Kindred spirits: Mexican ghost lore keeps cultural traditions alive and families tied
Fatima Hernandez Lopez lives in the rock-solid reality of Granite Shoals but has another foot in a cultural world of spirits brought over the Mexican border by her ancestors and elders from Durango. As her family passed the local lore of her Latin culture around the table at family reunions, the stories crept their way into the imagination of a young girl.
“Everyone has a story,” Lopez said. “I can’t tell you how many times we sat down at my grandmother’s, 20 people at dinner, and everybody has a story to tell.”
Her father told of running into a headless demon dog on his way home one night. Another story involved a ghostly horse that clopped down the old cobblestone streets of Durango. The city also harbors the spirit of a mournful nun who threw herself from a cathedral when she learned her lover had been killed in the Second Franco-Mexican War of the 1860s. The horrifying story of Cell No. 27 in a Durango prison warns that anyone who steps inside will die.
For Lopez, two oft-told tales stood out among the rest: the ghostly stories of La Llorona and La Lechuza, aberrations she claims to have seen with her own eyes.
“The funny thing is, out of the whole family, I was the least superstitious one,” she said. “Until it happened to me.”
The legend of La Llorona — the Weeping Woman — changes depending on the storyteller. In Lopez’s version, she is the spirit of a woman whose children were drowned by an abusive husband. In another telling, she is the murderer. Some believe her spirit wanders the night in an ethereal white dress, crying for her children. “Ay, mis hijos!” she screams, “Oh, my children!”
Lopez was stepping out of a car with her mother and grandmother when she saw La Llorona for the first time. They all froze in place and watched a woman in a white dress float across the street. None of them questioned her identity. They knew the stories.
Lopez recalled being more curious than afraid and explained the general Mexican attitude toward spirits.
“We never bother them,” she said. “Obviously, we’re feeling attacked, but you know, within the culture, we leave things alone. Mind your business. If there is a spirit floating around, just let it do its thing.”
Every culture has its tales of horror that create a kinship, according to research by Stephen T. Asma, a philosophy professor at Columbia College Chicago and a senior fellow of The Research Group in Mind, Science, and Culture. He wrote “On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears” and “The Evolution of Imagination.” Some stories encourage children to behave or an evil force will whisk them away from loved ones. Others scare us enough to think through escape plans, helping us evolve and survive, he said.
“Monsters are sticky memes that draw groups together into moral communities,” Asma wrote in an article for Nautilus, a monthly science magazine. “This means that fantasy helps make some of the core elements of culture itself because monsters and heroes create social solidarity through cultural kinship.”
For Lopez and her family, it’s a connection to the home they left behind and the family traditions they share. It’s also good fun, especially around Halloween.
Lopez certainly has the stories to tell the younger members of her family, especially after a second encounter with La Llorona at her grandmother’s house shortly followed the first. She spotted the woman in white floating in a massive oak tree, peering down at her from the branches.
“I’m grown up now and I thought, ‘Do I believe? This is my chance. Do I own this myth or not?’” she said.
When she encountered the witch La Lechuza in the form of an owl outside her Granite Shoals home, she chose to believe.
“I could have easily ignored it, I guess, but because it’s so instilled in me, my culture, I was like, ‘No. This bird is outside my house. It has no business here, and I’m going to pray it away,’” she said.
According to legend, La Lechuza often appears as a barn owl that can shapeshift into a witch or a half-owl, half-crone monstrosity. But it calls out like a barred owl, which, sight unseen, sounds like a witch cackling maniacally in the night.
Lopez has memories of her grandmother repeating the Lord’s Prayer over and over again to drive away the evil spirit. La Lechuza brings bad omens and mocks a person’s faith in God, so it is to be feared, she said.
“You’ll probably see one and think nothing of it because it looks like an owl. But when you’re raised in this culture, they’re bad. They’re a witch!” Lopez said.
At the sight of the bird, Lopez began to pray the same way she had heard her grandmother do so many times before.
The 36-year-old Lopez admitted that older generations might believe more in the power of spirits than she does, but she makes a conscious effort to keep the stories alive for the generations coming after her. She is passing on the legends to her nieces, who will have to keep them going down the line.
“I don’t want to lose (the tradition),” she said. “I don’t want the kids to lose the feeling that we had when our parents sat down and told their stories. Telling these stories brings that closeness, especially living here, it gives the kids the feeling of wanting to go back and experience it themselves.”