kills his kids and buries them in to tower too. The tower was then bought by some individuals who were involved in some sort of real estate scam and arrested, thus leaving the tower abandoned as it is today. Down a cracked concrete road choked with weeds stands Crazy Man's Tower, a rusting shell with charred wooden beams and "Satan's Playground" scrawled on the side.

Word has it that a developer went mad out there, killed his wife and hanged her inside the spire, then buried his murdered children at her feet. Pass it at midnight, some say, and you may meet a corpulent, bearded ghost reclining in a lawn chair, soaking up moonbeams in the nude.

There is also a genuinely creepy tale from a local police officer. "He said there were bad things out there. Just a week before, they had found a burned car with a body inside on the premises. He also mentioned finding a skinned and dismembered goat, candles burning, and other strange things on various nights, and that the place gave him the creeps.

The EMF detector didn't pick up nothing really significant as far as readings for ghosts in these areas, but the tower was quite interesting in itself. We walked around the tower in a clockwise motion and got readings of up to 10m.g., but when we walked counter clockwise we got nothing. The readings were consistent and occurred at the same places (breaks in the tower wall) on the clockwise trip so they should register the same the other way around. Still, one odd EM field does not prove that a place is haunted.

After examing the tower, we placed a tape recorder in one of the breaks in the tower, in hopes of getting some EVP, then backed off for awhile to take a break. This was when we noticed the a rather unusual phenomena. It appeared as light grayish "shadows" that move about in the windows of the upper tower. At times they seemed to be peeking out at us and it seemed that there were several present. However they never left the tower. Granted they could be explained away by many different things, but we all saw them and watched their movement. If nothing else it definitely added ambiance to the ghost hunt.

Photographs

Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP)

Question asked / Comment responded to	Possible Response	Sample
A splash is heard in the pond next to the tower and Buck asks "What was that?"	Hard to understand, "I'm a ghost"
Sionnan (talking to Buck) says "There are several of them here".	Sounds like "Who are you talking to?"
Another EVP that follows the previous one	Sounds like "I'm the one to talk to"

Our ghost hunt did not turn up much in the way of finding ghosts. All of the pictures taken at the site during the ghost hunt contained nothing more than false positives and no EM fields of intrest were located. While we did get three EVP samples, all of them are very close to the threshold of actual EVP recordings and could quite possibly have a mundane source. After the hunt was over, we researched the site's history. The truth is far less compelling.

Debunked

The brainchild of Westlake Mayor Scott Bradley, it once boasted 17 artificial lakes and a massive stone clock. Crazy Man's Tower is a relic of an upscale development that Bradley pursued in the late 1980s until the funding collapsed in the savings and loan crisis.

Called the Lakes of Brookstone, the neighborhood featured a water tower at its center, hidden inside a stone facade topped with a fancy clock. Now the stone is a pile of rubble and the wooden frame stands burned by vandals. Katherine Boyer, head of the Roanoke Public Library, has heard "crazy man" stories for nearly a decade. She tells patrons that it's all urban legend and that no documentation exists. If there was a murder, as described by the legend, there would be documentation of it somewhere. There simply isn't any.

The urban legend of the "Crazy man" is only a legend that has been embellished overtime so that the facts are far distorted. It became a hangout for teens who invented stories that got wilder every day, drinking cheap beer with a suburban phantom. The myth has evolved to the additions of such phenomena as "Turning off your car and honking three times, after which you can hear a kid screaming."

This location is nothing more than an urban legend.