The Bird Woman
A few years ago, I had to do my medical internship in a town far from the big cities. The Bird Woman Horror Story. In fact, it was like a kind of deal I made with the school, because the work would be somewhat hard. The health center where I would be giving consultations only opened one week a year.
That town was in the middle of the western Sierra Madre, very close to another town very famous for renting cabins. In fact, that was our first destination, we spent a night in that town. I'm keeping the names of these places to myself, mostly out of respect for their inhabitants.
As I said before, we had to spend a night in the neighboring town, because the transport only left once, and it was in the morning. We stayed in a hostel and the next day, early in the morning, we boarded a very run-down truck, it was all rusty and had broken windows. The driver was a person almost as old as the transport itself. Most of the nurses complained, but I kept my comments to myself, rather I had my doubts about the transport working. To my surprise, it turned out perfectly.
The road was very winding, we had to stop several times, not because of any faults with the truck, but because we found some obstacles on the road, branches, huge rocks and even some huge potholes that had to be driven around. We had been on the road for more than an hour and the whole staff began to get restless. We reached a stone road, further ahead we found a very steep slope, when I saw that the truck did not stop, I panicked, got up from my seat and went to ask the driver to stop, but the man calmly told me not to worry, that he always passed by that place. He did not stop, he just slowed down, I felt as if my heart was going to jump out of my chest, however, we crossed the slope without any major problem. Below you could already see the entrance to the town, which looked more like a small community than a town, as there were very few houses and as far as I had been told, there was only one store in that place.
We parked right outside the little house that served as a health center.
Inside everything was very rustic, it had very old hospital furniture, who knows how long it hadn't been changed, beds, desks and cabinets, everything was very old, although functional. We had been told that we had two options to spend the night, one was in the same house where the consultation took place and the other was to go to the house of one of the people who owned the most property in the town. According to what we had been told, he was the one who donated the house to be used as a health center. He was a very old man who did not live in the town, he was in a private hospital in the capital. We had not finished settling in
yet when we already had a line of people who wanted to be seen.
Most of the people I saw were very old people who, when basic examinations were carried out, seemed to be in very good health. However, most of them reported feeling ill, saying they were losing their sight at times, feeling nauseous, and all of them mentioned having nightmares and sudden high fevers. However, during the examinations during the consultation I did not notice anything strange, no sign of any illness. Nevertheless, I wrote each case in my log.
I met a very young woman who volunteered to help. She told a couple of nurses and me that in that place, people were very religious in witchcraft , and that, in her opinion, all of her symptoms were suggested, because, although there were strange things in the middle of the mountains, she never met anyone from the town who dedicated themselves to doing cleansings or spells, according to her those things were only done in the big cities.
I found it funny talking to the young girl, because at least I thought that those stories of witches and Nahuales only happened in far away towns.
I was attending to a person who had a common cold, when two boys arrived to inform me that their younger brother was very ill and that they needed me to come urgently.
I left with two nurses towards the boys' house, which was at the end of the village. It was a small adobe house with clay tiles , with a small corral in the back, and beyond that was the open field.
We entered the house. The youngest was on a mat, with many blankets on top of him, he was delirious, shouting nonsensical things. We took his vital signs and to my amazement, far from having a high temperature, his body was very cold. We did everything we could and managed to raise his temperature. Once the boy was calm, he told us that everything that happened to him was caused by the witch who lives in the forest. According to the boy, the witch came at night and stood outside his window, because she wanted to steal his soul to use in one of her spells.
It was easy for us to play along with the boy, so we went to his room, where he pointed out the window where he used to see the witch. I went up to the wooden frame that formed the window, and between the glass and the frame, I found a piece of black skin, with some feathers of the same color. The boy saw the feathers and began to scream, that it was part of the skin of the witch who visited him, that the last time she was there, her father shot her away and when she got stuck there, a piece of skin came off. I did not want to contradict the boy, so I took the skin and took it to analyze it in a free moment when I had it, it was too thick to belong to a bird.
