Ghost Story
“Her hair grew long and knotty, turning gray and full of burrs. Her nails grew sharp, extending inches from the tips of her fingers. She became emaciated, a skeleton of herself in a long, black dress. La Llorona.”
“At night she walks the arroyos, looking for her two drowned sons, crying and wailing for them. If you go near the river at night, she will reach out and grab you, drowning you just like her sons drowned.”
This was the story my baby sitter told me when I was in fourth grade and lived in New Mexico. It scared the hell out of me. After telling me how La Llorona’s children drowned in the river and what happened to her as a result of their death, my babysitter went on to tell tale after tale of La Llorona going from house to house, knocking on the bedroom windows of children three times, and those children who were not lucky enough to get out of the room before she came in would be found lost from their beds in the morning with three knock marks printed in blood on their walls, having, I assume, been ripped to shreds by La Llorona’s terrifying nails. I didn’t sleep for months.
Ever since my evil babysitter told me these stories, La Llorona is what I think of whenever anyone so much as mentions the word ghost. Through research I have learned that there is much more to the story and it does have its roots in Spanish and Mexican history. But a few details remain constant when it comes to the story that is passed now through oral tradition. La Llorona had two sons who died in the river - how and why they drowned varies depending on your source. After their deaths La Llorona changed, transformed somehow - some would say the hauntings began after her death, I fully believed this was a woman who was still alive but had sort of “lost it,” if you will. Sometimes she’s said to be in a black dress, sometimes it’s white. Whether or not her transformation then caused her to walk the streets or the arroyos at night as a ghost, crying for her children (La Llorona is “Crying/Weeping Woman”) or if she indeed snatched naughty children from their beds at night or from the sides of the river - that varies depending on who you’re talking to.
I remember every detail of what my sitter told me. And I think what terrified me the most, what made La Llorona’s existence so plausible for me back then, was that it made so much sense to me. The story terrifies me today for the very same reason, but my empathy is in a different place.
La Llorona lost her children. Her boys, they drowned.
If my - and I’ll go there for just a moment, just long enough to write this paragraph as quickly as possible and be done with it - if anything happened to them . . . if I couldn’t smell Robby’s head sweat each morning, if I couldn’t hear Sam sing a made-up song each day, or hug them every hour, or watch them sleep at night . . . I think I’d just crawl somewhere and lay down. I don’t know if I’d cry, because it seems that crying would take energy, and I can’t imagine I’d have any, but I really can’t say for sure. Weeping might be a more appropriate term. Moaning? And I don’t know how long I’d stay there, laying under a big tree, because for some reason that’s how I see it - with me huddled under a huge tree as seasons pass - but I know that when and if I ever got up, you’d find me quite changed. My hair would be long, knotted, riddled with leaves and whatever else blew by in those days, weeks, months, years. My nails, unattended for so long, would be curled and grotesque. Assuming I even had the energy to ever move again, I’d be emaciated from a lack of nourishment. How could I eat? How would I drink? I’d be a skeleton of myself, a shell of who I once was when I was the mother of two perfect, loving boys. A ghost.
I know now why this tale is so prevalent in the Southwest, which it is. La Llorona is more than just a culturally specific boogeyman, more than a ghost story told to children to keep them from misbehaving or walking near river edges after dark. For parents she represents the ever-present possibility of loss, of what we would become. It’s terrifying. I haven’t slept in years.
This post was written for Scribbit’s October Write-Away contest. The topic: Ghosts.
Eeek! I am FROM New Mexico, and I grew up on La Llorona. All the stories came back and I gots me the chills.
I have thought about what would happen to me if I were to ever lose all of my children, and I differ from you in that I suspect that I would run. Run like Forrest Gump and keep running forever, or until my heart burst.
You know, we just put the pool net on our pool yesterday because the weather suddenly turned nice this week and the little guy in our house is walking well and knows how to open the screen door. Before it didn’t matter, because the sliding door literally is so hard to open (on purpose) that I have a hard time with it, but now that the door is open there is NO WAY IN H*LL that I’m giving him any chance to get outside.
My husband wasn’t too thrilled because since the other two boys are good swimmers we haven’t had the pool net on the pool in about two years. It’s a pain. It’s shrunken a bit and hard to put on. You can’t clean the pool without taking the net off. But it’s worth all of it.
If anything were to ever happen to one of my children due to my carelessness (ie, leaving the pool net off of the top of the pool) I would NEVER EVER EVER EVER recover from that. I would never get over it. I would be over. I know it. So I know exactly of what you speak, and I’ve been struggling with the same thing myself lately.
Oh my goodness! Now I’M scared! And I’m not even going to go *there*…
Steph
Never knew you had heard such a story. Don’t remember you ever mentioning it. And I could have gone the rest of my life not knowing it.
Excellent post! And totally terrifying story, regardless of age.
Great meeting you yesterday at BlogHer !!
That story is Chilling and sounds like one that would have kept me up at night as a girl- ugh. It kinda reminds me of the movie The RIng, that was SO SCARY and opened right around when my son was born. I had to tell myself not to look down the dark stairs that I had to walk by, when I went into my son’s room at night to feed him… and then, after a couple of nights, I said to myself, “You sleep-deprived idiot, go and feed your baby and stop thinking about that horror movie!”… I can’t believe I just remembered that?!
See what a scary story can do?
That is a true scary story, and as a mom it brings a whole new type of horror to it. I can’t even go there - it’s too raw for me to even imagine.
I love scary stories but this one freaked me out!
That indeed is a very scary story, and the fact that it’s based in truth makes it much, much worse.
I don’t like going there either. As I’m sure you know, my sister lost her daughter in a horrific way. This, for me, makes ‘going there’ more difficult to avoid since it’s such a reality in my family. And I will say that my sister is changed. She did basically lay in bed for a long, long time. But eventually she had the strength to get up and get out. Partly because she has two other children who need her and partly, I’d like to think because of us, her family. Because we love her and we’re here for her. And we are hurting too. Not as deeply of course but we feel it every day.
It makes me feel wonderful seeing her with my kids, seeing how much she loves and enjoys them. Seeing how much joy they bring her.
I guess I find it comforting to know that even when something so horrible happens, that you can still live for something. But it’s true, you’ll never be the same.
Ok that made me cry, I think that I would become La Llorona too if…
GREAT job… this was well written!
Fantastic post, Beth.
My husband’s family has lived in NM for generations. Stories like that are a huge part of the regional tradition because they acknowledge a universal fear. Plus, the southwest seems to lend itself as a setting for the mystical. I feel it whenever we are there.
Her story has grown into mythic proportions. That’s what the incomprehensible will do…
I not only liked hearing the story and your take on things but the translation into life you gave it.
Good job taking an incident and making it real to you. I like that. And I especially like this line, because it can be so true: “possibility of loss, of what we would become.”
Gotta love folklore that has hints of truth to it. It’s the kind that freaks you out even more. Thanks for the sleepless nights!