WFAA.com staffer Lucy Jones—who moved to Dallas from London in August—reports on the mysterious attractions of Caddo Lake in East Texas.
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American small towns are very good at promoting their sometimes modest tourist attractions.

I was totally taken in by a brochure advertising Marshall, Texas, located 160 miles east of Dallas.

“Visit wonderland of lights for an old-fashioned Christmas beyond your childhood dreams. The 9,000,000 tiny white lights turn the city into a dreamland, with our historic courthouse as its jewel,” the leaflet said.

Nine million lights – it sounded impressive. But when we pulled up at Marshall, we found the town square’s lights no more pretty than, say, those decking out the public library in Richardson.

However, just a few miles from Marshall lies a genuine attraction – Caddo Lake, which rather than an open-water lake is more a labyrinth of swamps and waterways lined with moss-draped cypress trees.

Arriving in the deserted lakeside settlement mysteriously called Uncertain (population circa 200), was rather like entering a horror movie set.

Cypress trees emerge from the middle of the still black waters, their tresses of moss floating eerily in the wind. The enormous blue herons we saw from our window looked like something out of the dinosaur age.

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