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:
“When an old Woman begins to doat [sic], and grow chargeable to a Parish, she is generally turned into a Witch, and fills the whole Country with extravagant Fancies, imaginary Distempers, and terrifying Dreams. In the mean time, the poor Wretch that is the innocent Occasion of so many Evils begins to be frighted at her self, and sometimes confesses secret Commerces and Familiarities that her Imagination forms in a delirious old Age.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)