Texas

Alpine

Delores Mountain

This mountain is named for a tall, dark-haired woman whose ghost is seen here. She was working as a servant girl in a large house outside
Laredo in the 1880s when she fell in love with a sheepherder, who spent many weeks away from her tending sheep in the mountains. While they
were apart, the two lover lit brush fires to communicate their love over the great distance. Unfortunately the Apaches also saw the fires. They
attacked and killed the sheepherder. After her lover's murder, Delores still climbed the mountain to light her fire, hoping against hope to see a
reply in the far-off peaks. She did so until she was old and gray, and her ghost continues to kindle a flickering flame to this day.

Big Bird

Texas Rio Grande Valley

On January 1, 1976, Tracey Lawson, 11, and her cousin Jackie Davies, 14, were playing in Tracey's backyard five miles south of Harlingen in the
Texas Rio Grande Valley. As they looked out on a plowed field beyond the yard, they noticed an unusual object standing some 100 yards away,
near a borrow pit bordering an irrigation canal. Tracey went inside her house to get field glasses, through which she observed a "horrible-looking"
black bird of extraordinary size: over five feet tall. Its wings were folded around its body, and the bird was staring at the girls through large, dark
red eyes attacked to a gray "gorilla-like" face. Its head was bald, and it had a beak at least six inches long: it made a loud, shrill eeeeee sound.

The bird, or whatever it was, was lost to view for a few moments, reappearing on the northeast corner of the property, its head poking above a
small clump of trees. The girls fled inside and told Tracey's mother and father, who did not believe them. But the next day Jackie's stepfather
Tom Waldon found strange tracks: three-toed, eight inches across, square at the head, pressed an inch and a half into the hard ground. Tracey's
father Stan Lawson, who weighed 170 pounds, found that he could not dent the ground with his own foot however hard he pressed down. He also
noticed how oddly the family dog was behaving. It cowered inside the doghouse all day, leaving it only at suppertime, when it bolted into the
house and had to be dragged out. That night Lawson thought he heard large wings scraping across the bedroom window, but whatever caused
the sound, it left no trace of its passing.

An encounter with the same creature reportedly occurred on the evening of January 7, in nearby Brownsville, when Alverico Guajardo heard
something hit his house trailer. Unnerved, he sneaked outside, got into his station wagon, and drove around to the south end of the trailer. His
headlight caught "something from another planet." It was a huge bird four feet tall, with black feathers, a long beak, and bat-like wings. It had
been lying on the ground when the lights hit it, but rose immediately. Its blazing red eyes, the size of silver dollars, focused on Guajardo, whom
for the next two or three minutes was literally paralyzed with fear. All the while a "horrible-sounding noise" emanated from its throat. Eventually
the creature backed away and was lost in the darkness.

Exactly one week and two hours later, in the valley town of Raymondville, Armando Grimaldo sat smoking a cigarette in his mother-in-law's
backyard when he said he hear a "sound like the flapping of bat-like wings and a funny kind of whistling." As he got up to investigate, "I felt
something grab me, something with big claws. I looked back and saw it and started running." "It" was a creature with a monkeylike face and
leathery skin. It had large bright red eyes but no beak. Dashing for safety under a tree, he felt his pants, coat, and shirt being torn. The creature,
breathing heavily, then flew off into the night.

These sightings, which the press humorously attributed to "Big Bird," after the Sesame Street character, were reported in valley and even
national newspapers. As early as the previous November, however, rumors had circulated through Rio Grande City of the presence of a "man-
bird" four feet tall, with a bird's body and a man's head. In San Benito, a small valley town inhabited almost entirely by Mexican Americans,
residents had long believed in the existence of a large evil bird. Another lady, she's dead now, saw it often through her window. Another woman
said it has a cat face and no beak, The face is a foot in diameter, and it has a thick, foot-long neck. It has big eyes." One woman claimed to
have been attacked from behind by a flying creature with enormous wings, black feathers, and no bill.

Clark, Jerome. (1993). Unexplained! Washington, D.C.: Visible Ink Press.

Del Rio

Devil's River

The Wolf Girl of Devil's River was born over 150 year ago to Mollie Pertul Dent. Mollie had accompanied her husband to the Beaver Lake area to
trap. Searchers found their bodies in May 1835. He was killed in a thunderstorm and Mollie died in childbirth. Wolves had eaten parts of the
bodies and apparently carried off the baby. Then in 1845, reported of a feral child roaming with a pack of wolves began to circulate. A group of
hunters captures the naked wolf-child, whose body was deformed from running on all fours, and locked her in a cabin. The wild girl went crazy
and broke out. The next sighting was a surveying party in 1852. As late as in 1930s, there were reports of a human-looking wolves in the area.
Then, in 1974, a bow hunter in the area claimed to have seen the Wolf Girl again, this time as a white apparition.

Hauck, Dennis. (1994). Haunted Places: Ghost Abodes, Sacred Sites, UFO landings, and other supernatural locations. New York: Penguin
Book.