I know there is another version of La Llorona on this
site,
but I would like to give a clearer version of it, and also
a true story that happened to my mother and her family when
she was about 5 or 6.
First of all, almost every person of Mexican heritage knows
this legend or something similar and older people use it to
scare children into behaving or ELSE! The version that I
and most of my friends know is that a long time ago, there
was a woman with a son and daughter whose husband had
abandoned her. Desperate, poor, and hungry (and I'm sure a
little mentally unstable) the woman decided that her
children would be better off with God. So she took them to
the edge of the river (if your town has a river, that's
probably the river they're talking about in the story) and
dropped them in and they drowned. Realizing what she had
done, and unable to save her children, she herself jumped
in and drowned. Now they say that at night you can hear
her sobbing and wailing for her children: "Mis
niños...donde están mis niños?" (my children where are my
children!).
In my small town where I'm from the Nueces River runs through it and another small stream called
Espantosa Lake, Espantosa means ghosts or phantoms. So of
course, like in many urban legends, the story took place in
my town.
As a child, our older relatives would always make
us behave by telling us that La Llorana was going to get us
if we didn't behave...very scary as a kid! Now on to my
mom's story.
My mom is pretty sensible and besides this, nothing else
has ever happened to her (or me either, thank God!). Back
in the early sixties when she was young, her paternal
grandmother died. It was early in the morning before
sunrise and everyone was up because they had just heard
that she had died. Suddenly, out of nowhere my mom says
that they heard a loud sobbing coming from outside. She
has never been able to describe it, she says it sounded
like you know, someone who just lost someone, a very loud
sobbing. Something between a scream and a wail. This went
on not even for a minute. Everyone looked at each other in
the living room and my grandmother even thought it could be
the neighbors down the street, a brother and his two
sisters, but when they asked them later they too had heard
it but it was not them. They were also unable to locate
where the noise came from. It was eventually dismissed as
someone else in the neighborhood. So who knows? Growing
up with a legend like that, and then hearing that story
from my mom...maybe she is out there trying to replace her
children.
Contact me here:bbhumbird@juno.com
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