The cages were all empty—at least what was left of them. But that didn’t stop me from having the strange feeling that something was watching me as I hiked through the remnants of an abandoned zoo just outside Cisco.
This small town is about 100 miles west of Fort Worth and boasts a couple claims to fame. First is the Mobley Hotel—the initial hotel purchased by Conrad Hilton, in 1919—and second is an infamous 1927 bank robbery led by a man dressed as Santa Claus.
And third is the old zoo nature trails on the banks of Lake Cisco.
The zoo was built in 1923, during the height of an oil boom. It was to be the crown jewel of a tourist camp that also included a huge swimming pool just below the newly formed lake.
At its peak, the zoo had a number of cages built into the sandstone cliffs and held a strange menagerie of animals, including a bear, deer and flamingo. Sadly, its heyday was short-lived as animals died under “unusual circumstances,” and by the 1930s, everything was abandoned.
For decades, the ruins of the zoo were known to only a few, and it seems most of them were graffiti artists. It wasn’t until 2021 that a local nonprofit got permission to clear the paths, haul out the garbage and turn the old zoo into a public nature trail.
Walking the paths and peering into the old cages makes for an interesting, albeit creepy, nature walk. Pieces of rusted metal mark the outlines of the former enclaves. The only sounds you’ll hear are the wind and the occasional bird or squirrel scampering up a tree.
But it isn’t hard to imagine the growls of bears and howls of monkeys or those beady little eyes peering back at you.
