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Old Belief
← La Llorona
Woman in a long white dress standing barefoot with her back turned at the edge of a dark canal at night, village walls on either side under a deep blue sky. La Llorona of Mexican legend.

white and turned away

She is turned away because that is how she is met. The crying arrives first, and by the time anyone looks up she is already facing the water.

Basis: Mexican accounts of La Llorona · AI-generated

About the La Llorona

The weeping woman of the water's edge, heard before she is seen: a modern legend carrying an ancient reputation it did not earn.

  • Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, Book 12 (1577)The sixth of the omens said to precede the Conquest: a woman's voice heard weeping at night for her children. This is the earliest text usually connected to the legend, and what it contains is an omen, not the legend.
  • Frances Toor, A Treasury of Mexican Folkways (1947)Early popular collection. Evidence for what was circulating in the first half of the twentieth century, not an analysis of where it came from.
  • Bess Lomax Hawes, La Llorona in Juvenile Hall (1968)Fieldwork among girls in a Los Angeles juvenile detention facility, recording how they told the story and what they used it for. Rare evidence of the legend in actual use rather than in retelling.

Read the full La Llorona entry →

More of this creature

Stone-walled canal running through a town at night, still black water reflecting one street lamp beyond a low bridge, worn steps down to the bank and nobody in sight. A canal of the kind La Llorona is heard along at nightheard before she is seen →Narrow dirt street between low adobe houses under a deep blue night sky, every door dark, a clay water jar standing beside one doorway and nobody outside. A night street of the kind the sixth omen describes, later told of La Lloronathe sixth omen →Shallow river crossing in moonlight, a band of moon reflected down the water, the near bank trodden to wet mud between reeds and dark trees. A river crossing of the kind La Llorona is said to hauntthe ford at night →

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