Ghosts and Spirits : La llarona

Throughout the Spanish-speaking areas of the new world and especially in the American Southwest, there is the legend of La llarona, sometimes called the weeping ghost of the southwest. As a child living near the Rio Grande, chills ran up my spine as I heard tales of the wailing woman who would snatch children away and drown them in the rivers.

The specific story of La llarona varies depending where you are, but one version or another of it can be found anywhere from Chile to New Mexico, and even in the Kansas City area. While the origin of the story is unclear, the stories all have a common thread and no doubt it arose during the early arrival of the Spanish in the Americas. To me the story sounds distinctly New Mexican and while I can't prove it, I would conjecture the story arose in Northern New Mexico in the late 1500's or the 1600s.

Enough guesswork, what is the story of La llarona? Here we will tell one tale, the one I heard as a child. La llarona, whose name in life was Maria, was a peasant girl of unprecedented beauty. She had many suitors, but already had two sons. Where they came from wasn't related in the stories I was told, but what's important is that despite her beauty, things never worked out with men because Maria already had children. Maria often spent her evenings out entertaining gentlemen and left her children home alone. One day, the two boys were found drowned in the river. They could have died by neglect, but most thought Maria had drowned the boys, seeing them as an obstacle to her entertainment and hopes for marriage to a suitable man. Interestingly, this is a common occurrence even in our own times, as the case of Susan Smith illustrates.

Fast forward and Maria dies and becomes the spirit La llarona. Plagued by grief, she searches the rivers, lakes and streams endlessly seeking her children. The spirit is described as a tall, thin woman with long, flowing black hair, wearing a white gown. Wailing in the night because of her grief, now she searches for children to snatch, drowning them too, in a watery grave.

La llarona can be heard at night by the river wailing and weeping, as she roams on her endless search for the children she killed long ago, hoping to snatch some new ones as well. Rumor has it that born of Hispanic culture, she has followed Hispanic people throughout the America's, even being seen in Montana and Wyoming.