The Wolf Girl from Scary Stories: The Tale and It's Sources

I made a documentary about Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. (Now available to watch.) The three books consisted of over 80 stories of folklore and urban legends. It was impossible to appropriately address each and every story in a single documentary. This website, in part, is a chance to look at individual stories that I researched, tales in which I learned about their origins and social contexts. It’s a chance to examine stories that I ultimately found to be fascinating in some way or another.

This is Wolf Girl.

Stories of “feral children” are littered all over folklore of many traditions. Alvin Schwartz adapted a particular tale of one such story in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark‘s “Wolf Girl.”

There is something foundational in just about every culture that returns to this idea. It is entrenched with post-colonialist fears and deep, natural suspicions of native inhabitants of any region that Europeans have migrated to in history. The fear of this new natural world engulfing one of their own and making them feral and too animalistic is engrained in people’s psyche.

But also, it actually happens. There are many actual incidences, which only feeds the storytelling engine of the folklore of different regions.

Let’s dive into this particular example of such stories.

The Story of Wolf Girl

Alvin Schwartz made sure to mention famous examples in storytelling like Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and other American folk examples in the Ozarks of Arkansas and elsewhere.

Examining the topic of feral children will result in many more examples, including many real feral children that have been documented such as Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja and Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc.

Savage wolf girl Marie-Angélique le Blanc

From Savage: biography of Marie-Angélique le Blanc, 1712-1775 by Gaëlle Hersent, Aurélie Bevière and Jean-David Morvan

Here is the version that can be found in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Wolf Girl.

Travel northwest into the desert from Del Rio, Texas, and eventually you will come to Devil’s River. In the 1830’s, a trapper named John Dent and his wife, Molly settled where Dry Creek runs into Devil’s River. Dent was after beaver, which were plentiful there. He and Molly built a cabin from brush, and near it, they put up an arbor to give them shade. Molly Dent became pregnant. When she was ready to have their child, John Dent raced on horseback to their nearest neighbors several miles away. “My wife is having a baby,” he said to the man and his wife. “Can you help us?” They agreed to come at once.

As they got ready to leave, a violent storm came up, and a bolt of lightning struck and killed John Dent. The man and his wife managed to find his cabin, but did not arrived until the next day. By then, Molly Dent was dead too. It looked as if she had given birth before she died. But the neighbors could not find the baby. Since there were wolf tracks all around, they decided the wolves have eaten it. They buried Molly Dent and left.

A number of years after she died, people began to tell a strange tale. Some swore it was a true story, others said it never could have happened. The story begins in a small settlement a dozen miles from Molly Dent’s grave. Early one morning, a pack of wolves raced in from the desert and killed some goats. Such attacks were not unusual in those days. But a boy thought he saw a naked young girl with long blonde hair, running with the wolves. A year or two later, a woman came upon some wolves eating a goat they had just killed. Eating the goat with them, she claimed, was a naked young girl with long blonde hair. When the wolves and the girl saw her, they fled. The woman said that at first, the girl ran on all fours, then she stood and ran like a human, swiftly as the wolves. People started wondering if this wolf girl was Molly Dent’s daughter. Had a mother wolf carried her off the day she was born, and raised her with her pups? If so, by now she would be ten or eleven years old.

As the story is told, some men began to look for the girl. They searched along the riverbanks, and in the desert, and its canyons. And one day, it is said, they found her, walking in a canyon with a wolf at her side. When the wolf ran off, the girl hid in an opening in one of the canyon walls. When the men tried to capture her, she fought back, biting and scratching like an enraged animal. When they finally subdued her, she began screaming like a frighten young girl, and howling like a frighten young wolf. Her captors bounded her with rope, put her across a horse and took her to a small ranch house in the desert. They would turn her over to the sheriff the next day, they decided. They placed her in an empty room and untied her. Terror-stricken, she hid in the shadows. They left her and locked the door. Soon she was screaming and howling again. The men thought they would go mad listening to her, but at last, she stopped.

When night fell, wolves began howling in the distance. People say that each time they stopped, the girl howled in reply. As the story goes, the cries of wolves came from every direction, and got closer and closer. Suddenly, as if a signal had been given, wolves attacked the horses and other livestock. The men rushed into the darkness firing their guns. High up in the wall, in the room where they left the girl, was a small window. A plank was nailed across it. She pulled the plank off, crawled through the window and disappeared.

