OK, it is now October. This is quite possibly my favorite time of year. Why, you ask? Because Halloween is just around the corner and there are ghost shows and scary movies on TV. Growing up Mexican, I heard my share of ghost stories. Mexico is a place where the people are very religious, but also very superstitious. Everyone has heard a story about their grandma's or aunt's house being haunted. I also heard a lot of them growing up in San Antonio, which is one of the most haunted cities in the country. So this month I will dedicate to bringing you some of the ghost stories that I grew up hearing.
Mexico's history is rich with culture, but also with violence. Many battles of conquest, independence and rebellion took place on its lands. Throw in the pre-Columbian cultures with their own beliefs and you end up with a lot of scary stories. Perhaps the most famous, the one that almost every Mexican child has heard at one point, is that of La Llorona (The Wailing Woman). There are many different versions of the story, but all have a few elements in common. Children are warned not to play around rivers and lakes at night or La Llorona will appear and drag them to a watery grave. She is almost always described as the specter of a woman completely white who wanders along the banks crying out for her children. She is condemned to haunt the rivers and streams in an eternal search for her children. Any child she finds, she claims and drags them into the water. Now perhaps this was meant as a way to scare kids away from dangerous waterways at night...or was it?
For the first part of this story I will present to you some of the phenomena documented by the early citizens of Mexico City, which was built over the ruins of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. These events were witnessed in the middle of the 16th century following the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish. On nights when there was plenty of moonlight, the people of the city were awakened in the middle of the night by the wailing of a woman. These cries were filled with pain and sorrow, cries of a woman who was suffering either deep emotional distress or some kind of terrible physical ailment.
The first few nights that people heard these cries, they would make the sign of the cross and pray. Word spread that such cries must be from some creature that originated from the spirit world. But the occurrences became so common, that many became curious and ventured out to see with their own eyes who or what could be causing such commotion. By the light of the moon they could see a woman, dressed in white from head to toe and with a white veil covering her face. She seemed to glide along the streets of the city, almost as if she was floating instead of walking. But none were brave enough to get so close as to confirm this. Her cries were almost always the same; "Ay, mis hijos! Ay, mis hijooos!!" (Oh, my children!) She would appear in a different part of the city each night, but each night made her way to the central plaza of the city. She would then stop, face the West, fall to her knees and let out one last blood-curling cry before vanishing. No one knew who she had been in life, and so she simply became known as La Llorona. Nights in the city became a time when no one, not even the bravest, dared to venture out for fear of seeing La Llorona.
La Llorona made her presence known in Mexico City in this manner for many years, before fading away. To this day people still see her from time to time all over the country. They say that encountering her is a terrifying experience. There are many stories that tell who she really is, but I will save those for my next post.
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