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.

Do Graveyard tapes reveal the existence of Ghosts?

Years ago the famed paranormal show In Search of with Leonard Nemoy ran an episode about taping the "voices" of spirits. This was 30 years ago of course so I don't remember the details, but the idea was take a tape recorder to a graveyard and make some recordings. When you play it back, do so at slow speed and you'll hear the voices of the dead.

Being young, fresh out of high school at the time, when a friend saw the episode and suggested we do it ourselves several of us agreed with enthusiasm. So we grabbed some cassette tapes and a recorder, and headed off to a mysterious graveyard built at the turn of the century. 

The cemetery had two parts: an older area adorned with large statues and gravestones, and a newer area that was flat and open grass, with plaques on the ground instead of traditional gravestones. We went to the new area, walked in some distance, put the recorder down, then went back to our car and waited for 45 minutes. 

We picked up the tape and brought it back to the car. We placed it into the cars tape player and listened, but didn't hear much of anything-just a few clicks. It turned out that the batteries on the cassette player were low so the recording was slow. To remedy the problem, we went to a friends house and played the tape there on the original recorder.

What we heard was astonishing. A few minutes went by, and then we heard what can be described as two rocks being hit or smashed together. This occurred in a sequence of three: BANG! BANG! BANG! Remember-the recorder was placed in an open grassy area. Not to mention while waiting by the road we were watching the location, and nobody approached the recorder-in fact there wasn't a (live) soul to be seen anywhere we could see.

So a few more minutes went by of silence, and astonishingly we heard a voice! It was a man speaking. You may find it hard to believe but I assure you its what I heard with my own ears:

ST. PETER, LEAVE ME IN PEACE

Wow this was way more than we had bargained for! We listened to the tape several times, chills running up and down our spines. I went home scared to death. I couldn't sleep that night, and can still see the moonlight that came through the window at 2 AM as I kept replaying in my mind what I had heard on the tape. 

The following night another friend was told of what happened and was astonished. He wanted to duplicate the event, so once again we suited up with a tape recorder and headed off to a cemetery-this time a different one. It was December and that night it was very windy. We left the tape recorder by a grave and waited for 30 minutes, then brought it back to play in the car. 

This time, there was silence for a few minutes, but then....we heard the same sound of rocks smashing together. This time it started softly, as if two rocks were barely being touched...click, click, click. It went on for a good 10 minutes, gradually getting louder....click, bang, BANG! Finally it got very loud as if two stones had been smashed together as hard as could be. Then the sound got lighter again, gradually diminishing for a minute or so followed by silence.

There were no voices this time, but the similar sound of rocks being hit together was very intriguing. Later someone who had seen another episode of In Search Of reported that if you slowed the tape way down, the clicks or smashing sounds would turn out to be voices. But we were scared out of our wits, and threw the tapes away.

Do you believe? What are your ghost stories?