Years passed with no word of the girl. Then one day, some men on horseback came around a bend in the Rio Grande, not far from Devil’s River. They claimed they saw a young woman, with long blonde hair, feeding two wolf pups. When she saw the men, she snatched up the pups and ran into the brush. They rode after her, but she quickly left them behind. They searched and searched, but found no trace of her. That is the last we know of the wolf girl. And it is there in the desert, near the Rio Grande, that this story ends.

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Origin of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark‘s Wolf Girl

Alvin Schwartz in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark’s “Wolf Girl” credits two particular versions for being his main inspiration. One is an oral tale told to him by someone during his travels, and the other is a story “The Lobo Girl of Devil’s River” from L.D. Bertellion.

One version of Bertellion’s tale of the “Logo girl” can be found in a book Straight Texas by Frank J. Dobie (1966), found here. Below is the same story told slightly differently, since there are numerous versions as it was told orally for so many years.

In the fall of 1830, John Dent and Will Marlowe teamed up to catch fur beasts along the source of the Chikamauga River in Georgia. The two worked very well together until the spring of 1833, when they lost their winter catch.

The cause of the quarrel was a woman named Molly Pertur, whose father was a mountaineer. While hunting animals in the vicinity of Pertur’s hut, Dent fell in love with her, and the two made a lifelong agreement. In partnership, the two orcs agreed to jointly sell all the skins they were carrying, for an average penny. They enforced the agreement for the first two seasons; but now Dent insisted on taking half of the skin sheet and leaving it at his disposal. He had the idea that if he sold his skin alone, he would be able to earn more money to spend on his marriage expenses.

After a fierce quarrel, the things were evenly divided according to Dent’s request. Almost as soon as Marlowe finished, he told others that he had been deceived. The argument lasted 2 weeks, and then there was a fight, and Dent stabbed Marlowe to death. Public opinion opposed him, and he had no choice but to go away. Before leaving, he managed to meet his lover and tell her that he was going to find a place where they could live together. He also said he would come back and secretly pick her up.

As the months passed, people gradually lost interest in the matter. During this time, Molly Pertur may not have heard from the murderer’s lover. Then on April 13, 1834, shortly after the sun set in the west (exactly the year after Marlowe was killed), Morley went to the cattle farm to milk the cows, which was her habit. She had been away from home for an unusually long time, and her parents decided to investigate to see if something had happened. They found that the cow had not been milked, and they also saw a long knife in the empty milk bucket, with dry blood clotted on the handle, and the handle was made of antlers and strangely designed. The next day, people recognized at a glance that it was dent who killed Marlowe’s knife.

At night, in the darkness, both parents called out to find Morley; But in vain. As soon as it was dark, several invited mountain people began to search for clues. They found the whereabouts of a man and a woman walking towards the Cheka mauga River. By the river, they found a newly laid tree stump on the riverbank. It was obvious that a small canoe had just been moored under the stake. Molly Pertur was gone, leaving no words to explain or prepare for a moment; all she had with her was the clothes she was wearing.

6 months have passed. Mrs. Pottur received a letter with the postmark of Galston, Texas. The letter reads:

Dear Mom,

The devil has a river in Texas that he alone uses. The river is only used by people who have grown up.

Your love for you — Morley

At that time, Georgians were unfamiliar with texas rivers and their names. In Texas, it is true that very few people know about the Devil’s River. The river is far to the west of San Antonio, on the edge of all settlements; the local population speaks Spanish almost without exception. Mrs. Pottour and her husband and neighbors simply felt that Dent had a river somewhere in Texas where he was hunting alone. They knew dent was a devil, and that was true, though they might have been a little surprised that Morley had admitted it.

A little-known chapter in Texas history is about a small settlement of the Englishmen who settled by the Devil’s River in 1834; these people called their settlement Dolores. Settlements do not exist for long. The Indians killed the vast majority of the immigrants, and a few drifted to Mexico. The remaining people were: 14 adults and 3 small children, who were retreating east when they were attacked at Lake Espando, near the present-day Calizzo Spring. The Comanche Indians killed them all and threw the bodies and the carts they were riding in into the lake. That’s why to this day Mexicans think of ghosts in lakes. And the name Espandosa means “terrible.”

　　Dent and his bride joined the English settlement. There are many otters in the Devil’s River. There are also many otters in the upper and lower reaches of the Devil’s River that flow into the Rio Grande. We can believe that Dent did not live with the English community, he lived separately like lone wolves, and there is no doubt that he had an agreement with the Indians. A long way west on horseback, there are several more Indian Mexican families grazing the few goats in the Pecos River Valley.

