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- Urban Legends in San Antonio and South Texas
Urban Legends in San Antonio and South Texas
👻 Weeping Women & Mourning Spirits
Theme: grief, betrayal, tragedy leading to restless spirits.
- Donkey Lady Bridge – Wronged woman transformed into monstrous form (fabulate, with occasional memorate “sightings”).
- Victoria’s Black Swan Inn – Site of tragic deaths, restless spirits (fabulate).
- Ghost Lovers of Loma China Cemetery – Love and loss motif (fabulate).
- The Alamo – Spirits tied to tragic deaths and unfinished mourning (fabulate).
- La llorona – Wronged mother who drowned her children, now a weeping spirit bound to waterways (fabulate, with strong memorate traditions of encounters).
Potential search terms
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"La Llorona" AND folklore -
"weeping woman" AND legend -
grief AND betrayal AND ghost stories -
"restless spirits" AND mourning -
folklore AND tragedy AND women -
"haunted inn" OR "haunted hotel" AND folklore
UTSA’s catalog will be a bit lean on urban legends specific to our region. We unfortunately do not have a folklore program or a center for horror studies. As such, it may be beneficial to broaden the search language so you can still pull useful scholarly sources in JSTOR, Project MUSE, Anthropology Plus, etc., through the UTSA Libraries search. You can also use Google Scholar!
The themes (weeping women, children ghosts, headless riders, etc.) show up in lots of cultures, so you can compare across regions.
Some materials to get you started
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The Donkey Lady Fights la Llorona and Other Stories / la Señora Asno Se Enfrenta a la Llorona y Otros Cuentos
by
Call Number: Juvenile Literature PZ73 .G3678 2015Margarito is eleven years old now and he's way past believing in Grandpa Ventura's ghost stories, but he loves listening to them anyway. One evening on his way home from his grandfather's, Margarito finds himself alone in the gathering dusk, crossing a narrow bridge. Suddenly, a woman in white floats towards him and calls, "Come to me, child ... come to me!" He frantically hides in the shallow river, but soon sees a pair of yellow, glowing eyes swimming towards him. Before long, the Donkey Lady and La Llorona are circling each other, fighting to claim poor Margarito as their next victim!Popular storyteller Xavier Garza returns with another collection of eerie tales full of creepy creatures from Mexican-American lore. There are duendes, bald, green-skinned brutes with sharp teeth; thunderbirds, giant, pterodactyl-like things that discharge electricity from their wings during thunderstorms; and blood-sucking beasts that drain every single drop of blood from their victims' bodies!Set in contemporary times, Garza's young protagonists deal with much more than just the supernatural: there are chupacabras and drug dealers, witches and bullies, a jealous cousin and the devil. Accompanied by the author's dramatic black and white illustrations, the short, blood-curdling stories in this bilingual collection for ages 8 - 12 are sure to bewitch a whole new generation of young people. -
Woman Hollering Creek
by
ISBN: 9780679738565Publication Date: 1992-03-03A collection of stories by Sandra Cisneros, the celebrated bestselling author of The House on Mango Street and the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The lovingly drawn characters of these stories give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border with tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.
