Bad Moon Rising: Dispatches from the Dark Side of a Small Texas Town

Creedence Clearwater Revival: Bad Moon Rising

Bad Moon Rising: Dispatches from the Dark Side of a Small Texas Town

INTRO 

You know that song Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival?

Yeah… that one.

It’s wild, how much it reminds me of my hometown.

Not just because it’s a classic (which it is), or because it still plays on every radio, gas station speaker, and dad-rock playlist in Texas, but because it somehow matches the mood.

It has this eerie, yet upbeat weird foresight or synchronicity to foreshadowing darkness, like a warning. Like a whisper that something’s about to break. That something might already be broken.

That jangly guitar. That warning of trouble. That upbeat rhythm carrying dark news underneath.

As a kid, I didn’t think about it too hard. CCR was just part of the air we breathed on road trips, in the garage, at fish fries and family reunions. My parents loved them. Everyone’s parents did.

But now, when I look back at where I’m from and all the strange, tragic, beautiful things that happened there, I hear that song differently.

It doesn’t just remind me of home.

It sounds like it.

I grew up in Normangee, Texas.

A small town with one school, a few churches, and a name most people mispronounced if they weren’t from there.

My roots are deep there. So are the stories.

Some of them sweet. Some of them strange.

Some of them I still don’t understand.

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ACT I: Before the Moon Went Bad

Summers in Normangee moved slow.

We had vacation Bible school in the mornings, the Normangee Pool or Hilltop Lakes in the afternoons, and bikes in between. Someone’s mom would drive a bunch of us to the water; someone else’s would bring us back. It didn’t matter who. Everyone’s parents felt like a little bit yours.

Bob’s Corner Grocery sold Farm Girl sandwiches, a local favorite! The fountain machine had crushed ice, the good kind, and everything smelled like cigarettes and Bob’s brisket.

You didn’t really “hang out” in Normangee. You just existed near each other on porches and parking lots and ballfields. Baseball under the stars was more than a pastime. It was a language. A rhythm. A heartbeat.

Our town doctor was a Mason… one of the smartest, kindest men I ever met. He saw people from his own house. You’d show up, sit in a lawn chair out front, and wait your turn. No appointments. No paperwork. No shoes required. Just trust. And a little patience.

This was a town where people waved when they passed you on the road, even if they didn’t know your name. Where casseroles showed up before bad news even finished arriving.

Cake walks and bake sales were sacred.

Sunday meant church, and church meant more than just the sermon… it meant family.

Everything felt wide open. Slow. Safe.

The kind of place that looked like the lyrics to a country song, and sometimes felt like one too.

Maybe even the first verse of something bigger.

Everyone knew everyone, or they knew your people.

Teachers stayed for decades.

Preachers knew your grandparents.

If something happened, word spread fast, whether it was good, bad, or somewhere in between.

That’s just how it was.

And for a long time, nothing felt off.

Or if it did, I didn’t notice it yet.

We didn’t know what was coming.

Not yet.

ACT II: Looks Like We’re In for Nasty Weather

I was at school the day it happened.

Two men robbed the bank. They ran to the cemetery and killed an elderly woman out there.

I didn’t know anything at the time. I didn’t see sirens or hear announcements. I just went to class like it was a normal day.

It wasn’t until later after school, and more so the next day that I started to hear the story.

Everyone was talking, but no one knew how to talk about it.

It didn’t feel like something that could happen in our town.

But it had.

The woman who was killed wasn’t just a stranger to us.

She was someone’s grandmother. Someone’s neighbor.

Someone who showed up to church. Someone who bought gas at the same store we did.

But the part that’s always stayed with me… the part I still think about is this:

My mom had a doctor’s appointment in Houston that day. She needed someone to take her, and she asked a close friend to come with her. A woman she’d known her whole life. Someone I loved too. Her son was my friend. Her family was like extended family to us.

That woman had lost a child of her own, and she used to go to the cemetery nearly every day just to be near him. To sit. To think. To grieve in peace.

And on that particular day, if my mom hadn’t needed a ride to Houston… she probably would’ve been there.

At the cemetery.

Right around the time it happened.

But she wasn’t.

Because my mom asked her for help.

I think about that more than I can say.

It breaks my heart that someone was killed. I don’t take that lightly. But I’ve always wondered, if my mom hadn’t needed a ride that day, if she hadn’t made that call… would there have been two victims instead of one? I can’t shake the feeling that something shifted that day like God rerouted the map, just a little.

Some days, that’s what Normangee felt like.

Like a place where miracles and tragedies brushed shoulders.

And sometimes you didn’t even realize which one you were inside of.

I realized that even in a town like ours where the days felt simple and the rhythm felt known something could shift without warning.

And nothing would ever feel quite the same again.

 ACT III: Under the Blade of the Bad Moon

There was a group of boys at our school who called themselves things like Rat Boy and Mouse Boy.

They were older. Troubled. Wild in a way that didn’t feel fun.

They used to steal from the local stores and vandalize houses and abandoned buildings.

They carried a kind of energy that made teachers tense up when they walked past.

And one day, Rat Boy held a knife to my brother’s throat.

We were outside at school on one of those wide concrete walkways that connected the buildings. Not a hallway. Not tucked away.

Out in the open.

While he kept the knife pointed at my brother, he threatened to hurt me next.

I froze. Terrified.

Not because I didn’t understand what was happening… because I did.

This wasn’t just some weird older kid acting tough.

This was real.

This was danger.

And it was standing in front of us with a blade.

He got spooked by a noise and ran off aggressive and fast.

We lived basically across the street from the school.

Just a few houses in between.

The kind of setup where sometimes our golden retriever Max would meet us at school in the afternoon and escort us home.

But that day, we didn’t wait.

