This one appears all over the world, and keeps coming. We’ve taken care of maybe a dozen of them since we were kids. The basic story goes like this:
A young woman, in a despairing fury over her treatment at the hands of her husband, murders her children. Or she kills them because they prevent her from marrying the man of her dreams. In either case, she then dies and becomes a spirit. The most famous version is probably the Mexican one:
Long ago, the story goes, a beautiful Indian princess, Doña Luisa de Loveros, fell in love with a handsome Mexican nobleman named Don Nuno de Montesclaros. The princess loved the nobleman deeply and had two children by him, but Montesclaros refused to marry her. When he finally deserted her and married another woman, Doña Luisa went mad with rage and stabbed her two children. Authorities found her wandering the street, sobbing, her clothes covered in blood. They charged her with infanticide and sent her to the gallows.
Ever since, it is said, the ghost of La Llorona (“the crying woman”) walks the country at night in her bloody dress, crying out for her murdered children. If she finds any child, she’s likely to carry it away with her to the nether regions, where her own spirit dwells.
Even this is a newer version of a much older story, maybe all the way back to when the conquistadores were doing their thing along the Rio Grande—which just goes to show you how long these kinds of spirits have been around. There’s another version from a little closer to home, recorded outside Dallas. In this one, known as the Ghost of White Rock Lake, La Llorona comes together with a famous urban legend, the vanishing hitchhiker. In this one, a driver (almost always at night) picks up a hitchhiker, who then either disappears as the car passes a graveyard or gives an address that turns out to be a long-abandoned house. Our father had some pretty definite ideas about the vanishing hitchhiker:
Always dangerous because it preys on one of the best human qualities, the impulse to help those in need. The problem with the vanishing hitchhiker is that it never stays vanished. It leaves a token sometimes, which leads the person who offered the ride to try to find it again. Usually that search leads straight to a graveyard, and there’s one less Good Samaritan in the world. Some spirits know they can’t approach directly, and some just love the game of taking advantage of the better side of human nature.
Around White Rock Lake, you’ll see strange lights, hear strange noises, and the locals will probably tell you a story if you stick around long enough to hear it. There’s the pretty girl in a white evening dress, soaking wet, who flags down a ride and then disappears before the car gets to the address she gives. There’s the same girl, showing up on the porches of lakeside houses asking to use the phone and then vanishing, leaving only a puddle of water and the fading echoes of her screams.
We’ve heard of other La Llorona cases in Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery, Chicago; Fort Monroe, Virginia; Cry-Woman’s Bridge in Dublin, Indiana; Calumet Bridge in Gary, Indiana—something about Chicagoland seems to draw them like flies. But we’ve heard of woman in white/vanishing hitchhiker legends from as far away as Singapore. Those are the harmless ones. The ones we haven’t had to take care of yet because either they’re just wandering spirits or they haven’t gotten around to turning malevolent yet.
The last time we dealt with a woman in white was in Jericho, California, a couple of years ago. Like the White Rock Lake ghost, she was a vanishing hitchhiker. She’d ask for a ride home, and if you gave her one, you found yourself at an old abandoned house out in the middle of nowhere, and you weren’t going to have to worry about getting home. Also, in this case, the spirit—Constance Welch—was a suicide. She’d drowned her kids and then jumped off Sylvania Bridge. Sometimes suicides turn into angry spirits who aren’t focused on the people who did them wrong in real life. They’re just lost and hurting, and over time that turns dark, and they start going after anyone who vaguely resembles the people who might have driven them to suicide.
Our dad, after taking out a WiW outside Durant, Oklahoma, in 1991, wrote in his journal that he thought La Llorona was the same kind of spirit the Irish called a bean sidhe, or
Banshee. Sometimes they are dressed in white, sometimes in a winding sheet or burial gown. They wail, they scream, sometimes they sing to signal that death approaches for some member of the household where they are heard. Usually they come in one of three forms, which correspond to the three stages of womanhood (and maybe have something to do with the age of the person whose death is being signaled). A banshee is either a beautiful young woman, a matron, or a corpselike hag. As a hag, she has a link, way back, with notorious English hag figures such as Black Annis, a one-eyed crone, physically strong and with the features of a demon: long teeth, iron claws, and a blue face. She was said to hide in a giant oak that was the sole survivor of the primeval forest. Like many hag figures, she was a cannibal who preferred children, which she ate after flaying them alive. Their skins hung in a cave beneath the tree.
Baba Yaga, from Russian lore, is another example. Living deep in the forest, in a magical hut that moved around on chicken legs, she often ate children, but unlike Black Annis, Baba Yaga could be an important source of magical help for a hero or questing child. If you asked her the right kind of question, or caught her in the right mood, she might help you on your errand instead of making a meal of you.
The banshee often appears crying as she washes bloody clothes by a river—usually the clothes of someone about to die. Also, she can appear as a crow, rabbit, or weasel.
The banshee is more of an omen spirit than the woman in white tends to be, but the relationship is there. At least in the Jericho case, seeing Constance Welch was a sure sign that you were going to die.