Urban Legends in San Antonio and South Texas

Theme: witches or outsiders in animal guises.

• El Diablo at the Nightclub – Devil appearing in human/animal guise (fabulate, cautionary).
• La Villita Historic Arts Village – Some stories involve shape-shifting or mischievous trickster apparitions among its ghosts (fabulate).

• shapeshifting AND folklore AND witches

• "animal guise" AND legend

• trickster spirits AND folklore

• "devil at the dance" AND folklore

• outsiders AND witchcraft AND folklore

Note: 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.

Since these exact urban legends are almost impossible to find in scholarly/peer-reviewed sources, here are some ways you can try to find information on them (if you do decide to focus on these specific legends):

• Search local news archives (like the Express-News): Try using keywords El Camaroncito, El Camaroncito Night Club, Dancing Devil, El Diablo, man in white Halloween 1975, nightclub legend San Antonio. These will pull up feature articles, older columns, and possibly the news stories that sparked the legend.
• Use UTSA Digital Collections & Special Collections: try searches for La Villita, La Villita photographs, Old Highway 90, El Camaroncito, nightclub
• Collect contemporary retellings as primary data: ghost-tour pages, local blog posts, social media threads (Facebook groups), and oral history interviews are legitimate sources for studying the circulation of the legend. (Be sure to note the genre — commercial ghost tour vs. eyewitness vs. folkloric retelling.)
• Pair local materials with comparative scholarship: use articles on animal guise, devil-dance legends, trickster apparitions, or ostension/legend-tripping (Ostension= the act of enacting or acting out the events within a folk narrative. Legend-Tripping= the practice involving a nocturnal pilgrimage to a site associated with a tragic, supernatural, or horrific event)