At noon one day in May 1835, a man on a rickety horse approached one of these sheep farms. He told the Mexican sheep farmer couple that his camp was at the place where Della Creek flowed into the Devil’s River. He said his wife was going to have children and someone had to help. The Mexican woman agreed to go with her husband; the man immediately saddled the horse. At the same time, the area is notoriously charged with dark clouds. A bolt of lightning killed the messenger.

This greatly delayed the departure time of the Mexicans. The owner of the sheep farm knew the way there from the situation at the camp site described by the dead man, but night fell before he and his wife crossed the watershed of the Devil’s River. They did not find the camp until the morning of the 2nd. On the camp, under an open bush trellis lay a dead woman, alone. Indications are that she died while giving birth to the child. But there were no children. Couldn’t find the child. There was no indication of where the child had gone anywhere. Under the trellises of the bushes was a trail of trampling; this led the owner of the sheep farm to guess that the wolf had eaten the baby.

In a poorly furnished bush hut, the Mexicans found a letter. They bring the letter to the first person they may meet who knows English. It was later discovered that the letter had been written by Molly Pertur Dent to her mother in Georgia a few weeks before her death. The letter can be used as proof of her and her husband’s identity. And just like that, their romance was over.

10 years have passed, and a large carriage road leading to El Paso, which runs through the nascent of Texas, passes the Springs of St. Philippe (today’s Dellio) with a few Mexicans, and is only 12 miles ahead of the Devil’s River and then over the Pecos River; occasionally armed travelers pass by this road. In 1845, a teenager living in St. Philips reported that he had seen a pack of wolves attacking a flock of sheep, and with the wolves there was a creature with long hair covering half of her face, looking like a. Some Americans passing by the area heard the story and asked him. But they were intrigued by what he said about what the looked like, and not very concerned about the strange creature he was reporting. The story was ridiculed, but it still spread among settlements.

Less than a year after the incident, a Mexican woman in San Felice Springs claimed to have seen two wolves and a devour a freshly bitten goat. She said she came closer before she was discovered. Then the two wolves and the girl all ran away. The first ran on all fours, then stood up and ran on two feet; accompanied by two wolves. The woman was very sure of what she saw. The few people in the Devil’s River area began to watch over the girl alertly. They recalled the disappearance of the dead Molly Dent’s baby in the wolf’s footsteps. The men in the camp said that the she-wolf walked around the fur on the back of the baby’s neck without harming the young wolf. Perhaps, they say, some maternally conscious wolf took the newborn baby back into his nest and raised her. The Indians reported seeing barefoot slabs on the sandy ground along the river, sometimes accompanied by hand marks.

The hunt for the Wolf Girl of the Devil’s Valley was organized. The girl is now known as the Wolf Girl. The pursuit consisted mainly of Mexican cattle herders riding wild horses. Surely, the gang had not heard of the story of Romulus and Romus, who founded Rome, raised by wolves, or of children raised by wolves in India like Gibson’s Mowgli. But in this remote, isolated barren frontier, they faced unquestionable evidence: there was a human who had been raised by wolves and rode wild with wolves.

On the 3rd day of the hunt, two riders startled the girl near a small canyon that led to the Grand Canyon. She was with a big wolf. When she hid in a slit, she was separated from the wolf. The cattle herders surrounded her here. At first, she was scared like a rabbit. Then she spat and hissed, like a wild cat. She also tore, scratched and bit. When the cattle herder bound her, she let out a pitiful and terrible ghost-like cry: a voice that people said was a sound that resembled a woman screaming and a wolf howl, but neither. As she snorted this terrible scream, a huge male wolf, perhaps the one she had broken up with, suddenly appeared and rushed toward her captors. Perhaps before the wolf could rush to the front and use its powerful claws, a man saw it coming and saved their lives. The man killed it with a pistol. When the wild girl saw this, she fell into a coma and became silent.

The captured creatures were now tied up so strongly that they could be carefully observed. She had a lot of hair, but the beautiful curves of her breasts and other physical appearances showed that she was a normal female human. The muscles of her hands and arms looked strange, but they were still symmetrical.

After recovering from her coma, she was transported on a horse to the nearest ranch. In an isolated house, people untied her and let her go so she could spend the night. People gestured friendly to cover her body with a piece of something and gave her food and water. But even the high-altitude eagle and the deep forest lion would not show such distrust and fear of her captors as she did. She retreated to the darkest corner. The people left her and went. The door was closed; the only other exit was a small window opposite the door, with a plank nailed to it.

