Short Stuff: La Lechuza - The Witch Owl

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Hey, 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 La Lachusa, the owl witch.

Yeah, but I think that's where its origin was along the border of Texas and Mexico.

But I saw also it spread.

Chuck to places like Argentina and Cuba.

They have their own versions.

But La La Chusa is a, I think, somewhere around a seven-foot owl with the face of a woman, a 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 how stuff works and all that's interesting, Austin Harvey from there.

And I found a fun article on Texas Standard from Sarah Ashe and Raul Alonso that helped out with this.

But yeah, this is one of those sort of legends where, and there's a lot of different versions.

We're going to go over a few of those.

One is that La Lachusa will make like sounds like a baby is crying, hoping that someone will go like 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.

Also, some of the other stuff that's said about her is that if you see her near your house, it means

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,

I think sometimes if you dream about La Lachusa, a family member will die soon.

And it seems like most of the tellings

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.

Sometimes Lila chooses as more of a witch's familiar, like

a Dracula's or a vampire's familiar.

And I think in that case,

as a witch's familiar, 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.

Yeah.

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

a 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 Lala Chooza's lair, and bad things are going to happen to them there.

That's right.

If you you want to kill a La Lachusa, good luck, buddy,

because apparently you cannot hurt a La Lachusa with bullets.

I 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, and I guess in the La Lachusa factoff,

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 as Lala Chuza, and that when Lala Chooza is out doing her thing,

that person is unconscious back home in some room

until she comes back and re-inhabits their body.

So 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 Lala Chooza.

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 Lala Chooza.

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Okay, Chuck.

And we've been using the name La Lachusa without explaining to non-Spanish speakers that Lachusa 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's, 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 right you know western europe same thing if you're out messing around and you know spray painting somebody's brick wall or something like that la la cheese is going to come out of nowhere and snatch you up so you better be good kind of thing yeah absolutely uh and you know as far as where these things come from i remember god many many years ago we did one on urban legends and it's always

pretty much impossible to trace back like the 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.

Yeah, 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 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 a pretty cool La La Chusa

movie or character in a movie or TV show.

They'd be truly frightening.

Have you seen the movie based on La Jorana?

I don't think I saw that.

That was kind of scary.

It was the Latino urban legend, and it was okay.

All right.

Well, maybe I'll check it out.

Go with that.

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 Lalachusa

was an enemy in an issue of a comic book called Relimpago, and that was created by Margarito Garza.

So that was one.

What else?

It was music, too, right?

Yeah,

there's a song called El Parajo Gigante de Robe,

which is by a group called Los Campiones de Raúl Ruiz.

And the de Robe is actually talking about a specific town called Robestown, or Robstown, Texas, along the borders near Corpus Christi.

And

there was an outbreak of sightings of La La Chusa in 1975 and 76.

And like it was a big deal.

Like this whole town was like,

credible people are like, I saw La La Chusa with my own eyes.

And it turned out that there was a group of teens from town who had created a pretty convincing

La La Chusa like 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.

You 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

somebody two doors down is going to have the same thing.

Yeah, I would love a custom sort of, I think a Lalo choose that 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 Lala Chooses 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.

Yeah.

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 Chooza.

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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