South Texas Creek Where a Child's Body Was Never Recovered
Roma, TX
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Accessible roadside location along former Highway 83, approximately seven miles north of Roma.
Access
Limited Access
Rural creek crossing; unpaved road shoulder; uneven terrain approaching waterway
Equipment
Photos OK
The event at La Minita Creek belongs to that category of regional tragedy that becomes permanent geographical memory — the kind of thing people know happened near here, without necessarily knowing the names or the year, but knowing the shape of the loss.
In the early 1950s, during a severe thunderstorm, a vehicle traveling on old Highway 83 struck the concrete guardrail at the La Minita Creek crossing seven miles north of Roma. The creek had risen sharply. The car flipped over the railing into the water. The driver fought the current and managed to extract his wife, who was unconscious, from the submerged vehicle. When he returned for their daughter — eight years old — he could not reach her. Her body was not recovered.
La Minita Creek flows through South Texas rangeland before meeting the Rio Grande a short distance from the accident site. The convergence of the creek and the river, where the drowned valley meets the international boundary, became the focal area for subsequent sightings.
The incident is documented by True Horror Stories of Texas and referenced in South Texas ghost tour materials. No newspaper archive documenting the accident by name has been located in publicly accessible sources.
Sources
The sightings at La Minita Creek span a diverse population of witnesses — an unusual feature that gives the account more texture than typical roadside ghost lore. Dove hunters and campers have reported the girl running through brush near the creek and the Rio Grande confluence. People crossing the river without documentation — travelers in a state of high stress and watchfulness — have separately reported a child running along the bank.
In each account the figure is in motion. She runs. She does not stop, does not respond to voices, and disappears into vegetation or distance before anyone can reach her. Sound accompanies some accounts: crying, the sound a child makes who is frightened and cannot find anyone familiar.
The South Texas tradition of La Llorona — the Weeping Woman, who searches waterways for drowned children — provides a cultural frame through which the La Minita accounts have sometimes been understood. The Texas Observer noted in 2014 that La Llorona legends across the region tend to absorb local tragedies over time, offering a narrative container for losses that might otherwise remain unprocessed. The La Minita girl may represent that absorption — a specific historical drowning that entered the La Llorona mythos — or may represent something else entirely.
No one has explained the crying.
Notable Entities
The creek crossing on old Highway 83 approximately seven miles north of Roma, Starr County. A documented early 1950s drowning accident at this location — in which an eight-year-old girl was never recovered — anchors a decades-long tradition of sightings in the surrounding fields and Rio Grande corridor.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Combes, TX
Orphanage Road takes its name from a small orphanage that operated near Combes, Texas, in northern Cameron County after World War I. Regional accounts describe an orphanage assigned to care for Black children of the Rio Grande Valley during a period of social isolation following the Civil War. A small cemetery survives in a grove of trees off U.S. 77 near the road's exit.
Elizabeth Lake, CA
Elizabeth Lake is a natural perennial sag pond that sits directly on the San Andreas Fault in the Sierra Pelona Mountains of northwestern Los Angeles County at 3,228 feet elevation. The lake was known to Spanish settlers as Laguna del Diablo. Beginning in the 1830s, ranchers established properties on its shores but repeatedly abandoned them, attributing their losses to a creature living in the lake.
Burleson, TX
Bethesda Road in Burleson, Texas, is primarily known as the location of an urban legend rather than documented historical events. The folklore claims a school bus collided with a train on these tracks, killing most of the children aboard. No historical records in Burleson verify this specific incident.