The Wolf Girl of Texas

Since Halloween is almost upon us, I will share an old tale of a haunted part of Texas and the wolf girl who prowled there, so the legend goes.

In 1835, a trapper from Georgia named John Dent and his pregnant wife Mollie traveled up Devil’s River, already a renowned haunted area, in southwest Texas. They built a brush shelter and Dent set out to trap during the spring season while Mollie approached her due date.

Dolan Falls on Devil's River

A thunderstorm struck one night in May just as Mollie went into labor. She was having trouble giving birth, so Dent rode to a Mexican goat ranch and begged for help. However, as the goat herders prepared to go with him, a bolt of lightning struck him dead. Still, the men followed Dent’s directions and after a night’s delay at the river, they arrived at the Dents’ cabin the next morning.

Tragically, they found Mollie dead. She had evidently died in childbirth, but the baby was nowhere to be found. Fang marks on the woman’s body and many wolf tracks in the area convinced the herders the infant had either been devoured or carried off by the wolves.

TEN YEARS LATER

In 1845, a young sheep herder living at San Felipe Springs (now known as Del Rio) claimed to see “a creature, with long hair covering its features, that looked like a naked girl” attacking a herd of goats along with a pack of wolves. The boy's story was ridiculed by some but taken seriously by others. Seminole scouts working for the Army refused to go into the Devil’s River country after seeing human hand and footprints mingling with tracks of wolves.

Eventually, a hunt was organized to capture the “Lobo (or Wolf) Girl of Devil’s River” as she was being called. According to the story, the hunters, mainly Mexican vaqueros, found the wolf pack and trapped the animals in a box canyon. With them was a naked girl. She fought wildly, clawing and biting, but the men lassoed her and tied her up while she made terrifying sounds like human screams and wolf howls combined. Her howls drew a huge male wolf, likely the leader of her pack. He charged at her captors but was shot dead, causing the wolf girl to faint.

Mexican wolf; wikipedia; public domain

Examining the girl, the men found she was definitely human despite her long hair and wild animal behavior. Her arms and hands were strongly muscled, and she moved smoothly on all fours but not as well when forced to stand erect. She could not speak, only growling deeply.

Put on a horse, the girl was taken to a ranch and shut in an empty room. Offered clothing and food, she refused them, instead curling up in a dark corner and snarling at anyone who came near. Left alone, she was locked in the room, with a guard outside.

As night fell, unearthly howls came from her room, unsettling her captors and drawing answering calls from wolves somewhere beyond the house. The howls came closer, and the girl gave eerie cries from her room. Finally, the pack attacked the corralled goats, cows and horses, luring the guards out to drive them away.

Amid the bedlam, the girl smashed out a boarded-up window in the room and escaped. The howls stopped and the wolves melted into the night, along with the girl, presumably.

Over the following years, people reported seeing the girl suckling pups and attacking herds of sheep and goats with the wolf pack. But she always escaped into the Devil’s River wilderness, and no one ever tracked her down. In 1852, a surveying party laying out a new route to El Paso, were riding south to the Rio Grande, above the mouth of Devil’s River, when they spotted a young woman with two pups on a sand bar in the river. When she saw them, she snatched up the pups and raced away. This was the last sighting of the wolf girl, alive that is, although there were reports of “human-faced” wolves in the area up until the 1930s.

THE GHOST OF WOLF GIRL

Is the story of the Wolf Girl true or just a folktale? There is no concrete proof either way. However, she seems to haunt her former hunting grounds.

In 1974, during a javalina (wild pigs) hunt, a man named Jim Marshall and two of his friends camped along Devil’s River. They had been hunting for four days. It was near nightfall.

According to Marshall, one man went to gather firewood, but came running back, his face white with fear. They asked him what was wrong. He said they needed to see for themselves. They followed a trail down to the water and looked around while the frightened hunter described what he had seen. At first there didn’t appear to be anything there, but then Marshall saw a figure on the opposite shore.

“The only way I can describe it,” he said, “is that it appeared to be a girl, a real skinny girl, with long hair and wild eyes. Even in the darkness we could see her. It was like she was in a haze, a kind of foggy mist, standing there partly bent over, digging into an ant mound. Suddenly whatever we were seeing was gone. I don’t know if it vanished or just moved quickly into the brush.”

The three men returned to camp and packed up to leave, working fast, keeping three large lamps lit. Once on the road, they didn’t stop until they reached Del Rio. This account is taken from GHOSTS OF THE OLD WEST by Earl Murray.

Before her husband led her into the wilderness – and to her untimely death – Mollie Dent penned a note to her parents, postmarked from Galveston in the autumn of 1834. It read:

“Dear Mother,
The Devil has a river in Texas that is all his own
and it is made only for those who are grown.
Yours with love
Mollie”

I don’t know about you, but her words kind of give me the shivers.