The hustler who haunts

Before his death in 1992, Puckett became national nine-ball champion, was featured on 60 Minutes with Harry Reasoner, was profiled by Texas Monthly magazine, and played televised matches with Willie Mosconi and Minnesota Fats.

Puckett also came to haunt a south Fort Worth pool hall, Fast Freddy's.

And now, at least according to the regulars down at Fast Freddy's, the great U.J. Puckett has returned.

"I sat here at 4 in the morning and heard the door open and close, and nobody was there and I said, 'Damn it, Puckett is walking around here again,'" said Richard McElroy, a longtime regular at the smoke-filled pool room down on Crowley Road.

"And a couple of girls have been right by him and they get a cold feeling, like he's standing over their neck. It's happened a couple of times. People talk about Puckett's ghost, and it's pretty serious."

The feared hustler

Utley J. Puckett was born April 17, 1911, in Prattsville, Ark. After his father died in a logging train accident, his family moved to Fort Worth, where he attended what eventually became Trimble Technical High School.

Puckett excelled at basketball but also learned to play pool at the Panther Boys Club. Sometime during his middle teens, he dropped out of basketball and high school, briefly went into professional boxing and then got an acting job in Hollywood.

But eventually he took up pool full time, and by his mid-30s he was one of the South's most feared hustlers.

Fishing buddy Jackie Reagor said Puckett would sometimes put on greasy Texaco overalls before walking into a room. He'd explain that he'd just sold his gas station and wanted to celebrate. He'd show a few thousand dollars, cash money, and say he was ready to gamble.

Or sometimes Puckett would go looking for action wearing newly shot ducks festooned around his belt.

Literally, ducks. The ones that go quack.

Puckett was pretending he was a hick just in from the country, Reagor explained.

"He would go out duck hunting, and he'd come back into the pool hall and have ducks and hunting stuff with him, and he'd just go in and rob 'em" hustling pool, Reagor said.

Another Puckett trick was to down a big shot of whiskey so the alcohol was on his breath, and then stagger around the pool room guzzling brown water from a Jim Beam bottle.

"That was an old sandbagger's trick," said Carl Raithel, another regular at Fast Freddy's. "He was sober as a judge, but you would swear that he couldn't take another step without falling down."

Although Puckett won the national nine-ball championship in 1960 (that's the game where the first nine balls are racked and they go down in order, first player to sink the nine-ball wins), he became best-known for his skill at the game called one-pocket. That's the game in which each player picks a corner pocket to sink balls into at a point per ball; first player to eight points wins.

Puckett played Jack "Jersey Red" Breit of Houston at one-pocket, and of course Rudolf Wanderone Jr., aka Minnesota Fats, among others.

He and Fats were great friends. He once spent a night in jail with Jersey Red after a gambling bust.

Puckett also enjoyed fishing and took his boat out regularly on Lake Worth. After his eyesight began to fail, he left pool almost altogether and would get his buddies to take him out angling.

In his later years, he had a heart attack and then a stroke, and then at age 81, on June 22, 1992, he died.

A ghostly silhouette

Helen Puckett, his widow, doesn't mince words as she sums up his life: "He partied, he went with all the girls, he went fishing, and he played pool."

Because they married relatively late in life -- it was 1975 -- Helen Puckett also said she was experienced enough to know what to expect from her gambling man. No regrets.

"He loved life, and he lived it like he wanted to -- that was his life," said Helen Puckett, who was also quick to add, "I worked."

When she was told that the regulars down at Fast Freddy's insist that her late husband is still stomping around and causing mischief, she snorted. He hardly worked while he was living, so why would he make such an effort now that he's gone?

"I don't believe in spirits," she said flatly.

Fast Freddy's has seen better days. The carpet is long gone, and the trophies and portraits of the hustler have been taken down.

But he is remembered with something verging on worship. Go in any day of the week and you might find a half-dozen patrons eagerly trading stories of how Puckett was half-blind but still could find the pockets; of how he would run rack after rack, of how he was unbeatable when the money was put down.

