Mexican Ghost Tales of the Southwest Read online

  MEXICAN GHOST TALES OF THE SOUTHWEST

  STORIES AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY

  ALFRED AVILA

  COMPILED BY KAT AVILA

  This book is made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency), the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

  Arte Público Press

  University of Houston

  452 Cullen Performance Hall

  Houston, Texas 77204-2004

  Cover design by Daniel Lechón

  Avila, Alfred

  Mexican ghost tales of the Southwest / by Alfred Avila : compiled by Kat Avila.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-55885-107-8

  1. Mexican Americans—Folklore. 2. Tales—Southwest, new. 3. Ghost stories—Southwest, New. I. Avila, Kat.

  II. Title.

  GR111.M49A95 1994

  398.25'0976—dc20

  94-6919

  CIP

  The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

  Copyright © 1994 by Alfred Avila

  Printed in the United States of America

  8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 11 12 10 9 8 7 6

  To my parents, José and Guadalupe Avila,

  and to Rev. John V. Coffield.

  In blessed memory of Rabbi Robert J. Bergman.

  —Alfred Avila

  CONTENTS

  La Llorona

  The Devil Dog

  The Bad Boy

  The Witches

  The Pepper Tree

  The Devil and the Match

  The Devil Baby

  The Devil’s Wind

  The Funeral and the Goat Devil

  The Dead Man’s Shoes

  The Yaqui Indian and the Dogs

  The Caves of Death

  The Acorn Tree Grove

  The Water Curse

  The Bat

  The Japanese Woman

  The Brutish Indian

  The Whirlwind

  The Chinese Woman of the Sea

  La Llorona of the Moon

  The Owl

  MEXICAN GHOST TALES

  OF THE SOUTHWEST

  LA LLORONA

  LA LLORONA

  A long time ago, in the old days, there lived a woman in Mexico. Life was hard for her because her husband had died and she was left with three small children. In time, the children became a burden for the woman. She longed for the gaiety and the dancing at the fiestas as an escape from her daily responsibilities. For this reason, the woman would go out and leave the children to fend for themselves, and because they were hungry and hurt from the beatings they received at her hands, the children cried often.

  One day, tired of hearing her children’s endless weeping and pleading for food, the woman forced them into a sack and dragged them to a nearby river swollen from the rains in the mountains. Although the children cried out to their mother, begging her to release them, they did not suspect the grim fate she had in store for them.

  As the woman dragged the sack slowly to the water’s edge, she could hear her children cry out, “Please, mother! Please!” Still, she was determined to cast off the yoke that hung around her neck because her heart was hard and cruel.

  Oh, to be rid of these troublesome children! she thought.

  Finally, the mother pushed the sack off the bank into the river with one quick move. She could hear her children’s terrified screaming as they tumbled into the swift, swirling waters that swallowed them into eternity. Afterwards, the woman walked away happy. At last she was free!

  The woman continued her loose wicked life until she finally died. Her soul was then taken before God for judgment. Trembling and sorrowful, she stood before the Almighty.

  “You!” God said to her, “are to be pitied. Not only have you sinned greatly during your time on earth, but you committed the greatest sin of all, you killed your own children. Therefore, you are condemned to roam the rivers of the world until you find their bones. You will find no rest until then, and you will wander about crying until the end of the world.”

  If some night when there is no moon, you happen to hear a long, mournful, howling cry by the river, beware! It may be La Llorona, the Wailing Woman, looking for her children. Stay away from the river, because you don’t want her to find you in the dark.

  THE DEVIL DOG

  THE DEVIL DOG

  Many years ago in the quiet sleepy village of La Colonia, on the outskirts of Zacatecas, there lived a hard-drinking man who did not care for his own people. He spent the nights drinking tequila and pulque and quarreling at the local cantina, and the days sleeping in the dusty, windy streets.

  Sometimes he made it back to his adobe house. It sat about a mile from the village, in a clump of mesquite trees amidst large cactus plants that grew here and there from the arid ground. The house was just a short distance from the railroad tracks. On rare occasions, a train would pass by headed north. It would carry federal troops sent to suppress the unrest stirred up by the famous Pancho Villa and the revolution that was blazing in the northern lands.

  One night, after drinking heavily, the man said goodbye to his friends in the cantina and staggered out reeking of tequila and lime. Stumbling in the dark, he finally found his way to the railroad tracks.

  “At last!” he said to himself in a drunken stupor. “I will follow the tracks home.”

  As he wove his way home stumbling on the railroad ties, he suddenly tripped over the rail, hitting the ties hard when he landed on the gravel.

  “Oh, what a miserable life!” he cursed out loud in the dark.

  As he slowly picked himself up, he looked back and saw two small red glowing lights way off in the distance. The drunkard staggered onward humming to himself, and every once in awhile he would glance backward. Each time he could see the red lights gaining on him.

  The man kept walking on and thinking, “What can those lights be? Maybe they’re only a pair of fireflies.”

  He was beginning to sober up and was perspiring. He looked back again, straining his eyes in the dark. Nearer and nearer the lights came.

