Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: La Lechuza - The Witch Owl

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

Today we kick off the scariest month with the legend of La Lechuza - The Witch Owl.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 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 and that it's around, you know, maybe Texas, New Mexico, border towns mainly of the Lalachusa, the Owl Witch. Yeah, but I think that's where its origin was along the border of Texas and Mexico. But I saw also spread Chuck to places like Argentina and Cuba. They have their own versions. But Vlalachusa 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 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, we're going to go over a few of those. One is that Lalachusa will make 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 10. 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 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, 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. Sometimes Lala Chusa is more of a witch's familiar, like the, like, you know, a Dracula's or a vampire's familiar. And I think in that case, as a witch is 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 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 follow the ground and die on impact. And if they're unlucky, they'll be carried by their scalp all the way back to Lalachusa's layer and bad things are going to happen to them there. That's right.

If you want to kill a Lalajusa, good luck, buddy. Because apparently you cannot hurt a Lalachusa with bullets. I think if you try to kill one with a gun or something like that, you're going to get killed, like, pretty soon afterward for sure. Right. Yeah, I guess in the Lalachusa 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 praying on the rest of the community is Lalachusa, and that when Lalachusa 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, 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 Chusa, and then ostensibly, they get their scalp taken. All right. Shall we come back after this? Yes.

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Okay, Chuck, and we've been using the name La Chouza without explaining to non-Spanish speakers that La Chouza 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 Western Europe. Same thing. If you're out messing around and, you know, spray painting somebody's, brick wall or something like that. Lala Chuse 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. Yeah, I thought this is really interesting because a lot of the gods in Mesoamerican cultures were animal human hybrids, right? Yeah. So an owl woman may have been some ancient or eldrit. 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 La Chusa like movie or character in a movie or TV show, you know, they'd be truly frightening. Have you seen the movie based on La Yorana? I don't think I saw that. That was, it was kind of scary.

That was 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, yeah. I mentioned pop culture. I think La Lalo Chusa was a,

was an enemy in an 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 Campions de Raoul Ruiz. And the De Robe is actually talking about a specific town called Robes Town, or Robes Town,

Texas along the borders near Corpus Christi. And there was an outbreak of sightings of Lalachusa in 1975 and 76. And like it was a big deal. Like this whole town was like credible people are like I saw 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 Lalachusa like dummy, like a life. size one, and was just, you know, running it around town, scaring the bejesus out of people. So that's where that, 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, you know, 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 that Lalituzas 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. Yeah. 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. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thank you.