Donkey Lady (Houston: area code, car, office)

[mission-sundancer]

Smaug.......

Where did you go to school? The lady I saw was burned also. She looked really scary to me at that age!

[THOMAS655]

Originally Posted by googie2525

isn't she out by the haunted train tracks? I've always thought the idea of a giant female chinese spectre was kinda amusing. But i imagine if i actually saw a giant chinese ghost, i wouldn't find it so funny.

i remember the haunted train tracks, where the ghosts of the kids killed when a school bus was hit by a train would push your car over the tracks to safety. My brother and i went there when i was very young with my mother. We cleaned the back of the car and put baby powder on the trunk lid. The car came to a complete stop, and a few seconds later, the car started to roll forward on what seemed like level pavement, and we rolled over the tracks to the other side. I swear there were little handprints on the back of the car after we got across the tracks. My mother might have been pulling a trick on me and my brother, but to this day i still think something unusual happened there. The donkey lady was also supposed to be in that same area as the legend goes.

[gy2020]

The railroad track is an urban legend. The real accident occurred around Arizona in the 20's or 30's and the myth spread around the country.

[majormadmax]

Originally Posted by gy2020

The railroad track is an urban legend. The real accident occurred around Arizona in the 20's or 30's and the myth spread around the country.

Exactly, while it is fun to joke and tease about it, and even "experience" the "ghostly, uphill roll over the tracks" (which in reality is an optical illusion); it never happened and even Snopes knows it!

[wCat]

Originally Posted by THOMAS655

i remember the haunted train tracks, where the ghosts of the kids killed when a school bus was hit by a train would push your car over the tracks to safety. My brother and i went there when i was very young with my mother. We cleaned the back of the car and put baby powder on the trunk lid. The car came to a complete stop, and a few seconds later, the car started to roll forward on what seemed like level pavement, and we rolled over the tracks to the other side. I swear there were little handprints on the back of the car after we got across the tracks. My mother might have been pulling a trick on me and my brother, but to this day i still think something unusual happened there. The donkey lady was also supposed to be in that same area as the legend goes.

I talked to one of the librarians in the Texana dept at the downtown library. At the time, he was fervently scanning old SA papers for ANY reference to this incident in San Antonio. Something this horrific would have been big headlines in this city. He found nothing, and he's a professional historian. Nothing in San Antonio has ever been substantiated or recorded that this happened. It's still fun to explore, as long as no one is trespassing or being unsafe.

BUT.....speaking of train wrecks....I do have an article of a train smashing into a car full of people in the 30's I believe. This was long before 410 and I-35 were ever constructed. Austin Hwy was just that.....THE only major road out of town to Austin. At the time...the stretch of Austin Hwy that currently runs into loop 410 (NE), connected with what is now Randolph Blvd. (at that time part of Austin Hwy). The train tracks were on the ground level, not elevated the way they are right now. That area was actually a precinct known as "Fratt". Obviously, there were little to no railroad saftely crossings in that era. The people in the car never had a chance. Another similar but more fiery crash happened on the same rail line during that same time up around either New Braunfels and San Marcos. If I can find the stories I'll post them with dates and locations.

I suppose the point is, the last two weren't in SA and didn't involve a bus of children and made headlines, so you can imagine a bus/train incident with school children would still live on in people's memories. There would probably be living siblings or nieces or nephews that would know about it first hand as well....maybe even parents?

[gy2020]

Doesn't this sound familiar. It is in NY.
Location: Long Island, NY
Place: mount misery and sweet hollow road
madradstalkers: Urban Legends

It's a long stretch of road that is suppose to be haunted. A cemetary is located near the road. Legend has it at night if you go under the bridge where a bunch of kids hung themselves, you will have weird **** happen to your car. Especially if you put white powder on it...you will see hand prints. I didn't do the white powder thing but my boyfriend and I went on a foggy night and when we were leaving I saw a tiny hand print on his back window. It bugged us out.

Hope that helps.

Here's snopes explanatioin: snopes.com: San Antonio Ghost Children

[lgough]

I grew up with Doc Anderson and Oscar (he wasnt her husband). She taught me to trick ride as a kid. Doc Anderson was Annie Oakley's replacment in Buffalo Bill Cody's Rodeo when Annie Oakley retired and Doc was a young girl. She was Bill Cody's trick riding sharp shooter and she was good. She lived on the Winn's land (of Windcrest) and they knew she was there and they let her stay there. She was on thier property until she died. They were good to her.She did lose the arm to a cancerous tumor and my mother made her come home with us to recover from it. I'll never forget how Oscar would show up at the house almost everyday to see her he missed her so much. They were wonderful people. She slept in what was a new bed I had just gotten at the time (i was 12 or so) and I can still remember how it stunk of her until the day i grew out of it and got another one. She was a sweet old lady who LOVED her animals. Chickens, goats and skunks used to run thru thier house. They would keep all the doors and windows open and the animals would just run everywhere. The skunks never sprayed anyone, they were tame. Doc Anderson and Oscar were wonderful people. Im so glad she and Oscar are remembered by people. It would make them very happy to know that. They were a San Antonio fixture. And I loved them.

