A ghostly woman, with long black hair and dressed all in white, wanders alone at night wailing for her lost children. Children that she drowned. That woman is La Llorona, or the Weeping Woman, a haunting figure in Latin American folklore. For some, to hear her cry is an omen of death. For others, it’s a siren’s song that leads to your own death. But most commonly, La Llorona is ghost in constant search of wayward children to snatch up to replace the ones she lost.
The foreboding La Llorona is finally poised to become a household name with The Curse of La Llorona, but she’s been haunting Mexico and the Southwest for centuries. Her legend is so old that the exact origin has long been lost, and details of her story have changed depending on the region. La Llorona has been such a fixture in Latin American folklore that versions of her tale have slipped through into pop culture, some overt and some far less obvious. Though none quite as huge as a major theatrical release set in the Conjuring universe, which draws from the most common telling of La Llorona. Consider this a primer for this ghostly figure ahead of The Curse of La Llorona’s arrival in theaters.
Many believe that the earliest version of La Llorona stems from the Aztec goddess Cihuacoatl, ruler of the cihuateteo, or deified spirits of women that died during childbirth. On certain days of the year, the cihuateteo haunted crossroads seeking victims, preferably children. La Llorona has also been conflated with La Malinche, or Doña Marina, the Nahua mistress of the conquistador Hernán Cortés and mother of his first son. The story of La Malinche is that when Cortés wanted to return to Spain, he wanted to leave her behind and take their son with him. Distraught and angry, she killed their son and then herself.
The most common version of La Llorona is that of Maria, a beautiful woman born of a rural, poor village. When a traveling nobleman passes through her village, he’s so taken with her that he marries her despite her low station. At first, they’re happy and she bears him two sons. Eventually, though, his travels mean he’s away from his family more and more, until he returns with a new wife- one more suited for his wealth and class. Distraught and wrathful, Maria takes her sons out to the river and drowns them. When her anger subsided and she realized what she’d done, she spent the rest of her days weeping by the riverside in a state of profound grief, wasting away until death claimed her.
There are variations to the details, but the core remains the same: the ghost of the grieving woman haunts bodies of water (or highways and roads in modern versions) in perpetual search of her lost children. It’s a story passed down to children to keep them from wandering of by themselves, especially at night.
With such a long running history behind the legend, it’s no surprise that La Llorona has managed to slowly enter pop culture in recent years. There’s a good chance that even if you aren’t familiar with La Llorona, you’re familiar with her legend. Here are a few examples:
Movies
The Curse of the Crying Woman
Or, La Maldición de la Llorona, this loose telling of the legend is highly underseen outside of Mexico, but it’s an amazing gothic gem that borrows a lot from Mario Bava (Black Sunday in particular). The plot follows Selma, who has summoned her niece Amelia to her mansion to claim it as part of an inheritance. It soon becomes clear that Amelia has been lured there to play a role in the family’s curse and revive the witch La Llorona. Witches, bats, gothic set pieces, and imagery that feel straight out of a Bava film, there’s not a whole lot of familiarity to the actual legend here, but it’s a great film (with some melodrama) and La Llorona is pretty creepy.
Mama
While the ghost at the center of 2013’s Mama isn’t La Llorona, there are obvious parallels between the two. The creepy entity acting as mother to the orphaned Lily and Victoria was once Edith Brennan in life, a woman committed to an asylum and separated from her baby. She escaped from the asylum with her baby, jumping off a cliff and drowning in the water below. Her ghost spent the next century wandering the woods in mourning, looking for her lost child. Like La Llorona, Mama is a ghost created out of profound grief for her lost child, a loss that was entirely her fault, and doomed to wander the area where the loss occurred.
TV
Grimm “La Llorona”
This Halloween episode of season 2 featured, you guessed it, La Llorona. In Grimm’s version, La Llorona moves from city to city, stealing and drowning three children in a river just prior to midnight every Halloween. It turns out that La Llorona sacrifices the three kidnapped children in the hopes of getting her own back. The heroes work to save the kids before the stroke of midnight. They succeed, but La Llorona is still out there, her spirit free to kidnap more children in another city. This version also borrows from La Malinche’s origin of La Llorona; an ancestor of lead protagonist Nick (David Giuntoli) once encountered the spirit while traveling with Cortés in 1519. She cries tears of blood and has a much ghastlier appearance hiding beneath the surface in this version.
Supernatural “Pilot”
Referred to in the premiere episode of Supernatural as the “Woman in White,” the Winchester brothers investigate the mournful ghost of a woman who lures male drivers to their doom in Jericho, California. Dressed in white, she hitchhikes near a bridge and murders those who pick her up. In life, she was Constance Welch, a woman who drowned her children and then killer herself after discovering her husband cheating on her. In the end, she’s defeated when the brothers take her home, where her ghostly children get revenge. In the episode, she’s referred as a “Weeping Woman,” one of many wailing female spirits across the world, including Mexico. Supernatural references La Llorona’s source while turning her folklore into a specific type of ghost.
Haunted Attractions
Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights
La Llorona has proven to be a tried and true entity for Universal Studios annual Halloween Horror Nights event, especially the Hollywood location. Initially featured as one of six scare zones in Hollywood’s 2010 event, and making an appearance on the Terror Tram, the Weeping Woman received her own haunted maze in 2011- La Llorona: Villa De Almas Perdidas (Villa of the Lost Souls). It was so well received that she returned in 2012 in the scare maze La Llorona: La Cazadora de los Niños (The Child Hunter). In 2013, La Llorona finally made an appearance at Orlando with the haunted house Urban Legends: La Llorona.
The highly detailed level of work that Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights brings to their haunted attractions brought La Llorona to life in a thrilling way, especially for those who grew up with her story. The mazes constructed in the likeness of popular horror movies usually gets most of the attention, but their original mazes are often even better. And as far as La Llorona is concerned, in pop culture anyway, Universal Studios was ahead of the curve.
Here’s to hoping for many more La Llorona inspired nightmares to come.