  He started to run, trembling from fear and gasping for breath. When he looked behind him, now mortally afraid, he saw a coal-black dog moving towards him in a fast, loping motion, a huge dog with bright glowing red eyes that gleamed in the moonless night!

  The drunkard screamed and screamed, his shrieks echoing into the darkness.

  Days passed, and the man was never seen again. Around the village water fountain there was gossip that he was carried off by witches, or that he got tired of the town and hopped on a train headed north to join the revolution.

  “Who knows?” the villagers used to say.

  What no one ever guessed was that the drunkard had been carried into Hell in the tightly clenched jaws of the Devil himself, screaming in fear for his eternal soul.

  THE BAD BOY

  THE BAD BOY

  Many years ago somewhere in the lowlands of the Sierra Madre Mountains, there was a remote village. Life was hard for the villagers, who lived on the edge of starvation. Many managed to barely survive by selling the firewood they gathered in the surrounding hills to the people of a nearby town. With this, they earned a few coins they used to buy maize for their tortillas and a handful of beans.

  On the outer edge of the village in an old adobe house lived Enrique, a sixteen-year-old boy and his mother. Enrique had worked hard collecting wood and selling it to the townspeople for their cooking from the time he was eight. By now, with no improvement to his life and every day the same grueling routine, he was getting tired o
f his daily chores. His mother was old and could do nothing more than sit in the house, cook the meager daily meals, and pray before the family altar. His father had died when Enrique was very young.

  Every morning Enrique would rise early, grab his machete, and head for the hills to cut wood. By the end of the day, the weight of the heavy bundles bit into his shoulders, bruising them. Still, the will to survive is strong, even for the poor, and it kept Enrique going.

  “Ah!” the boy would dream. “To run away to the big city of Chihuahua!”

  Enrique had heard stories about the city from those friends of his who had been lucky enough to attend the large festival of the Day of the Dead held there every year. But he had never had the money for the trip. As it was, sometimes he could barely manage to feed himself and his mother, and she was beginning to get on his nerves.

  “What a useless old woman!” he would say to himself. “She’s like a flea on my skin! All she does is sit at home while I work hard chopping and gathering wood to sell in town in the heat of the merciless sun! Then, when I get back home, I have to go down to the village fountain to fill the water jars!”

  One day he decided that he would not go out and work. His mother begged him to go do his daily chores.

  “Please, son,” she pleaded with him.

  One day, her whining tone aggravated him more than usual. He was tired of her crying and uselessness. Enrique raised himself up and kicked at his elderly mother. Her face was suddenly covered with fear.

  He yelled at her, “I’m sick of your ugly face! I’ll fix you once and for all!”

  He took his machete in his hands and started to hack at her. She did not even have time to scream; horror was etched on her face as he cut her down with one deadly slash. Blood flew on the wall and fell on the dirt floor as he hacked her once, twice, three, four times before his rage calmed down.

  Enrique walked over to a shelf and took a small bag that held a few coins. He put them in his pocket. Then he went out of the adobe house and headed for a nearby river to wash the blood from his hands and his clothes.

  “Once I clean myself up, I’ll head for the city of Chihuahua,” he laughed.

  Upon reaching the bank of the river, he took off his clothes and washed himself. He then began to wash off the fresh blood from his garments. The trail of blood flowed in short stringy threads as it rippled and swirled away in the water. Enrique squatted on the bank with the morning sun warming his wet body.

  He slowly stood up to leave. To his surprise, his feet were stuck to the sandy soil. He strained to break loose, but to no avail. He cried, and screamed for help

  Some of the village people came. They pulled to break him loose, but they could not move him. He sank to his ankles. Later on during the day, they discovered the boy’s ghastly deed. He had killed his mother.

  In Mexico, one of the most unforgivable crimes is to kill your mother or your father, or both parents. Even the beasts in the wild do not commit such brutal acts.

  As the days went by, Enrique sank deeper and deeper into the riverbank. The older women of the village took pity on him and brought him food and drink. The men made no effort to assist him. The women prayed for him.

  He cried and pleaded and begged to be helped, but he only sank further into the earth. He sank to his waist, then to his chest. He could be heard at night yelling and crying for his mother to break him loose. He screamed and cried, but it helped him none. He sank to his neck. After several weeks, he disappeared into the sandy earth screaming, only screaming, until the earth swallowed him.

  They marked his final resting place with an old wooden stake. Some nights, even today, he can still be heard screaming from the river’s edge.

  THE WITCHES

  THE WITCHES

  Deep in the interior of Chihuahua lies the small town of San Francisco del Oro. The Rio Conchos flows nearby, and the Sierra Madre Mountains stand on the west side. On the outskirts of the town are dry rolling hills and valleys with a few trees scattered here and there.

  At the base of a nearby hill, there used to be an old adobe house guarded by a tall adobe wall. The local people would avoid going near the place once the sun started to set. They said that evil reeked from it. The tall adobe wall and the closed wooden gates kept the house separated from the outside world. No one was ever seen emerging from the place, and no one knew who lived within.