The ranch house was a simple dwelling of two rooms, alone in the wilderness. Before dark, four or five people gathered here. Now, the wild and crazy creature locked up in the house began to emit terrible screams. The howl passed through the many crevices in the wood-built walls and reached far in the night wind, and soon received the response of wolves in the distance, a low voice that lasted a long time. The wolf seemed to be responding in all directions. The wolf’s mournful howl spread far away, bringing a farther and farther response. All the great wolves of the western land are gathering together. Never before had the ranchers who had heard wolf howls in their lives, never heard the howl of so many gathered wolves, or the low, long, gloomy death-like howl. The wolves got closer and closer, gathering more and more densely. Now, the wolves howled in unison; it was a hopeless, fierce, dark bass chorus that no musicians of the world had ever dreamed of. Then the wolves were silent, as if waiting for an echo; and the wild girls in the dark room responded with the screams of an inhuman world that was neither a woman nor a beast.

After a while, this large herd of wolves rushed to the herd and attacked the goats, cows and saddle-laden horses. The noise of the livestock, especially the screams and hisses of the rushing and kicking horses, drew people to the rescue. Usually, people who are familiar with wolves are not afraid of wolves at all. Now, the shepherds were gathered together, firing their guns and shouting in the darkness as they advanced. The wolves retreated.

Meanwhile, in the midst of the chaos, somehow the wolf girl broke the planks from the window and came out of the house, and it was thought that she had immediately entered the wolf pack. The night hardly a wolf howl could be heard again. On Day 2, there was no trace of the girl. For a long time, it was difficult to see a wolf in that area.

In six years, I hadn’t heard anything about the Devil Valley Wolf Girl. At this time, gold mines were discovered in California, and the number of people traveling westward increased dramatically. In 1852, a frontier explorer, in search of a route to El Paso (a route with more water sources than the water source on the chevalier trail known as the Qihuahua Trail, which was used at the time), rode to a sharp bend in the upper reaches of the Grande River, far from the mouth of the Devil’s River.

They had not yet seen the creature, or rather, they had already walked to the water’s edge before they had been seen by the creature at the water’s edge. At the water’s edge, they clearly saw a naked woman sitting on a sandbank, two young wolves biting at her full breasts. In an instant, she stood up, two arms between a young wolf, rushing towards the crack, and its speed could not be caught up with even fast horses. This creature can only be the Wolf Girl of the Devil’s Valley.

It is understood that no one has seen her since the fight, although, even if asked, some of the old Apache Indians may have some stories to tell. The fate of this wolf girl, the wolf woman, may never be known. In an extermination campaign against wolves — the most voracious of america’s livestock-known beasts — a wolf with a distinctly human face was occasionally spotted in the border area. For years, the so-called “human-faced wolf” was considered the final culmination of a killing and elopement time in Georgia. If man can have a “beast mark”, why can’t a beast have a human mark? For me alone, although more than a century has passed since the beginning of the events just described, more than one wolf face has appeared in the west in the past 40 years or so. Has the distinctive characteristics of humans.

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What is interesting is that this story of a feral child in both Bertellion’s Lobo Girl and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark’s Wolf Girl mix feral children and “cryptid tales” reminiscent of Bigfoot or the Chupacabra.

— FOUNDATIONS OF HORROR —

^{Further explore these subgenres & tropes. more>>}
#Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark | #Cannibal horror | #Folk horror | #Monster horror | #Foreign Locations are Scary | #Natural horror

In all these stories, there are real-world explanations. Seeing from a distance a bear walking upright for the first time could result in an early European to tell tales of a big-footed hairy beast (a Bigfoot). Seeing from a distance a man riding a horse for the first time could result in tales of a minotaur or centaur, half-man half-horse. Seeing an unusual wild dog for the first time could result in tales of a Chupacabra. And so yes, seeing a Native American wearing what they deemed unusual clothes such as animal fur, perhaps of a Native tribe they had not seen before, evolves into something like the Wolf Girl story.

The fact that these stories come from Mexican land may mean something. While the Spanish had encountered Native Mexican customs for centuries, it is easy to imagine that expansion of Northeastern American travelers into the lands would result in them seeing customs that they were otherwise not familiar with in seeing other Native tribes of their lands. It also can very well mix with native Mexican animals that American travelers were not accustomed to. Similar to someone accustomed to the Mexican desert traveling north and seeing a bear walking upright for the first time. That is where unusual folk tales begin, and thus easily where something like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark‘s Wolf Girl finds its origin.

Last Updated on November 3, 2022.