The Legend Of La Llorona Explained

Every culture has its famous ghosts, and the most famous ghost of Latin America is undoubtedly La Llorona, the crying woman. This spectral apparition is known to children all the way from Texas and New Mexico down through Mexico and Guatemala, and all the way to the tip of South America. Her eerie cries foretell death and danger for naughty children, or maybe unfaithful husbands, as her weeping echoes over various bodies of water and threatens an impending drowning.

The story of La Llorona is becoming better known in the United States thanks to supernatural television shows and horror movies like 2019's The Curse of La Llorona, but what do you really know about the wailing woman? Read on to learn all about her origins and modern day sightings, but be sure to obey your mom and listen out for spooky sobbing over the water.

Many ghost legends have a tragic story to go along with them, but they're not always as well known as the ghost itself. Consider how many American kids know Bloody Mary but don't know anything about her background. La Llorona, on the other hand, has a couple of popular stories that might explain the crying ghost who wants to drown your children. Legends of America tells what is probably the most-repeated version of the story: in life La Llorona was named Maria, a poor but beautiful woman who caught the eye of a rich man who showered her with affection (in many versions of the story, Maria is an indigenous woman while the man is Spanish). Soon she bore the man two sons, at which point the man's attitude began to change.

He soon ignored Maria, turning his attention to chasing women and booze. When he would come to visit the young woman, he would only spend time with the children, and he would talk about marrying a woman more suited to his class and lifestyle. Soon Maria resented the attention that the boys got from their father that she desired, and in a fit of rage at seeing her lover with his new wife, drowned her children in the river. Realizing what she had done, she wasted away with grief and wailing until all that was left was a weeping specter on the riverbank.

While there are those who contend that the origins of La Llorona stretch back centuries, to the era of conquistadors or even earlier, the indisputably earliest written account of La Llorona dates back to 1883, in a sonnet written by poet Manuel Carpio. Carpio was a Mexican poet, theologian, and philosopher who lived from the late 18th to mid-19th century and who was a member of the literary movement known as Mexican Romanticism. The version of the wailing woman presented in his poem, however, differs significantly from the popular oral legend told today. For example, the infanticide at the center of the modern ghost legend is completely absent from the original text, which tells instead of a woman who was murdered by her husband.

In the version found in the poem, the weeping woman's name was Rosalia, not Maria, and all we know of her life from the 14-line poem is that she lived in the narrator's village and was killed by her criminal husband. "Ever since," the sonnet says, "the frightened people, trembling in the gloomy night, hear the sad groans of the grieving woman." This shrieking apparition wanders the streets and riverbank, filling all who hear her voice with deadly horror. "And by the river," the poem concludes, "in the thick darkness, she leaves crying, wrapped in her cloak."

Some students of the La Llorona legend believe that the modern ghost story has its roots not in mythology, but in history. As History Today points out, there are those who see a significant similarity between the story of the wailing woman and Hernan Cortes' interpreter and concubine, known as La Malinche. The legend surrounding La Malinche is that she was an indigenous woman who was betrayed by her Spanish lover to marry a Spanish woman and that her wounded pride led her to murder the child she bore him. While all those elements are echoed in the popular version of the La Llorona legend, there is no evidence that these things really happened. Rather, this story seems to be an attempt to create a microcosm for the heartless way Europeans dealt with the indigenous culture.

According to JSTOR Daily, the real La Malinche, known also as Doña Marina and Malintzin, was the daughter of an Aztec chief who was sold as a slave after her father's death, ultimately landing in Cortes's possession. From there, she acted as his interpreter and guide as well as mistress, but there is little evidence that there was much of the fiery, even murderous, emotion to their relationship that the legend would seem to indicate. Scholars claim that "there is no indication that their relationship involved love or even enthusiasm."

As La Llorona is one of the most popular ghost legends throughout pretty much every Spanish-speaking country in the Western Hemisphere, it should be no surprise that there is an abundance of modern-day sightings of the weeping apparition. Legends of America records a number of different encounters, including a man who claims that as a boy he and his family saw a woman floating over the water of a creek in New Mexico, who turned toward a hill and then vanished. He describes the woman as tall and thin and says that when he went over to where she had been, there were no footprints.

Another story reports that young brothers had run away from their ranch home in New Mexico in a wagon after a heated argument with their parents. As they made their way toward Santa Fe, a woman dressed in black and whose face was covered with a veil suddenly appeared between the two boys sitting in the front of the wagon. She sat silently between them until the boys turned the horses back toward home, at which point she assured them they would see her again if they ever argued with their mother. Likewise, in Santa Fe there have been numerous sightings of a weeping ghost in the Public Employees Retirement Association Building, which is said to be on the former site of a Spanish-Indian graveyard.

As modern Latin American culture is a blend of the indigenous peoples and Spanish conquerors who colonized the area, it makes some amount of sense that the most famous ghost legend in that modern culture would reflect elements of the cultures that comprise it. Besides the various Aztec myths that seem to share some aspects with the modern La Llorona, there are a number of European legends that bear some similarities to the wailing woman as well. Notably, the Greek myth of Lamia tells of a queen who was loved and betrayed by Zeus, after which she became a night-prowling monster who ate children. The Jewish legend of Lilith, Adam's first wife who was expelled from Eden and became a mother of demons, contains some of that same DNA as well.

But besides the revenge infanticide, La Llorona is part of a much wider tendency in ghost legend around the world, the figure of the Woman in White. As Gizmodo explains, stories about ghostly women in white dresses are basically ubiquitous, from Germany and the Netherlands to tales of the yurei in Japan. And of course, La Llorona's trademark crying, which is sometimes said to be an omen of death, bears more than a passing resemblance to the banshee, the fairy woman of Irish lore, whose eerie wailing is said to foretell the impending death of a family member.

The classic story of La Llorona has not been merely relegated to classic horror films, however. The hugely popular ghost tale has continued to serve as fuel for filmmakers' imaginations well into the current day. For example, 2013's Mama, from Mexican producer Guillermo del Toro and Argentinian writer/director Andy Muschietti, reimagines the story of La Llorona with Jessica Chastain and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as a couple who suddenly find themselves haunted by a ghostly mother figure after they are forced to adopt their tragically orphaned nieces. The 2007 independent horror film The Cry is a more straightforward version of the La Llorona story about a police detective investigating missing children.

The highest profile adaptation of the legend, however, is undoubtedly 2019's The Curse of La Llorona, starring Linda Cardellini as a social worker trying to protect her own children from the wailing woman, which turned out to secretly be part of The Conjuring series of films. It was ... fine. The year 2019 also saw the release of a much better La Llorona film, called, well, La Llorona, a Guatemalan production that uses the famous legend to examine the history of genocidal crimes against indigenous people in Latin America. It manages to be a supernatural revenge picture that also puts a lens on a serious issue in a way that might even make the weeping woman smile.