I returned to the consultation, and out of sheer curiosity, I began to ask the people I saw if they knew anything about a witch who appeared around there. To my surprise, most people agreed that, indeed, on the outskirts of the village, a witch used to appear, sometimes in human form, sometimes in the form of an animal, and most often in the form of a bird. According to the people of the village, they must have been very careful with their children, because this being used to kidnap them and they never saw them again. One lady even told me that, for this reason, there were not usually many children in the community.
I was surprised by the number of people who told me the same story.
In a free moment, and, , I began to analyze the piece of skin with feathers. It looked very strange, the skin, as I told you, was not similar to that of any animal I knew. After looking for a long time, I felt as if the skin was shaking by itself. At first I thought it was just my nerves playing a joke on me, but the phenomenon repeated itself, so I went to talk to another doctor , who also witnessed that piece of tissue with feathers moving by itself . For fear that the skin had some parasite that caused that strange movement, we set it on fire and reduced it to ashes.
I decided to spend the first night in the house that they offered us, because the place offered greater comfort, especially because that house was three times the size of the health center , and could have one room for two people.
That first night, I fell exhausted. The room that had been assigned to me was at the back of the house, it had a huge window that looked out onto a corral with some pigs. I slept through the early hours of the morning without any problems, unfortunately, my roommate suddenly woke me up, informing me that something strange was happening outside, in the pig pen.
It was freezing cold, and sure enough, something was wrong, the pigs were squealing in despair, we looked out the window, and saw a couple of ranchers shining their lamps . We didn't really see much, because everything was very dark out there and the ranchers' lamps did not illuminate very well, even so, I can assure you, we saw a naked woman running, with flaccid skin. That vision soon faded in the darkness of the night. The next day we would learn that a couple of pigs had their eyes torn out. They asked us to take a look, because there was no veterinarian in the village.
The wounds were strange, too perfect for any animal to have done it, and we also found black bird feathers. People were whispering that it had all been the work of the witch who lived in the depths of the mountains.
The day at the health center was a little calmer than the previous one, we basically just gave some flu shots and basic medicine to the few children who lived in the village.
We were having our lunch, which had been kindly prepared by a lady from the village, when two men came running, informing us that one of their sons was badly injured near a bean field.
We got to the field and attended to the child, he had aHe had a severe head wound, but it was not my turn to treat him, because while we were there, the boy's mother, a woman of just 17 years of age, asked me and the two men who had guided us there to go to a hillside where, according to her, her youngest son, a baby in her arms, had been kidnapped by the witch. I did not believe the story at first, but the woman looked very desperate.
I then walked with the other two men, who were well armed with a pair of machetes. We crossed several fields. I was afraid, but not because of what we were going to find, but because of the men who accompanied me. I don't know , they didn't give me much confidence, they looked very tough.
We left the fields and came to a very narrow gap that ended in an area full of trees . The men told me that they knew where that witch lived and that they hoped to catch her.
We came across a small adobe house with a tin roof . To my surprise, I heard a baby crying. There was no door. The men burst in, but they were paralyzed, just like me, by a terrifying sight.
Inside, there was a woman in a black dress, with a face that I cannot describe perfectly, it was so grotesque, so terrifying and sinister. It was as if her human face was mixed with that of a bird's beak, as were her eyes. In one of her hands she held the little baby and with the other she was cutting open its stomach with a knife. The men woke up from their paralysis and let themselves go with machetes. The amorphous being backed away. I saw smoke coming out of its body, and although I was very terrified , I went over to grab the child, and I immediately did everything I could to stop the bleeding coming out of its stomach .
I didn't know what happened next, I only heard the men say that the witch had escaped.
I ran to the clinic with the little creature in my arms.
Fortunately we were able to save him. Once the boy's mother calmed down, she thanked us by giving us some corn cobs, a bag of beans and things like that.
It took me a while to come to terms with what I witnessed, because it went beyond everything I believed. This kept me awake at night, even weeks after I left that strange town, where the people are kind. I have never returned to that town and I have never witnessed anything as evil as my encounter with that kind of witch.
Copyright © 2018 Prabir Rai Chaudhuri
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