Looking back, he saw the skull-faced woman riding behind him. Riding home past the arroyo, another worker who had teased him for being scared by a woman lowered his head to make it past the crying souls. Then she turned around, and he saw her skull face with red glowing embers for eyes.” It traumatized the field worker so much he would sit outside a cantina with his rifle in his lap. ‘I will make you happy.’ He followed but saw that her feet didn’t touch the ground. “Near an arroyo where people thought they heard souls being tormented in hell, a field worker saw a woman in a black dress covered with shiny discs. “My ‘Lady Death’ story came from him,” he says. The folklorist also collected tales from an uncle, Nieves Hinojosa, whom Hernán Moreno Hinojosa described as a “brilliant storyteller.” I found her grave and thought I heard her crying, but it could have been the wind in the arroyo.” “All the people left the ranch, abandoning houses, after she died because they could hear her crying at night. “She loved a young cowboy, but her father arranged for her to marry an older, wealthier man,” Hinojosa says. “She is believed to be the daughter of the owner, who died of a spider bite or scorpion sting as she stood at the altar to be married.” The tale is known throughout Mexico.Īnother tale, “Candelaria’s Sorrow,” harkens to a time the author was sent by his father to La Florida Ranch near Hebbronville to check on water for the cattle herd.Īccording to legend, a young woman named Candelaria had committed suicide on the ranch in the late 1800s by drowning herself in a well. “A mannequin in a boutique window comes to life each night and wanders the streets,” Hinojosa explains. The next morning, his backyard is full of songbirds.Īnother tale, “The Dark Night of the Mannequin,” retells the legend of Pascualita from Chihuahua City. While attempting to tamper-proof his bird feeder, he is attacked by a lechuza, which he hits with a shovel and kills as he realizes the bird is the shape-shifting old woman. He becomes upset when the woman insists it isn’t her cat killing the birds. He thinks she’s harmless but her cat keeps coming over the fence to kill songbirds that he feeds. The title story of the book, “Lechuza,” tells of a Korean war veteran who lives next door to a woman rumored to be a witch. In his fourth book, Hinojosa, who has taken on the nickname “Folklorist of the South Texas Brush Country,” recounts some of the stories he learned from relatives when he was a child. “The department loved the positive publicity,” he recalls. After publishing a folk story in a Houston magazine in 1994, he was invited to tell stories for schools and other groups all over the city. “I began collecting stories when I was about 16,” says Hinojosa, a retired Houston police officer who grew up in Hebbronville. Houston author Hernán Moreno Hinojosa draws on the legend of the mythical bird in his new collection of South Texas folk stories, Lechuza: Eerie and Unusual True Tales. The Spanish dictionary translation of lechuza is “barn owl,” but in Mexican American folklore, the lechuza is a shape-shifting figure that changes into an owl, usually to bring misfortune to someone. Book cover courtesy Hernán Moreno Hinojosa. Hernán Moreno Hinojosa recounts South Texas folk stories in his new book, “Lechuza: Eerie and Unusual True Tales.” Photo by Will van Overbeek.
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