  A young boy named Refugio—known as Cuco to everyone— lived in a neighboring village in a small adobe house with his father and his dog Prieto. All his life Cuco had heard stories about the haunted old house at the foot of the hill and about the horrific creatures that dwelled in it, and these discussions he overheard at the village fountain did not fail to stir his curiosity. At night, the unearthly screams he heard coming from the direction of the old house also inflamed his curiosity. Cuco and Prieto—the dog’s eyes bulging from fright—would both sit and stare in the direction of the screams.

  “What is happening? Who are these creatures that rule the night?” Cuco would wonder to himself.

  One night when his curiosity got the better of him, Cuco got up from his bed, slipped by his sleeping father, and left by the back door followed by Prieto who kept looking up at his master with wondering eyes. The boy and the dog crossed a field and headed down the road towards the evil adobe house, looking in all directions to make sure that they were not being followed by any of the evil creatures.

  In the distance Cuco could see the silhouette of the big house and the reflection of strange flickering lights from behind the tall adobe wall that surrounded it.

  When he finally reached the wall, Cuco climbed up a tree that grew next to it, going up the trunk first and then into the upper branches. Below, his dog leaped in vain trying desperately to follow. Pulling himself along one of the big branches, Cuco managed to reach the top of the wall where he was partially hidden by the tree. There he stood, panting, his heart thumping hard.

  “What will my fate be if I am discovered?” he wondered. “Will evil fangs bite deep into my body and make me shrivel up?” This was a horrifying thought because Cuco could not imagine himself as a shriveled up bag of skin and bones.

  As he sat quietly on the wall hidden by the tree branches, Cuco heard voices, and he looked to the roof of the old house. There he saw two women in the dark, two witches performing a terrifying ritual. They were pulling out their own eyes and replacing them with eyes plucked from live cats!

  The shrieks and howls of the animals were pitiful to hear. Once they were through with the cats, the witches threw them over the wall, their bodies making a thumping noise as they hit the ground. The animals thrashed in the grass and brush in a frenzy of pain as they leaped and ran wildly, howling and screeching until death finally silenced them.

  All this time Prieto, huddled under the tree next to the adobe wall, was shivering and shuddering from fright, wondering where those screaming demons that were falling from the sky had come from. Finally, although the dog was loyal to his master, he couldn’t stand it any longer. His fear made him dart in the direction of the village, leaving Cuco to meet his foolish fate.

  Cuco could see the two witches on the roof. They raised their arms skyward, spread them, and uttered an incantation to the King of Evil, the Devil. Membranes sprouted from their outspread arms, forming bat wings. Both witches flew up and away into the darkness of the night.

  Cuco stood on the wall and repeated the secret words he had heard. He, too, felt wings sprout. The boy leaped off the wall flapping, and headed in the direction the witches had gone. He flew and flew. In the distance, he could see them landing in the far valley.

  The wind had come up and was getting stronger. He found it hard to fly. As he approached the area where he had seen the witches land, Cuco could hear an eerie howling sound. He landed nearby. A tall mound hid him from the coven of witches and sorcerers. There was a curious smell in the wind. The grass was high and almost reached his shoulders.

  Suddenly, he realized the ca
use of the howling sound. It was the wind blowing over a large deep hole in the ground that made the sound. There were many mounds and holes in the grassy area. The sound resembled the moans of the dead crying over their miserable existence in the deep pit of hell, howling to get out of their misery and knowing there is no escape. He covered his ears to block out the noise.

  The grass was swirling like thousands of thin wiggling snakes as the wind came in stronger and carried the stench of death into Cuco’s nostrils. It was horrible! Gasping for breath, Cuco threw himself backward into the swirling grass. The mounds were piles of decaying dead bodies!

  He knew where he was now. This was the Valley of Santa Barbara, where the revolutionary forces of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata had destroyed several hundred federal troops in a fierce battle. The deep holes in the grassy valley were to have been burial pits for the dead. After the battle, no one remained behind to bury the federal troops. They were hated by the peasants, so they lay in huge piles alongside the pits, unmourned, rotting food for crows and witches.

  In the high grass, looking up at the mound formed by the bodies, Cuco could see the jutting arms, feet, and skulls tangled up in a giant heap. He could hear the wizards and witches feasting and haggling over the dead bodies. What a horrible feeling came over him! In the dark, the sounds and smells made him feel very sick. He sat there in the grass regretting his foolish quest.

  Frightened, Cuco slowly turned and started to walk through the tall grass away from the stench and noise of the gathered witches and sorcerers. He started to pray to the god of the Spaniards and to the gods of his father, the gods of the Tarahumara Indians. The ancient gods would protect him as they had protected his ancestors for past generations. His bat wings vanished as he prayed, for evil and good are not compatible.

  Now Cuco could no longer fly, so he prayed as he half ran through the tall grass, avoiding the burial pits and the mounds of the dead. The grass became like a thousand whips lashing at his face and body. He ran and ran. Time became a stranger. The world seemed to stop except for his running. He felt an unfamiliar feeling deep within him, egging him to keep on going. His feet kept pounding the hard ground. He lost his sandals somewhere. He was running for reasons unknown to him, perhaps a legacy from his ancient ancestors to run from evil, run from death, run for life … run.