CURSE OF THE LECHUZA WINDOWS

They claimed lechuzas are just that, owls. Others interviewed offered a more mundane explanation. Garza and others said the lechuzas became less frequent when the city cut down many of the palm trees in the neighborhood. 'People who talk about them usually don't see or hear them, but I have. 'I have seen them,' Garza told the reporter. If the cursed individual recited the Lord's Prayer backward perfectly, the creature would fall to the ground and its face would revert to the face of the person who cursed them, whether the witch herself or the person who paid the witch to cast the curse. According to Garza, lechuzas and pajaros nortenos were the same creatures, with pajaros nortenos created by a witch cursing someone. One woman, Angelica Garza, told the reporter that residents on Elvira and Angelica streets all had run-ins with lechuzas. More: #TBT: Manatees, sea monsters and more odd Corpus Christi marine sightings through years

CURSE OF THE LECHUZA WINDOWS

But instead the half-human, half-owl creature that would whistle and scratch at the roof and windows as punishment to those who had done wrong. Not true owls, which is the direct translation of the word. He came back with stories of residents hounded by lechuzas. In February 1979, Caller-Times reporter Felix Sanchez headed to the Molina neighborhood on the city's Westside to hear the local tales. A peeping Tom, perhaps? Except her daughter's window was 15 feet from the ground, and there were no trees, ladders or other structures nearby for someone to climb. Another time her daughter swore she saw a man's face peeking in her bedroom window. The lights, radio and television would turn on by themselves in the night, and multiple family members witnessed the walls glowing in the night. It would appear while they watched TV, but rapidly vanish when someone would ask 'What do you want?' On several occasions the family witnessed an apparition that took on the form of a man. The entire family would hear voices and tapping when no one else was at home. For a time she wrote them down, and at one point tracked more than 300 unusual occurrences. Asking only to be identified as Pearl, she recounted many of the experiences she and her family had in the house. In England it was believed that if you walked around a tree that an owl was perched in, it would follow you with its eyes, around and around until it wrung its own neck.In April 1967, a woman told Caller-Times reporter Grady Phelps of the three years she and her family spent in a haunted house on Tancahua Street. Though the owl's nocturnal activity was at the root of many superstitions, the amazing ability of an owl to rotate its neck to extraordinary degrees was even turned into a myth.In other cultures, owls were simply the messengers of witches, or hooted to warn of the approach of a witch. Greeks and Romans believed witches could turn themselves into owls, and in this form would come to suck the blood of babies. Owls are of course associate with witchcraft.In fact, many different cultures believed that a person became an owl after death. The Kwakiutl people also thought owls were the souls of people and shouldn't be harmed because if the owl was killed, the person whose soul the owl carried would also die. Among Australian Aborigines, owls are the spirits of women and so are sacred. For some cultures, the owl was sacred.

On the other hand, Dakota Hidatsa people believed that burrowing owls acted as protective spirits for warriors. Boreal owl calls were a call from spirits to the Cree people, and if you answered back to the owl with a whistle and didn't get a response, it was a sign that your death was imminent. For instance, dreaming of an owl signified approaching death for Apache people. Owls are a sign of death in many cultures, including some Native American tribes.Folklore from India had a more direct method: just eat owl eyes. In England, the method was to cook owl eggs until they were ash, then incorporate them into a potion. Owls are famous for their exceptional eyesight and it was thought that you could gain better eyesight from them.

Curse of the lechuza