Be Afraid, very afraid

Close Encounters of the Zombie Kind: Three near-misses in one day in westHouston

Truth is often stranger than fiction and I swear every word of this is true.

By lunch time on Halloween I had run into three zombies. In broad daylight!

Mind you, these weren’t the kind of zombies you’d expect to see on a day like Halloween, and surely not until a little later when the sun was down and the ghouls were out in force. No, these were real zombies and infinitely more frightening than the costumed kind.

Zombie encounter # 1

My first experience was with a lady driving her car in my neighborhood. Let’s call her zombie #1.

I was minding my own business, idling at a stop sign. (I'm a big Halloween fan and decorate my west Houston home inside out with ghoulish trinkets. There’s always one last minute idea to enhance my front yard cemetery before the candy troops arrive so I was on my way to Lowe’s to get another spotlight.)

This lady zombie turns onto my street and into my lane aimed straight at my car. If she hadn’t caught herself in time she would have hit me head on.

With eyes focused on something far, far away (like maybe another planet) she slowly glided past my car as if it was invisible.

She never glanced in my direction and her face had no expression (as in, “Hey, I could have just killed somebody.”) Instead, she continued her journey in an oblivious state.

Zombie encounter #2

Barely having time to recover from my first real live zombie encounter on Halloween (I confess my heart was still kind of pounding from it) I was next almost hit by a pair of zombies in the Lowe’s parking lot.

This looked like a husband and wife zombie couple, the husband was driving. He wandered into my lane and I swerved out of their way. As they puttered on to endanger other people, it was obvious they were totally unaware they’d caused a near-death experience.

Mine.

As I bravely (stupidly?) continued my drive toward the store entrance, I marveled at how eerie it was to have two zombie encounters within minutes of each other. Then, lo and behold, I almost ran into (or rather almost ran over) a third zombie!

Zombie encounter #3

He looked for all the world like a normal man as he walked out of Lowe’s and across my lane and into my path.

Zombie #3 looked straight ahead, presumably towards his car, in an apparent catatonic state. I came to a stop and waited for him to shuffle across at a pace that would make a snail look speedy. No, he wasn’t talking on his cell phone or 100 years old. He was just in a zombie state of mind.

Zombie #3 will never know how close he came to making a CultureMap contributor hit a pedestrian.

Superstitious people say bad things come in threes, so hopefully this is the end of my zombie encounter for a while.

As I sat still trembling in my car, however, scribbling this story in the Lowe’s parking lot, I was thinking, did I really need one more spotlight for my Halloween scene?

Or should I play it safe and just go back home?

No way. Even with the threat of Zombies everywhere, my graveyard came first.

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SAFE SPACE

2 Houston neighbors ranked among the top 10 safest cities in Texas

Steve Francis home estate Memorial Villages

Photo by Kevin Ward

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Judging by the headlines, locals might think they're going to be accosted every time they leave home, but a new report says the Houston area is home to two of the safest cities in Texas. Home security review site SafeWise has ranked the communities of the Memorial Villages (No. 3) and Fulshear (No. 8) on its recent list of towns unburdened by crime worries.

For its 2026 report, SafeWise factored in FBI-reported property and violent crime data for 343 cities, then adjusted it for population in order to fairly compare metros to rural and suburban towns. Although the rankings do provide a snapshot, the site says “a number of factors, including local agency reporting practices, community resources, prevention efforts, and lived experience all influence how safe a place is (or is perceived to be).”

The rankings were released with SafeWise’s State of Safety survey, which found that perception didn’t always gel with reality. Although the statewide property crime rate of 23.4 incidents per 1,000 people is slightly higher than the national rate, Texas’ violent crime rate of 4.44 incidents per 1,000 people is consistent with the national average.

Still, Texans feel less safe than the average American. Only 49 percent of the survey’s respondents say they feel safe in the state compared to the national norm of 52 percent. 55 percent said they worry about their safety on a daily basis, a year-over-year increase from 52 percent. The data contrasts with first-hand reporting. For the second year in a row, Lone Star State participants said they have had few personal experiences with property crime and package theft.

Elsewhere in Texas, Fair Oaks Ranch was the only San Antonio area city to make it to the list, which favored towns of 30,000 residents or fewer. The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan statistical area had the most ranked cities. The full top 10 includes:

No. 1 — Trophy Club (Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington)
No. 2 — Parker (Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington)
No. 3 — Memorial Villages (Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land)
No. 4 — Melissa (Dallas-Fort Worth)
No. 5 — Fair Oaks Ranch (San Antonio-New Braunfels)
No. 6 — Whitehouse (Tyler)
No. 7 — Murphy (Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington)
No. 8 — Fulshear (Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land)
No. 9 — Colleyville (Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington)
No. 10 — Lumberton (Beaumont-Port Arthur)

safety suburbs crime rankings