Short Stuff: La Lechuza - The Witch Owl

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1:20Hey and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry sitting in for Dave and this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right. We're beginning our spookiest month of October. Yes, and I'm psyched. I am too. We love our Halloween-y content. And we're going to talk to you a little bit today about a kind of one of those just fun urban legend stories that seems to be geographically specific in that it's around, you know, maybe Texas, New Mexico, border towns mainly of the Lalachuza, the owl witch. Yeah, but I think that's where its origin was, is along the border of Texas and Mexico.

2:05But I saw also it spread, Chuck, to places like Argentina and Cuba. They have their own versions. But Lalachuza is a, I think, somewhere around a 7-foot owl with the face of a woman, 15-foot wingspan, and a bad attitude. Yeah, and this is one of those things where, you know, because it's lore and legend, it's going to differ from place to place depending on who's telling the story. By the way, we should thank HowStuffWorks and all that's interesting, Austin Harvey from there. And I found a fun article on Texas Standard from Sarah Ash and Raul Alonzo that helped out with this. But, yeah, this is one of those sort of legends where – and there's a lot of different versions.

2:51We're going to go over a few of those. One is that La Lechuza will make sounds like a baby is crying, hoping that someone will go try and find this baby and all of a sudden be snatchable by the talons. And they would be snatched up and returned to the owl's nest, ostensibly. That's so creepy. Yeah. Can you imagine a seven-foot owl woman with a 15-foot wingspan mimicking a baby's cries? No, it's pretty terrifying. I don't like that. um also some of the other stuff that said about her is that um if you see her near your house it means it's it's she she's portending that something bad is about to happen to somebody in your house maybe a piece of furniture in your house i don't know yeah uh if i think sometimes if you dream about lalachuza a family member will die soon uh and it seems like most of the tellings it is a woman who was once a, or an owl woman who was once a human woman, and something bad happened to her, some act of cruelty, usually something by a bad man, happened, or maybe happened to her child, and it turned her into a vengeful beast.

3:59Sometimes Lila Chusa is more of a witch's familiar, like Dracula's or a vampire's familiar. And I think in that case, as a witch's familiar, or they would abduct kids for the witch. Right. She's also been accused of being an emissary of Satan himself. Satan? That's right. And one of the things you said is that she's often described as being vengeful because of something that happened in her past or her kid. Usually that's chalked up to either her child was killed for a crime they didn't commit, and so now she's stealing other people's kids in return or that her child was killed by a drunk man.

4:44Yeah. And that's actually one group that she seems to target in modern tellings are drunk dudes stumbling out of bars and walking home alone at night and then 15-foot wingspan comes out of nowhere and the talons just sink into their head and carry them off by their scalp. And if they're lucky, their scalp will rip off of their head and they'll fall to the ground and die on impact. And if they're unlucky, they'll be carried by their scalp all the way back to Lalochuza's lair, and bad things are going to happen to them there. That's right. If you want to kill a Lalochuza, good luck, buddy, because apparently you cannot hurt a Lalochuza with bullets.

5:23I think if you try to kill one with a gun or something like that, you're going to get killed pretty soon afterward for sure. Right. Yeah, I guess in the Lala Chusa fact-off, there's that whole idea that this is a woman, owl woman, who is actually some sort of spirit or familiar or something like that, means that there is an actual person involved in this elsewhere. Often a member of the community secretly preying on the rest of the community is Lala Chusa, and that when Lala Chusa is out doing her thing, that person is unconscious back home in some room until she comes back and re-inhabits their body.

6:07So either they're possessed by her or they're using her or their special ability to enact vengeance and terrorize a community. and there's actually supposedly, I looked all over for it, I couldn't find it, but there's supposedly some sort of incantation or prayer or something that a community can use that will reveal the person who is actually La Lechuza and then ostensibly they get their scalp taken. All right, shall we come back after this? Yes. All right, we'll be right back with more on La Lechuza.

