One of the weirdest San Antonio ghost stories is about the Donkey Lady.
“The Donkey Lady’s gonna get you!” my brother used
to shout, to frighten me. “The Donkey Lady’s gonna get you!”
Then he’d make crazy ‘hee-haw’ noises. It always terrified
me. I guess it was pretty easy to scare me back then.
So, what is the Donkey Lady? Well, it’s hard to say for sure,
because there are so many different stories about her.
In one, the Donkey Lady is the angry ghost of a woman who died in a
horrible car accident. The skin of her face hangs loose and her fingers
are all melted together so that her hands resemble hooves. Weird!
The stories get even weirder. I heard that if you go to a certain area
of San Antonio and you hide in the bushes and make “hee-haw”
sounds, then the Donkey Lady will appear. In this version, she’s
a monster with the body of a woman and a hideous donkey head!
But in my favorite version of the legend, the Donkey Lady was a woman
whose best friend was a donkey. Every day, she would stroll with her
donkey on Applewhite Road and they’d cross the bridge over Elm
Creek to get to a grassy field where the donkey would graze. People
would make fun of the Donkey Lady because they all thought she was weird.
She just ignored them.
Then one day, a boy who lived nearby made up a terrible lie. He told
his father that the donkey had bitten him. The boy’s father decided
that the donkey had to go. He hid near the bridge with several other
men and, when the woman walked by, they jumped out and grabbed the donkey’s
rope. They tried to take the donkey, but the lady struggled against
them. She hugged her donkey so tightly that the men couldn’t pry
her loose. As she held on, the frightened animal reared back and lost
its balance. Together, the two fell off the bridge.
And so, on that sad day, the woman and the donkey drowned in Elm Creek.
The bridge is now called Donkey Lady Bridge. People say if you drive
there and turn off your car’s headlights, then the ghost of the
Donkey Lady will think that you’ve come to take her donkey away.
She’ll get angry and start throwing rocks. Then, you’ll
hear the sound of hooves coming closer and closer. . . .
My father said that when he was a teenager he would park with his friends
on Donkey Lady Bridge and wait for her to show up. Once, on the empty
bridge at night, they heard the click-clack sound of the donkey approaching.
I asked him what happened next.
He just laughed and said, “We didn’t wait around to find
out.”