And they'll also tell darker tales of knocked-over pool cues and unexplained footsteps. A barmaid said she nearly jumped out of her skin when the ghostly banging began one afternoon in the walk-in cooler.

"There's nothing in there; you can check for yourself," she said solemnly. A former manager admitted getting spooked and drawing a weapon.

"I would hear voices and I would walk out of the office, and look around and I'd swear there would be someone there," said Rick Myers, who ran the pool room from about 2004 until earlier this year.

"I was there at night by myself one time and a TV turned on by itself. I had a gun with me at the time, for safety, and I had to walk out [from the office] with the gun because I thought somebody was there. That TV just turned off all the sudden, but there was no one there."

The eerie bumpings generally get going late, he said.

"The women, a lot of them, wouldn't stay there by themselves at night -- they'd get freaked out or scared," he said.

Myers insisted that a security camera once captured a pair of unearthly images --like silhouettes of a man and a woman.

"You could tell it was Puckett," Myers said, because the silhouette showed the hat he wore.

Mike Lynch, owner of Fast Freddy's, also remembers the "very weird" security tape. Unfortunately, he copied over it.

"It was after closing time, and there wasn't anybody there and we saw his image" on the tape, Lynch said. "It was like a shadow. We kept running it back and running it back, and wondering if our imaginations were getting the best of us. But it looked exactly like a man in a hat and a woman walking through the pool room."

Stories they swear by

On a recent afternoon, about a half-dozen customers eagerly told stories about the hustler's ghost. Sometimes the chain-smoking old-timers would nearly shout over one another, and sometimes they became deathly quiet like kids around a campfire.

Puckett was known for his giant feet -- size 13 shoes -- and his big, big hands. Puckett's ghost is stomping those big feet on wooden floors near the bathroom, they said, and he is running those big hands down the backs of pretty girls who linger a bit too long after dark.

Don't even think about moving the old leather chair next to table 19.

That's was his favorite table and his favorite chair.

"We try not to ever move it -- ever," one barmaid said with deadly earnestness. "We don't want to get Puckett mad."

The stories are told with gusto, especially when the Budweiser is flowing.

Take the time that Myers brought in the clairvoyant, how they sat at the edge of the bar, and then how the clairvoyant moved onto Puckett's chair.

The clairvoyant reported feeling Puckett's presence. She said Puckett didn't like anyone moving the chair.

Better yet, nobody should even sit in it, she said.

"They had a girl who could channel dead people -- they wanted me to get in there, but I didn't want to get into it," regular customer Raithel recalled. "I figured if Puckett wanted to tell me something, he would have told me when he was living.

"But I do know that I've heard wind blowing and the sounds," he added. "And then there was one time when the whole rack of sticks got thrown down and nobody was in here. I mean the whole rack fell down off the wall -- bip, bip, bip -- right in succession. And there wasn't anybody here."

His friend Reagor, 43, hooted when he heard that one.

"I think all of y'all have lost your minds," he said. "The last thing he would want to be remembered for was haunting this damn place. There are a lot of other places that he's rather be -- like Lake Worth or Eagle Mountain Lake. Fishing."

Hosea Robinson, a retired prison guard, accused Reagor of being scared. "That ol' Puckett is going to get into your pocketbook!" he said.

That led brothers Darryl and John Moorhead to say they mostly agree with Reagor, but not completely.

"Supposedly there was this shadow of him walking above the partition," John Moorhead said.

"He always said he'd been everywhere 10 times," Darryl Moorhead added.

And then someone ordered another beer, and Robinson got a refill on his coffee, and everyone agreed that Puckett was the best.

"And he's probably come back here, and he's listening right now," said Chloe Dore, the bartender. "I think this is where he wanted to be."

A few people started from their seats when the front door slowly creaked open. But it's not the wind and it's not U.J. Puckett. It's a customer.

The pool player sidled up to the bar, ordered a cup of coffee and decided to sit and listen a while.