Originally Posted by wCat

I read the nostalgia thread and was completely confused about all the tails of the Donkey Lady. Having lived in Windcrest in the 70's, I remember very vividly Robards Land (a land development that went under)....plotted streets that were over grown with trees and weeds that you almost didn't know they were there. It was fun but creepy driving through there....especially at night.

I remember distinctly that the "Donkey Lady" lived out there. We knew where her shack was and we sort of just left her alone.

When all the stories popped up about her in other areas of town, I wondered if my memory was failing. Ironically this story surfaced on www.mysanantonio.com I'm glad to know I'm not crazy!
Northeast Bulletin Board
October 26, 2006
Chuck McCollough: Donkey Lady update
Reaction to the Donkey Lady story that ran in the Express-News and on MySA.com has been strong indicating a lot of folks enjoyed the fun story on a dreary Wednesday.

Apparently many local people have heard the Donkey Lady legend whether the South Side version or versions from other parts of town.

I enjoyed reading local folks telling their own Donkey Lady stories on a feed back forum and I learned a lot more than I knew before.

One question that came up over and over was what happened to the Donkey Lady of Live Oak and Windcrest? Her real name was Doc Anderson.

Reader Noel H. sent a version of what happened to Doc Anderson aka Donkey Lady Northeast.

Noel wrote -- She (Doc Anderson) was such a neat lady that I only knew briefly. I was 14 when we met in the fields by the house I grew up in. Her shack was closer to O'Conner than it was to Wiederstein. Her and her husband had been squatting on that land for years and just at the time I met them, the man whom thought he owned the land had torn down there shack and ruffed them up. I was going to Central Catholic downtown for High School at that time, so I contacted KSAT with the help of my Mother. I think it was KSAT because it was right across the street from school, or it could have been KMOL. At any rate, they did a story and the newspaper picked it up as well. This old couple was living in their old dodge pick up thanks to the landowner. I remember a lawyer volunteered to help and he found that the eviction was illegal and was going to help them fight for their rights pro bono. However, she had a severe stroke and died a day or two later and the husband went out to California, so it was dropped. I'm not making this up. The time frame was mid February 1982 to early March of that year. She (Doc Anderson) had the most fascinating stories. She said her and her husband were extras who worked on "Rawhide" or one of those type 50's serial Westerns. She said that was because they could ride and she would often drive the wagon. She was missing her arm from the R. elbow down. She stated it was because of a tumor that she lost it. I used to help her feed her Donkeys when I could. It's hard to believe how afraid of her we all were. Come to find out she was just a sweet old lady. I believe she was buried here in SA.

Posted by: Judith K at October 26, 2006 06:55 PM

[Sonny Chiba57]

Is that like the "Cucuy"?

[huckster]

"El Cucuy" is like the hispanic boogerman. I never had "el cuycuy" fully explained to me, just that he would get me if didn't keep quiet at night.
I heard of some strange origins of the donky lady when I was a kid.
I do not know how many people here have ever heard of the local tradition of "El Ojo".
I also was cured, or purged (me curaron) by my grandmother of "El Ojo" (The Evil Eye- An evil spell cast upon me by some stange evildoer somewhere ) in some sort of Indianlike mystical ceremony when I was 6 or 8 years old here in San Antonio on the south side. My grandmother was a very , very old lady born in the 1800's, that I suppose was like a curandera or, a seer. My dad was away at the time attending college night classes, the old lady thought that this was a bad idea too and that he should stay home evenings.
I was laid on the kitchen table and then walking, circling the table, she rattled some sort of leafy herbs and quietly whispered some sort of incantations I could not hear and I believe I remember candles in the darkened room. I still remember this ceremony some fifty years later. I remember I did not know at the time, what is going on here ?

Originally Posted by Sonny Chiba57

Is that like the "Cucuy"?

[RoianaB]

Back behind Windcrest, in the area known as 'Rohbars' or 'Roebars' (it was a family name so I have no idea how to spell it) lived an old woman who basically was squatting on some property (or owned it, depending on who you talked to at the time) in a small house (no it wasn't a shack, but it was kinda unfinished) and she had a small herd of donkeys, mostly white jacks really. She was tough and liked her privacy and had a real problem with the fact that us kids liked to do our parting back there because many of us had 4x4's and the cops didn't. I met the Donkey Lady several time because we rode our horses back there from the old stables on Crestwind Drive. As long as she didn't catch you drinking, harassing her stock, cutting her fences, or bothering her privacy, she left you alone. Do any of the above and you were liable to end up with a butt full of buckshot. Where the ghost stories got started I have no clue.