Baby Head Cemetery – Llano, Texas - Atlas Obscura

Baby Head Cemetery

Llano, Texas

This grimly-titled Texas cemetery is all that remains of a Wild West settlement with possibly the worst name. 

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Sitting near a mountain that once shared its bizarre name, the Baby Head Cemetery is the final remnant of an entire community that based its name on a grisly atrocity for some reason. 

As the story goes, it was sometime around the 1850s or 1870s, depending on who you talk to, that a group of American Indians, looking to scare off the encroaching white settlers, kidnapped a young girl from one of the families. The girl was supposedly killed and her head placed on a pike at the foot of what was almost instantly dubbed “Babyhead Mountain.” While the exact details of this tale differ, the name of the mountain stuck, and when a community began to grow in the area near the turn of the century, it too became known as Baby Head.

The tiny town of Baby Head grew to a respectable size, establishing a post office, a school, a courthouse, and multiple businesses. However, as time went on the seemingly promising community began to dwindle, dropping to a small rural settlement with a population of about 20 people. It is not known if this was the result of being named Baby Head. Eventually the name was abandoned and the remaining population was absorbed into the city of Llano, Texas.

Today the only remnant of the Baby Head settlement is this small cemetery which still bears the name, in possibly its grimmest association yet. The graveyard contains a few dozen graves, with some burials as recent as 2000. A historic marker has been placed at the edge of the cemetery, and it is not uncommon to see baby doll heads hanging from the sign.

Know Before You Go

There are two historical marker signs: one is 1 mile before and the second is as you approach the cemetery on the other side of the road. There is a small gravel pull-off where you can park off of the road. There is no accessing the actual cemetery, as there are no trespassing signs posted on the fences, but you can see the cemetery behind the historical marker sign.

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