Louisa Elizabeth Henry Howard (July 25, 1835–1916) was Robert E. Howard’s paternal grandmother, the daughter of James Henry and wife of William Benjamin Howard. Born in Alabama, she married William in Mississippi on December 6, 1856; the family moved to southwestern Arkansas in 1858 and to Texas in 1885. Later family research places Louisa and her son Jim in plain, uninscribed graves beneath an old cedar at Mount Antioch Cemetery near Mount Calm, Texas.

Howard remembered his grandmother above all as a source of folklore. In a circa September 1930 letter to H. P. Lovecraft, he described her as one generation removed from southern Ireland and as knowing the tales and superstitions of both Black and white communities. He recalled stories of a driverless night wagon filled with severed heads and limbs, a ghastly yellow horse racing through a plantation house where a wicked woman lay dying, ghostly switches striking doors, deserted plantation mansions, and spectral pigeons. He said her stories frightened him more than the other ghost stories he heard as a child and associated her with the “gloominess and dark mysticism” he perceived in Gaelic tradition. He also remembered her singing old Scottish and Irish ballads.

These remembered motifs are important background to Howard’s later horror fiction, particularly the atmosphere and imagery of “Pigeons from Hell.” A later biographical reconstruction has suggested that Louisa may have stayed with Isaac, Hester and young Robert at Oran, Texas, around 1912 and that this could have been where some storytelling occurred, but that setting is not securely documented and should remain a possibility rather than a fact.