Woman Hollering Creek is a creek located in Central Texas. At one point, it crosses Interstate 10, between Seguin, Texas and San Antonio, Texas.
The creek's name is probably a loose translation of the Spanish La Llorona, or "The weeping woman". According to legend, a woman who has recently given birth drowns her newborn in the river because the father of the child either does not want it, or leaves with a different woman. The woman then screams in anguish from drowning her child. After her death, her spirit then haunts the location of the drowning and wails in misery. The legend has many different variations and there have even been occasional sightings of the restless woman's spirit. The legend also states that if you get too close to the water, the hollering woman will drag you in, hoping you are her child.
Author and poet Sandra Cisneros wrote a collection of short stories entitled Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories in 1991.
The creek is the subject of the song "River Called Woman Hollering" by the Electric Boy Rangers.
Famous quotes containing the words woman and/or creek:
“The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of the compass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“The only law was that enforced by the Creek Lighthorsemen and the U.S. deputy marshals who paid rare and brief visits; or the “two volumes of common law” that every man carried strapped to his thighs.”
—State of Oklahoma, U.S. relief program (1935-1943)