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Stuff You Should Know

Short Stuff: La Lechuza - The Witch Owl

01 Oct 2025

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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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Full Episode

0.031 - 35.691 Unknown

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40.478 - 46.947 Josh Clark

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.

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47.281 - 52.375 Charles (Chuck) Bryant

That's right. We're beginning our spookiest month of October.

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52.937 - 55.504 Josh Clark

Yes, and I'm psyched.

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55.524 - 78.597 Charles (Chuck) Bryant

I am too. We love our Halloween-y 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 in that it's around, you know, maybe Texas, New Mexico, border towns mainly of the La La Chuza, the Owl Witch.

78.998 - 103.197 Josh Clark

Yeah. But I think that's where its origin was along the border of Texas and Mexico. Yeah. But I saw also it spread, Chuck, to places like Argentina and Cuba. They have their own versions. But Valachusa is a, I think somewhere around a seven foot owl with the face of a woman, 15 foot wingspan and a bad attitude.

103.918 - 104.018

Yeah.

104.588 - 125.365 Charles (Chuck) Bryant

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 HowStuffWorks and all that's interesting, Austin Harvey from there. And I found a fun article in Texas Standard from Sarah Ash and Raul Alonso that helped out with this.

125.345 - 147.056 Charles (Chuck) Bryant

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 La Luchusa will make like 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 talons and they would be snatched up and returned to the owl's nest ostensibly.

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