La Llorona, the Weeping Woman

Long, long ago, so the story goes, there was a beautiful young woman named Maria who caught the eye of a very rich man.

Though she was poor, and beneath his station, this man spoke to her of love and marriage.

He showered Maria with expensive presents.

So they settled happily together and were blessed with two sons.

But as time went on, the man began to tire of Maria.

She was no longer so beautiful, at least in his eyes, nor so captivating.

Sometimes he came home in a drunken stupor.

Sometimes he did not come home at all, not for months at a time.

Sometimes he was seen about town, in the company of younger and more alluring women.

Maria's heart was breaking.

One day she was walking by the river with her sons, when the man drove by in his carriage, and he was not alone.

Another woman hung on his arm, smiling prettily, and delighted with her position.

The man stopped to greet his children, but he said not a word to Maria.

He did not so much as look her in the eye.

When he drove on, a great grief and a rage welled up inside Maria.

Her anger and her jealousy turned against those closest at hand, her two sons.

She seized them by their necks and threw them into the river.

As soon as they were out of sight, taken by the water, Maria came to herself.

She realized what she had done, and she plunged after them, weeping and crying for her children.

The rushing water carried her away, too.

The townspeople found her body and buried it.

But Maria's spirit still haunts the waterways.

They call her La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, because she is a ghostly figure in white, searching, always searching, and crying out, Ay, mis hijos! ¿Dónde están mis hijos? Oh, my children! Where are my children? And if ever she finds any children out playing by the river after dark, she's likely to mistake those children for her own.

She'll wrap her icy fingers around them, cry her blood-stained tears over them, and carry them away into the night, never to return.

That is the story of La Llorona, which is told with infinite variations all over Latin America.