In most stories, the bird is an owl, but sometimes a bruja will turn into an eagle.Īnother school of thought holds that not all lechuzas are brujas. Indeed, lechuzas have been scaring people in Mexico and South Texas for a long time.Īccording to Santos, lechuzas are witches – brujas – who transform themselves into birds. “It was big and it watched us as we drove by,” one of them told Santos. “It must be a lechuza,” said the woman’s husband, who reached over and turned off the wipers.Īs he did that, the headlights of their vehicle illuminated a big bird sitting on a telephone pole. They were on State Highway 191, headed toward Eagle Pass, when their vehicle’s windshield wipers suddenly came on. Fascinated by stories like the one told by the three women whose shopping trip ended scarily, Santos has been collecting them for several years.Ī couple who for obvious reasons did not want to be named told the Crystal City writer this story: “A lot of people believe in lechuza,” says Zavala County historian and newspaper columnist Richard G. Despite that, an internet search shows that the tradition is mostly oral. Since Spanish colonial times, generations of children in South Texas and across the river in Mexico have grown up hearing stories of lechuzas. But as far as these three women were concerned, the answer could be articulated in one word: lechuza. Sure, it could have been a loose battery wire, or any number of easy-explainable mechanical things. The bird, meanwhile, had disappeared.Īs mysteriously as it had died, the car eventually restarted. The women locked themselves in the car, stuck out in the middle of nowhere. The driver managed to get the car off the roadway but could not restart it. The lights went dark and the vehicle stalled, slowly losing speed. The bird seemed to be mocking the women, but this was no mockingbird. The woman behind the wheel pressed her foot on the gas to outdistance the bird, which at one point circled back to fly right outside the driver’s window. The bird flew ahead of them faster than the vehicle, swinging back and forth and bobbing up and down. Just outside Batesville on State Highway 57, a large, dark and menacing bird suddenly appeared in the headlights of their car. Among that group are three Zavala County women who vividly remember an experience they had one night on their way home from a shopping trip to San Antonio. And sometimes, an owl spreads its wide wings and flies from its roost looking for prey.īut some people along the border believe that owls are more than big-eyed night feeders. “At night in South Texas, especially under a big moon, things start moving.ĭeer begin grazing, coarse-haired feral hogs emerge from the brush to steal corn from game feeders on the big ranches, five-foot rattlesnakes slide from their lair, the sensors on their arrowhead-shaped heads looking for warm meat.
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