3,300 Acres of Urban Wilderness and Old Legends
5707 E 36th St N, Tulsa, OK 74115
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
General park access is free. Tulsa Zoo requires separate admission.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Mix of paved paths, maintained trails, and dense woodland; Oxley Nature Center trails vary in difficulty
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1924 · Tulsa Park History · New Deal Public Works · Oxley Nature Center
Mohawk Park's creation in 1924 was tied to the engineering project that extended Spavinaw Dam water service to Tulsa. The city acquired the land and developed it incrementally through the 1920s and 1930s, with New Deal federal programs funding a substantial portion of the construction — the Tulsa Zoo, a recreation lake, shelters, fish hatcheries, and, in 1934, Mohawk Golf Course.
In that same year, a 70-acre Bird and Wildflower Sanctuary was established within the park's boundaries. That sanctuary eventually became the foundation for the 804-acre Oxley Nature Center, formally established in 1974 and now one of the more significant urban nature preserves in the region.
At 3,300 acres, Mohawk Park is among the largest parks owned and operated by an American city. Much of it is wooded and relatively undeveloped — the kind of urban-edge wilderness that transitions quickly from maintained paths to dense forest. The Spavinaw line that gave the park its existence was, when it opened in 1924, the longest gravity-flow water pipeline in the United States; Tulsa's transformation from frontier oil town to functioning city ran through this stretch of land.
The park's interior carries deeper Indigenous and regional folkloric layers — Plains Nations cosmologies of small spirit beings and the Deer Woman among them — that predate and persist alongside its modern recreational identity.
Sources
Two distinct folkloric traditions attach to Mohawk Park, and they represent very different categories of supernatural claim.
The first involves 'little people' — small presences heard in conversation and movement throughout the park's woodland sections without ever becoming visible. Accounts describe voices, the sound of movement, and the clear sense of being in proximity to something that declines to show itself. This category of encounter appears across multiple Indigenous traditions of the southern Plains, where small spirit beings associated with natural areas are a recognized part of the cosmology. Whether the Mohawk Park accounts draw directly from those traditions or are a parallel development is not established in available sources.
The second is the Deer Lady (also called Deer Woman): described as standing approximately eight feet tall on hind legs, half human and half deer. This figure appears in Ponca, Cherokee, Muscogee, and other Plains and southeastern Nations folklore as a supernatural being who often functions as an agent of consequence — particularly toward men who have wronged women. Her appearance in accounts from Mohawk Park places the park within this regional tradition rather than inventing a local one.
The golf course entry for Mohawk Park carries an additional anomaly — the bathroom structure with no power showing a light at night — which may be related to the broader atmospheric quality of the park or may simply be a separate, low-intensity phenomenon.
Notable Entities
Explore one of the largest municipal parks in the United States, including the 804-acre Oxley Nature Center established on a 1934 bird and wildflower sanctuary. The wooded sections of the park — particularly the less-traveled trails near dusk — are where legends of unexplained sounds and the Deer Lady have been documented.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Gatlinburg, TN
Great Smoky Mountains National Park preserves 522,427 acres of southern Appalachian terrain across Tennessee and North Carolina. The land was the heart of the Cherokee Nation before forced removal in 1838 along what became the Trail of Tears, and home to Appalachian Scots-Irish and English settler communities through the early twentieth century. Congress authorized the park in 1926; it was formally dedicated by Franklin D. Roosevelt on September 2, 1940.
Tulsa, OK
Mohawk Park was created in 1924 as part of Tulsa's infrastructure expansion and became home to Mohawk Golf Course in 1934, originally 18 holes later expanded to 36. The 3,300-acre park is one of the largest municipal parks in the United States and contains the Tulsa Zoo, Oxley Nature Center, and a lake.
Linville Falls, NC
The Linville Gorge Wilderness in Burke County, North Carolina is part of the Pisgah National Forest and contains the deepest river gorge in the eastern United States. The Brown Mountain Lights — unexplained luminous phenomena visible from Wiseman's View and other overlooks near the gorge — were first reported in published accounts around 1910. A 1922 investigation by USGS scientist George R. Mansfield attempted to explain them as reflected headlights and brush fires but could not account for all reported sightings.