Supernatural

Sharing frightening fables one way to feel chill of autumn’s darker days

 

Some stories in the Arizona Latino cultures are best told in whispers.

Tales of La Llorona, the child-killing mother. Devil dancers. Corpses of banditos spurring ghost horses. Ghastly, screaming apparitions. The decayed dead returning to avenge a wrong. Brujos and brujas shifting shapes from human to spirit animals. Demon lovers.

Are the tales true? Who knows? Many of the tellers, past and present, swear by them. Yet these accounts - some from before the murderous Conquista - persist through the centuries like rusty stains on ancient sacrificial altars of stone. "Tales to scare children," explain the disbelievers and those too frightened to believe. "The rantings of the crazy," claim others.

Yet these eerie histories cling to our collective memories like leeches, chilling the blood of generations. These repeated reports of encounters with a world hidden within ordinary reality remain in our families forever because they spring from the shadows of our Latino psyches.

Join Latino Perspectives - if you dare - as we retell tales of terror and evil deeds that are spoken of in the dark only if the listener has a strong heart and stout courage - or a reckless disregard for living a full and sane life.

 

LA LLORONA

On chilly nights thick mists hover among the dark trees along the San Pedro River near Amado and Tubac, site of the old Spanish presidio. Then a scream pierces the silence: "Ayyyyy, mis hijos....Ayyyyy, my children."

Between the corridors of moonlight, shadows shift shapes until they coalesce into the outline of an emaciated, hideous woman gliding above the stream, crying and screaming inconsolably.

This mutilated soul was once a beautiful young mestiza named Maria Dolores. She lived in a shack near Tubac with her elderly parents. Maria had caught the eye of a tall, ruggedly handsome captain named Diego. A bold man of action, Diego soon courted Maria, meeting her in the groves by the river, singing to her and murmuring poetry. She fell deeply in love with the officer, envisioning her social elevation to his rank.

Maria moved in with the officer and gave him two beautiful children. Maria’s life was filled with bliss, and other mestizos accorded her respect usually reserved for the pure-blood nobility. One day, suddenly, the captain and his regiment were ordered back to Mexico City for redeployment. Diego promised to return soon, consoling the frightened Maria.

Months turned into lonely years in the isolated pueblito. She bestowed her love on his children, laughing and playing with them. Life continued until one day, an entourage of soldiers escorting a fancy carriage rode through the dust into Tubac.

Maria recognized the outline of her man, Diego. She rushed to the horseman to welcome him home. A stony look in her man’s eyes caused her to halt before him. He spoke words she could not believe, and pointed to the carriage, where sat a beautiful Spanish lady, a dama. Diego’s words froze her heart and soul: He had come to claim his children, to take them away to be raised by his new, church-married wife.

Maria screamed and ran to her patio, clutching her two children to her as she fled into the forest. She stumbled across the fields, to the river. The shouts of Diego followed her, driving her until the dark river bank stopped her. She turned and knelt. Her terror was overwhelming. As the soldiers began to encircle her, she immersed the children in the water. Soon their lifeless bodies sagged in the current. She released them to the river, stood, and with a blood-curdling cry, drove a dagger deep into her heart.

The horrified Diego and his men stood by, too late to prevent the tragedy.

The children’s bodies were never found.

Not long after, the people of the pueblo began to hear a sighing, a crying, a screaming at night that seemed to be coming from along the river. They barred their doors and windows.

Stories began to drift in from nearby pueblos of children disappearing at night. Parents in the region, fearing for their children, began warning them of the ghost woman in a flowing white dress, her face twisted in grief, who will steal them if they disobeyed.

It seems that La Llorona has widened her search for her children through the centuries to the barrios and urban centers of Arizona. Ask any Latino family, and they will quickly inform you of where a family member last saw her.

Stella Pope Duarte, author of two books on the Mexican-American culture, has incorporated La LLorana into a presentation that looks at her place in the Mexican collective consciousness.

There’s lesson in La Llorona that each generation must confront, she says.

"She’s an archetype. She’s this wandering, creepy woman who acted in a murderous manner toward her children, committing something that is tabu in any culture," says Pope Duarte, who was born in Phoenix’s Sonorita barrio off 7th Avenue and I-17. Llorona sightings, she adds, abounded in Arizona’s barrios.

"She reacted to a pain in her life with madness. Any time a person reacting to their own pain inflicts it on others, they are acting in the same manner that she acted."

 

 

DANCING WITH THE DEVIL

Christina Calderon, granddaughter of Arturo Calderon, recalls her tata’s dance hall off 16th Street and Buckeye was always packed with Latinos on Saturday and Sunday nights. Young men and women from the nearby barrios flocked to this early Phoenix social scene.

One night couples crowded the dance floor as usual. Suddenly, a woman screamed. Dancers near her paused and looked to where she was pointing down.

"People say that a man. dressed up and looking good, had patas de gallo instead of feet," she says, and a rush for the doors ensued as they tried to escape the Devil incarnate. "I still know some people still alive that will swear it happened," she says.

The ballroom has since been demolished, but the tale of the Devil who danced there lives on.

 

EL TEJANO RIDES

 

El Tejano was a notorious stage robber in the 1880s, with a base camp at the Cerro de Gato in the Tucson Mountains on the pueblo’s west side. He also operated in the Picacho Peak area. It’s rumored that he would bury his ill-gotten wealth along the sandy banks of the Santa Cruz River.

The Hispanic highwayman was dispatched by shotgun blasts during an ambush by local lawmen. Proving it’s hard to keep a good bandito down - or dead - locals say they still see El Tejano, his corpse riddled through with buckshot, spurring his ghost horse at a full gallop, chasing stagecoaches that have since faded away into history.

"Old-timers on the west side say men have come upon El Tejano’s buried treasure," says Griffith, "but when they try to tote some away, El Tejano’s ghost says, ‘Todo o nada’ - meaning take it all or die - and they are so scared they forget where it is."

Griffith adds that the last report of an El Tejano sighting was near Sasabe.

 

BARRIOS HAUNTED HOUSE

 

"The stories of ghosts are as much a part of the Mexican people as breathing," says Barrios.

Yet Barrios’ own experience with his family’s haunted house matches the most hair-raising tales he’s heard.

Barrio’s grandfather Alfonso built a two-story house near Seventh Street and Garfield in the 1920s.

"After he built it, he didn’t want to move into it. We did after he died. So he rented it out to an asylum, and they put crazy people in there. People died there," Barrios says.

His earliest memories include the time his aunt spied the form of a man in a white shirt in a hallway, only to disappear when the lights went on. Or the time the same aunt visited the pantry at night and someone - or something - tripped her. She looked down to find a red string tied around her ankle. His little cousin recounts awakening in bed to see a ghostly woman sitting here, smiling down at him. At age 7, Frank saw a man outlined against a doorway.

He yelled and the man disappeared.

"I found out later that was the anniversary of my aunt’s husband’s death," Barrios says.

The Barrios house no longer stands, swept away by progress. Yet Barrios still gets chills when he drives past the site.

"It had to do with the asylum. You know, when you read the Bible it was all about exorcisms that Christ was doing," Barrios says. "How many of them would be called crazy today? Who knows what was going on there."

 

Frank Barrios, 64, comes from a Latino family in Phoenix for generations. A historian, he has recorded many local legends of La Llorana and demon sightings, brujas, ghost horsemen, and devil dancers.In Tucson, James "Big Jim" Griffith, a research associate with the University of Arizona Southwest Center, shares the grisly legend of El Tejano, the ghost bandito of southern Arizona.