Waco Community Network

In January 1895, a Waco woman checking beaver traps found something sticking out of a riverbank that turned the whole town upside down.

George Renick's wife was working a gravel pit near Tennessee Street when she spotted it: a human foot and leg jutting from the bank. But this was no ordinary body. The flesh had turned to stone — dun-colored, it rang like rock when tapped, and you could still see the pores in the skin.

Old-timers swore they knew who it was: Bill Johnson, the "terror of the Brazos." Back in 1859, Johnson had been captured in a Bridge Street shootout — then shot, hanged, disemboweled, and buried on a bluff by a mob. A surviving posse man, Capt. Henry Warren, took one look and would only say it "looks like Bill."

They put the body on display in an empty storefront and charged admission. A Dallas doctor examined it and called it a counterfeit — adding that a genuine petrified man would be "even more wonderful." A New Yorker wrote in saying the whole thing matched the Cardiff Giant, the famous 1869 gypsum hoax.

Then came the twist: amateur detectives reported a heavy box delivered to a house on South 10th Street the previous November — and men seen hauling something human-shaped through the night.

Before anyone could settle it, the courts seized the body to pay Renick's debts and auctioned it off. The buyer loaded it up and drove away after dark. It was never seen again.

Renick's farewell: "He may be a petrified mistaken identity for all I know, or maybe he is the original Adam. We found him and he is ours."

Four years later, copycat "petrified Bill Johnsons" were still popping up as far away as Alabama.

So — hoax, mistaken identity... or the original Adam?