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8:34Okay, Chuck, and we've been using the name La Lechuza without explaining to non-Spanish speakers that Lechuza is actually the word for owl. Yeah. Which makes a lot of sense. Sure. And this was, we said that this whole thing kind of came from the Texas-Mexico border. That seems to be the origin of it. And they think essentially that this is just like any other bit of folklore, that it was used to explain unbearable things like the disappearance of children, or probably more likely it was used to keep kids on the straight and narrow, like fairy tales were in, you know, Western Europe. Same thing.

9:16If you're out messing around and, you know, spray painting somebody's brick wall or something like that, Lala Chooza is going to come out of nowhere and snatch you up. So you better be good kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, as far as where these things come from, I remember many, many years ago, we did one in Urban Legends and it's always pretty much impossible to trace back like the true origin. With this one, there are people who think this might have come from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica when the indigenous peoples had very close relationships and bonds with animals. But when the Spaniards came along to Mesoamerica, they brought, of course, Christian, you know, Catholic Christian beliefs with them and condemned the rest as paganism, of course.

10:05Yeah, I thought this was really interesting because a lot of the gods in Mesoamerican cultures were animal-human hybrids, right? So an owl woman may have been some ancient or eldritch deity and was in no way, shape, or form evil, but the Spaniards came along as Christians and went to that Christian playbook and basically said, your gods are now Christianity's demons, so stop worshiping them. And that is a great explanation for where something like La Chusa came from. Yeah, for sure. It's also popped up over the years in, like, various pop culture ways. I'm surprised there hasn't been, like, a pretty cool Lalochuza, like, movie or character in a movie or TV show.

10:48You know, that would be truly frightening. Have you seen the movie based on La Llorana? I don't think I saw that. That was kind of scary. That is a Latino urban legend, and it was okay. All right. Well, maybe I'll check it out. You have good horror recommendations. Okay. I take that back then. Because I don't want to ruin my streak. I mentioned pop culture. I think La Lechuza was an enemy in an issue of a comic book called Relampago. And that was created by Margarita Garza. So that was one. What else? There was music too, right? Yeah. There's a song called El Parajo Gigante de Robe, which is by a group called Los Campeones de Raul Ruiz.

11:36and um the de robe is actually um talking about a specific town called robes town or robstown texas along the borders near corpus christi and um there was a an outbreak of sightings of la lechuza in 1975 and 76 and like it was a big deal like this whole town was like like credible people are like i saw la lechuza with my own eyes yeah and it turned out that there was a group of teens from town who had created a pretty convincing Lollachusa dummy, like a life-size one, and was just running it around town, scaring the bejesus out of people. So that's where that inspired that song, as far as I can tell.

12:23You know, I wish I knew somebody who was a good sort of model maker, creature maker, because we've been getting more into the Halloween front yard decorations, and like to be a little outside the box and not just whatever you get at Party City. Or, no, not Party City. What is it? We did a whole episode on it last year. Oh, Spirit Halloween. Although, I mean, their stuff is really good. I'm not knocking it. Have you been to Home Depot lately, dude? They've gone off the chain. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. They have, like, 10, 12-foot tall scary monsters now. It's crazy, like, their Halloween thing. But it's the same issue that you don't want, which is, you know.

13:03Somebody two doors down is going to have the same thing. Yeah, I would love a custom sort of, I think a Lalochuza would be truly scary, and it has kind of a fun story behind it. I like stuff that has like a legend behind it. So, hey, if anyone out there wants to just, you know, make me one, I'll just say my address on the show and you can just drop it off in the front yard. Good plan. Yeah. There was one other thing, too, and I kind of touched on it, that Lalochuza has survived into modern day and that the most modern interpretations tend to kind of drill into the kind of gender norm or flip-flop gender norms that the fable or the urban legend actually kind of gets into, which is there's a vengeful woman who is big enough and powerful enough and angry enough to punish bad men.

13:53Yeah. And that not just men who stumble home drunk from the bar are targeted, but men who are known to like abuse their wives or children are her favorite like prey now. So it's interesting how she kind of evolved into a bit of like an Avenger for women and children. I like that version. Yeah. Hats off, Layla Chusa. That's right. We're good guys. Don't come after us. That is true, Chuck. That is true. Anything else? I got nothing else. Okay. Well then, short stuff is out.

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