Story by Jack Dennis as published in The Examiner

“We are doing something a little different for Halloween…hope that you enjoy it and today, have fun but above all else, BE SAFE!!!” ~ R.T.

The legend of the Donkey Lady still haunts the wooded areas south of San Antonio, Texas.
Graphic by Jack Dennis

The bone chilling legend of the Donkey Lady offers that a half-woman-half-donkey-like creature continues to haunt the concentrated woods amid the Medina and San Antonio Rivers just south of the Alamo City. Faithfully, an October and Halloween tradition of searching for the terrifying Donkey Lady, or by now, perhaps her ghost, has been a teenage ritual going as far back as the late 1940s.

A few years back, Harlandale High School classmates and residents of the 1940s and 1950s sat at their local favorite lunch hangout on the south side, Bud Jones Restaurant at Military Drive and Commercial discussing their youth. The conversation turned to the Donkey Lady.

“To this day I swear it wasn’t just a made up deal,” claimed Archie Mabry, a retired electrician, who recalled “going out there as far back as about 1952 or 53. We decided we were going to ride out bicycles out there and actually camp because we wanted to find her.”

“The story we were told by, our older brothers, sisters and classmates, was that there was a man and woman, who lived with their small children near Elm Creek about where Jett Road and Applewhite Road was,” Mabry said. “It was right after World War II and he had come back home messed up in the head after being in the battles in Europe.”

“Well, the man was abusive and drinking all the time. One night she became scared when he came home drunk so she pulled a kitchen knife on him to protect herself and the kids. It ticked him off so he went and set the damn house on fire.”

“I guess fate, or what you call karma, took care of him because the husband and the two children died in the fire,” his friend, retired San Antonio police detective Walter ‘Corky’ Dennis added. “Supposedly, they found her barely alive and just severely burned all over. Someone finally took her to what was either called Brooke General Hospital, or Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) back then, on base at Ft. Sam (Houston). Now it’s a major trauma center.”

“She was so scarred up and disfigured that she looked somewhat like a horse or donkey,” Dennis emphasized. “But I don’t think we started calling her ‘Donkey Lady’ until after the drowning at the bridge.”

The old classmates shook their heads agreeing to this version of the story.

“That’s right,” affirmed Mabry. “When she healed her face kind of drooped, baggy-like and her fingers fused together like hooves.”

Others around the table explained that when the woman was released and went back with no home, she “really no choice but to settle camp style, wild-like, and isolated.”

“We grew up wondering if she would ever make her way into town where we lived,” laughed Dennis. “On summer nights, around campfires, we talk about how she needed to come look for food. We just knew she was out there in the dark waiting for the last one of us to go to sleep, or if one of us needed to walk away for a minute to go to the restroom.”

Stories spread over the generations of students throughout Harlandale, Burbank, McCollum, South San and Southside High Schools. Mutilated by the fire, and absolutely insane from the death of her children, her appearance, the beatings from her husband, and then the isolation in the woods, people reported she would wear a bonnet, scarf or hood during the day to hide her eerie form. Shop keepers nearby said if she came into their stores, it would be with her beloved donkey. She’d remain unnervingly silent placing purchases on the counter, pay, and simply walk out.

However, at night, the sightings were treacherously different—even sinister in the descriptions. Those who dared to venture over the Applewhite Road Bridge crossing Elm Creek in the dark were terrorized by the sound of animals, especially the unnatural wailing of a donkey.

Then one of the classmates told about the bicycle trip he, Mabry, and two other young Harlandale Indians freshmen took to find the Donkey Lady.

“We thought we were on a safari or witch hunt,” the gentleman announced. “We loaded our bikes up with everything we thought we needed to camp out and find the Donkey Lady: lanterns, bedding, slingshots, food, matches, cowboy canteens, just everything you could imagine.”

“We were something out of the ‘Little Rascals,’ now that I think about it,” laughed Mabry. “But we peddled ourselves way out there.”

“I bet we hadn’t settled down more than 30 minutes before we started talking about how she would come out like a wild lion and pounce on one of us, chewing and ripping one of us apart and then we heard the sounds.”

“It was a donkey,” Mabry swore. “It was a wailing, crying, howling donkey. We could hear it back there in the trees and it was coming closer; right at us.”

The boys all started yelling and ran to their bikes…(CONTINUED)

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