Lechuza legend full#

“A mannequin in a boutique window comes to life each night and wanders the streets,” Hinojosa explains.

Lechuza legend full#

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.