We raced home as fast as our feet would carry us, burst through the door, and ran straight to our dad.

He picked up the phone and called the police himself.

What he said was simple. And terrifying in its own right:

“I’m leaving the house with my gun.

You’d better find that kid before I do.”

They found him.

Fast.

And after that, something changed in me.

In the way I looked at school.

In the way I understood safety.

In the way I started to recognize what fear actually felt like.

Up until then, the world had mostly been soft.

But that day?

That day was sharp.

ACT IV: Hope You’ve Got Your Things Together

It started with a hit-and-run.

Someone hit a woman with their car and left her for dead.

She survived and she remembered.

She gave a name. Gave a description.

And when the police showed up to question the guy involved, they didn’t just find him.

They found his wife and children in a wood chipper.

It’s the kind of sentence that doesn’t sound real when you say it out loud.

But it happened.

Right there.

Not far from where we had once lived.

And the man who had been with him, his friend… just disappeared.

Vanished.

No arrest. No trial.

Just gone.

What haunted me wasn’t just what they found.

It was how close it all was.

This didn’t happen in a movie or on the news—

it happened here.

In the same place we grew up, went to school, rode our bikes, and thought we were safe.

The wood chipper.

The drugs.

The murder.

The absolute chaos hiding just below the surface.

That would’ve been enough to carry.

But that wasn’t the end.

A while after I graduated, I got a call from the local lawyer’s office.

Apparently, the FBI had come in.

Turns out a guy who worked there had been embezzling money and funneling it into a Swiss account.

Some of the funds stolen had come from my account.

And they were being returned.

That’s how I found out about the audit.

The theft. The money. The investigation.

That’s how I learned the FBI had already been involved because of the hit-and-run and the wood chipper.

I didn’t know what to feel.

Shock didn’t really cover it.

It felt like the walls of the town were breaking apart, 

and secrets were leaking out that had been buried for years.

The day I got the call, I remember thinking:

How deep does this go?

How many things had happened just beneath the surface,

while we were out riding bikes and playing baseball and thinking nothing could touch us?

Maybe the bad moon had been rising for a long time.

We just hadn’t looked up yet.

ACT V: There’s a Bad Moon on the Rise

You’d think it would’ve stopped by now.

That maybe all the chaos had already happened.

That the worst of it was behind us.

However, Normangee still makes the news occasionally.

Sometimes it’s for awesome stuff

like basketball state championships,

local sports legends,

or band teachers who go on late-night talk shows

and play the turkey baster.

But more recently…

it’s gotten a lot more dark and twisted.

A while back, a story broke about a youth pastor.

A predator.

Accused of abusing a young girl.

It spread fast, and my social media feed was flooded with the story.

It didn’t stay local.

It spread like wildfire. 

Devon Sawa (yeah, Final Destination Devon Sawa)

even my favorite model, Katie Wilcox, shared the story.

And suddenly, Normangee wasn’t just a small town with buried secrets.

It was trending.

Another headline.

Another crack in the map.

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And somewhere in the background of all this—

still playing in gas stations and waiting rooms and old trucks…

is that song.

“I hear hurricanes a-blowin’…”

When I was younger, it felt like nothing more than an old rock song.

Catchy. Familiar.

Something you danced to and sang along with without thinking.

A song featured in a favorite childhood film (My Girl).

But now?

I hear it differently.

“Don’t go ’round tonight, well it’s bound to take your life,

There’s a bad moon on the rise.”

It sounds different when you’ve lived in a place like that…

Where everything seems fine, until it’s not.

Where tragedy doesn’t knock first.

It just shows up,

sits at your kitchen table,

and dares you to act surprised.

ACT VI: Don’t Go Making Plans Tonight

I don’t live in Normangee anymore.

But I woke up to it again.

Scrolling through Facebook at 4 a.m. (the way you do when your brain won’t turn off) I saw the flood begin. Another headline. Another wave of people posting in disbelief. Another wave of people who weren’t all that surprised.

A man in Houston shot and killed his mother.

Then he drove to Normangee.

And there, just outside of town he shot and killed his father. He killed their dogs. He shot a deputy in the face and arm. Then, in the hours that followed, he took his own life.

There was a standoff. A shelter-in-place. A town on lockdown.

The deputy survived, thank God.

But not everyone did.

I wasn’t there.

I didn’t hear the sirens or feel the ground shake beneath it.

But I knew the rhythm of what was coming.

I’d seen it before. Too many times.

And still… it hit me like a gut punch.

Because Normangee was trending again.

Not for something sweet or strange or even small-town legendary.

But for another headline with a body count.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about how many times this has happened now.

How often it all feels like a pattern.

Another storm. Another name.

Another person who thought they had more time.

That’s what the song always said, didn’t it?

“Don’t go making plans tonight…”

Because in a place like this, tomorrow isn’t promised.

And the calm is never quite what it seems.

Every small town has its songs, its secrets, its shadows.

And some of them never make it past the county line.

But some, like this don’t stay quiet forever.

I carry all of it with me.

The light. The dark. The weird. The beautiful.

CCR always knew. Bad Moon Rising always knew.

Not just that storms were coming.

But that they were already here.

That even when the sky looks calm and the wind feels still,

something can be shifting just beneath your feet.

Even the darkest towns have stars above them.

Even the messiest maps hold moments of light.

Even under a bad moon.

Sometimes, good people live in dark places.

Sometimes, dark things happen in good places.

And despite the chaos and the noise, let’s try not to forget:

light almost always finds a way through the darkness.

I might’ve grown up in a town full of tragedy, with more headlines than we ever asked for.

But somehow between the storms and the stories I carried something else out with me.

The light. The grit. The good.

And even in the shadow of a bad moon, I learned how to walk toward the light.