La Llorona, a mythological woman in Mexican and Latin American oral tradition whose siren-like wails are said to lure adults and children to their untimely deaths. The legend of La Llorona is a popular ghost story that is especially prominent on Día de los Muertos and in Chicano and Latin American communities.
According to the legend, La Llorona was once a beautiful woman named Maria. In many variations of the tale, Maria’s husband was an unfaithful or abusive man who treated their two sons more affectionately than he did his wife. Other retellings say that her husband may have left her for a wealthier or lighter-skinned woman. Out of jealousy, rage, or despair, she is said to have lured her sons to a nearby river and drowned them before drowning herself after realizing what she had done. In another version, Maria’s neglected sons drowned accidentally while she was cavorting with gentlemen callers. Forever after, Maria’s ghost, now La Llorona, is forced to wander the Earth searching for her lost sons. She can be identified by her loud, wailing cries: “Mis hijos! Mis hijos! ¿Dónde están mis hijos?” (“My sons! My sons! Where are my sons?”)
Many versions of the story are told to children across Latin America, often to dissuade them from staying out too late at night. Some versions claim that La Llorona can be summoned in a séance-like environment. Others claim that she appears when children misbehave or when men find themselves lost and alone near a lake or river. In some versions, she appears to mothers and steals their children, mistaking the children for her own lost sons.
There are many stories of encounters with La Llorona. In 1968 American folklorist Bess Lomax Hawes published an article, “La Llorona in Juvenile Hall,” which gives accounts of a “weeping woman” haunting a juvenile detention facility in California. Some accounts describe La Llorona as having long hair and wearing a hooded cape or a veil. Others describe her as being young and pretty, being dressed entirely in black or white, or having the bones of her dead children embedded in her backbone.
In all iterations of the story, encountering La Llorona is to be avoided at all costs. It is said that those who hear La Llorona’s cries are destined for misfortune or even death. A desperate and malevolent spirit, she is said to act unflinchingly and without mercy, often drowning the children she has found or kidnapped when she realizes they are not her sons. Some traditions hold that she will begin to seduce a lone man and then murder him as a form of revenge for her husband’s abuse or adultery, while others assert that she kills men, women, and children indiscriminately. Eerily, her wails are often said to sound more distant the closer she is to her victims.
The legend has several different origin stories. According to one account, her tale originated in Mexico; another argues that it traveled through oral tradition from Spain. Some historians identify La Llorona as directly linked to the Aztec earth goddess Coatlicue. Another tradition holds that she is Malintzin, or “La Malinche,” the enslaved Indigenous woman who was the primary interpreter and concubine of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. This version was told in Rudolfo Anaya’s novel The Legend of La Llorona (1984). Aside from these speculations, La Llorona endures as a myth that continues to strike fear in children of Latin American heritage.
La Llorona has been depicted in many films, dating back to the Mexican films La Llorona (1933) and La maldición de la Llorona (1963; The Curse of the Crying Woman). More recently, the legend has been told in the films Mama (2013), The Curse of La Llorona (2019), and The Legend of La Llorona (2022), a horror film costarring Danny Trejo.