Downtown Cleburne’s historic Garza Plaza Building has experienced quite a year to say the least, thanks to numerous nutty and bizarre episodes. The latest being a second anonymous letter sent to the Times-Review late last week promising Halloween doom to the building unless certain conditions are met.

The building, constructed a year after the Civil War wrapped, is rich in fascinating lore. Through the years, it housed a funeral parlor, saloons, gambling, carousing, ladies of the night, a Tandy Leather shop and a furniture retailer just to name a few.

Since September’s arrival of Chicago hot dog restaurant Garza’s Famous Chigo Hot Dogs, odd, some suggest manufactured, incidents seem to pop up every month.

The building is haunted. So say several paranormal investigation groups who have looked into the matter.

A mannequin dubbed Chico, constructed by an area veteran to serve as the restaurant’s mascot, mysteriously lost his head during last February’s ice storm. Undaunted, building owners Frank and Casey Garza left Chico in his sidewalk lawn chair, an inverted bucket substituting for his heisted head.

An album of vintage photos dating to the 1800s allegedly discovered in the building’s upper floors also vanished just as mysteriously.

Several months later, an anonymous letter arrived at the Times-Review wherein the writer wrote that the photo album belonged to [the writer’s] family and had been “left on the three floor attic in 1937 by my great uncle who started his funeral parlor [Vincent Gray].”

Several pictures from the albums were included with the letter.

Rife with spelling and grammatical errors, the letter promised the return of the photo album provided the Garza’s give away 100 free hot dogs on Valentine’s Day.

Despite free lunch for 100 hungry Cleburne residents on Valentine’s Day, the album never showed up.

The latest twist in the tale of the Garza Plaza took flight on Memorial Day.

Cleburne Fire Chief Clint Ishmael, while setting out American flags, noticed what looked to be loose bricks fronting the building’s upper floor.

Ascending to the tippy top of the building in the bucket of CFD’s tower truck, Ishmael —  forever hereinafter known as Chief Batman to his co-workers — removed a brick and peeked inside only to find a cloud of bats peering right back.

The furry, flying mammals it seems have been residing within the upper walls of Garza’s Plaza for some time now, as well as several other downtown buildings, firefighters subsequently learned.

The discovery prompted suggestions from several bat experts and attracted a flurry of media from near and far to town. One local TV station went so far as to erroneously report that CFD or the Garzas, or someone sprayed the building, and possibly the whole of downtown, with ammonia to shoo the bats elsewhere.

The actual long and short being that while the wall of the building poses no danger of collapse, the Garzas need to call someone in to temporarily repair the exterior to prevent the danger of falling bricks.

The bats? Well, that has to wait. Bat babies birth in June, several experts said. Babies that can’t fly until August or September. Methods exist to block the bats’ re-entry once they leave the building. This is not the ideal time to do that, however, the experts said. A building teeming with baby bats unable to leave while their mothers can’t get back in during Texas summer would lead to rather unpleasant consequences, they said.

Instead, the Garzas said they plan to carry out the exclusion process in late September, or just wait a bit longer and repair the building fully once the bats head south to winter in Mexico.

Which brings us back to last week’s anonymous dispatch.

The bat invasion was no accident, and reinforcements are on the way, according to the letter, a letter obviously sent by the sender of the now infamous hot dog ransom note letter.

“My family has summon 100,000 bats to take over building by July 4,” the anonymous author writes in the letter.

The letter included three more photos from the purloined photo album. One of those photos is identified as “Great Aunt Betty Lou 1853-1913.”

The spirit of Aunt Betty, according to the letter, touched the soul of Ishmael — that is, Chief Batman — on May 30.

The letter continues with a new demand.

“Now the only way Bats vacate building current owners will need to leave by Oct. 31, 2011, at that time at midnight all 100,000 Bats will leave property,” the author writes.

Great Aunt Suzie Q. [1848-1903] will be on hand to oversee the bat leaving activity, according to the letter, to avoid a possible collapse of the building.

The letter includes a pic of Suzie Q as well as Uncle Billie Joe, who was born in 1863, but has no death date. Maybe he’s still around.

The writer of the letter concludes by offering to “personality” deliver the stolen photo book at midnight on Halloween provided the Garzas vacate the premises.

“Well, whoever’s sending these letters obviously isn’t going to give the book back no matter what we do,” Casey Garza said on Monday. “But no, we’re not leaving.”

Well and fine, but the first letter coupled with the hot dog giveaway and the headless Chico caused several to suggest that culprits behind such shenanigans are the Garzas themselves, attempting to drum up publicity.

Charges the Garzas, no surprise, deny.

“No,” Casey Garza said. “I was considering doing the 100 free hot dogs thing again if the Mavericks won [the championship], but decided not to.

“The deal with these letters and the photo album is too much unwanted publicity. If I was going to write a letter I would make sure it was spelled right. A lot of the stuff in both of these letters doesn’t even make sense.”

The perpetrators, Garza surmised, are probably kids.

“Whoever it is probably saw us in the newspaper about the mannequin head and photo album, and they’re just toying with us,” Garza said. “It was funny at first, now it’s just kind of annoying.”

Especially, Garza said, that news of the bats hasn’t exactly helped business.

“It’s picked up some,” Garza said. “Now that it’s gotten out in the news that the bats aren’t actually inside the building or the restaurant. We get a lot of people coming around out of curiosity hoping to see bats outside.”

In the spirit of batmania, however, the Garzas concocted the bat dog, a chili dog with tortilla chip wings and a marshmallow head.

Should the “borrower” ever return the photo album, the Garzas said they plan to donate the book to one of the area museums.

“Maybe they’ll read this and feel guilt or remorse or something,” Casey Garza said. “We’d like to get it back, just to make copies if nothing else. I would like to meet whoever took it though, just to ask them why.”

No charges pressed, no questions asked, Garza assured. He may even treat the photo thief to a bat dog, on the house.