Lunatics Radio Hour
The history of horror and the horror of history.
Lunatics Radio Hour
Episode 146 - The History of La Llorona with Anastasia Garcia
Get your copy of Ghostly Ghastly Tales here! And follow Anastasia Garcia on Instagram @anastasiawrites to keep your eye out for upcoming projects.
On today's episode Abby sits down with Anastasia to discuss the mythology behind La Llorona, La Lechuza and her new book of short horror stories.
Sources
- Janvier, Thomas A. “Legend of La Llorona.” In Legends of the City of Mexico, 134–138. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1910
- Library of Congress article by folklorist Stephen Winick: La Llorona: An Introduction to the Weeping Woman
- Espooky Tales article on The Owl Witch
- Texas Standard article by Sarah Asch & Raul Alonzo La Lechuza legend serves as both a cautionary tale and a story of revenge
Get Lunatics Merch here. Join the discussion on Discord. Listen to the paranormal playlist I curate for Vurbl, updated weekly! Check out Abby's book Horror Stories. Available in eBook and paperback. Music by Michaela Papa, Alan Kudan & Jordan Moser. Poster Art by Pilar Keprta @pilar.kep.
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Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Lunatics Radio Hour podcast. I am Abbey Branker and I am so beyond thrilled to be sitting here with a very longtime internet friend, anastasia Garcia, and this is the first time that we are actually face-to-face with each other after so long, and we're so thrilled to finally be collaborating on a project project. But Anastasia is here to talk about the folklore of La Llorona and how she translated that mythology and many other very, very interesting mythologies into her new book Ghostly Ghastly Tales. Welcome, we're so happy to have you here, hi so great to see you, abby.
Speaker 2:We've been internet friends from afar for so long. I love anything and everything that Abby does and I'm just here to support her, so I'm so glad to be in the room finally talking about a shared project.
Speaker 1:Yay, yes, okay. So, before anything else, tell us a little bit about Ghostly Ghastly Tales.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this is my very first book. I've written horror in the past short stories and longer form fiction and this is my first published book. It is a collection of short horror stories for young readers. This is ages 8 through 12. It's based on folklore from around the world, and one of those short stories is inspired by La Llorona, which is what I think we're going to be chatting through today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yay, and can I ask you a little bit about your process as one horror writer to another? Like how did you tackle the research of the mythology that kind of inspired the stories and combining that with, like your modern twist on these tales?
Speaker 2:yeah, so I did quite a lot of researching, um, original like kind of uh, secondary sources, so folks who had collected folklore and written them down so that I could kind of read them through the ages.
Speaker 2:Truthfully, a lot of the horror short stories that we liked when we were little like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Short and Shivery all of those stories had footnotes in the back of their books. So I started there with like the original kind of books that they referenced to inspire those stories that I read as a kid. And I just collected a bookshelf worth of folklore books, started reading and writing and as I found a story that scared me to this day, I was like this is a story that has something in it that pulls through the generations that's still scary to this day. Those are the ones I kind of bookmarked and wrote down and thought about. And then I took some of those and just like kind of elaborated them for what I think kids are more scared of today, what scares me today. So taking those as kind of the foundational nuggets and then building stories on top of that. So that's how I started. So it was a lot of research and finding those scary things that still persist to this day.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's amazing. Okay, and this is going to be like a really obnoxious question, but do you have like a favorite story, like when people buy the book, which I'm sure they will all go by after listening to this, like where should they go first?
Speaker 2:I think so. One of my favorites is Something's Wrong With Mother. That one, to me, is one of the scariest. It's based on this like 100-year-old Victorian short story that actually inspired the other mother from Coraline, which I'm sure fans on this podcast understand, and so I loved. The concept that something that's very familiar to you kind of takes a sinister turn is very scary. So in this story something's wrong with mother. A girl misbehaves and her mother leaves for a business trip and returns slightly different, and I'll leave it at that. But to me that's like the scariest thing. The scariest thing is something that seems familiar is actually dangerous and terrifying. So love that one.
Speaker 1:Even just you saying that sort of like gave me chills. It's such a like someone you should know and be able to like love and trust, but you know that something's wrong about it is such a gripping horror story. Yeah, okay, so we do. When we have guests on this podcast, we have some cringy icebreakers that we ask everybody, so forgive us in advance, but the first thing I always ask people is what are your favorite horror films, just so the audience can get a sense of kind of the lens that you look at horror through.
Speaker 2:Yeah, fantastic question, always great. So for me, my favorite scary movie is the Thing from 1982. Obviously, as horror fans out there know, it's the practical effects of this movie that were outstanding and to this day are very terrifying to me, like the idea of spider legs coming out of a little head that runs around the, the, the mutating gross like feel body horror of this mutating kind of alien effect. As everyone knows, the thing set in Antarctica at a little art expedition and the isolation horror is terrifying about this too, the idea that you can't run out and just like run away. The characters in this movie are all scientists, so they do what you want them to do they test blood, they try to kill it with fire, they isolate people that are acting strange, they tie people to couches that are being violent and belligerent, like they do everything you want, but they're still like, still mounting. Chaos ensues by the end and then it still ends on an ambiguous ending. You don't know, did they vanquish the alien? Are they safe? You know, is that person who you think they are Like? I love that element. So to me it was a very simple concept, perfectly executed in true horror fashion. And then I'll give you a number two, which to me is like kind of a personal aside, was kind of leads to the book, which is Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Speaker 2:I actually like the remake because I thought they did such a fantastic job like amping up the gore. But being from Texas, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was one of the first movies I saw that really felt real, like I'd seen this gas station. I know these people. I've been like the landscape to look real. The driving down these long country roads felt very real. So for me this is the first time like wait a minute, this isn't just scary stuff I can see in a movie that's set somewhere mysterious and fictional. This can be in my backyard and that was scary yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've actually never thought about the people who grew up in Texas watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and like how that would influence or impact your feeling about that movie of like, because I understand that I grew up in this in New England, essentially, but a place in New England where there's a lot of, like, very dark history and I'm actually researching a big topic that will come out right before this episode that is like takes like all of the history takes place like in my backyard when I grew up, and so it's this weird feeling, but I I can totally relate to that and I never thought about the impact of that with that movie. That's such a good point. Yes, so true, love it. Oh, wow, okay, so that those are pretty hardcore horror films. I love that. That's. That's great. And then my favorite question have you ever had a paranormal or unexplained experience of any kind?
Speaker 2:Yes, so I have two. I think that I can. I'll just do really quickly. One is so in an old family home that I lived in when I was a baby so not me personally, but like my family and the lore kind of carried through like my whole life. We lived in this very tiny little house in the middle of country Texas. It had been there for quite a long time and they've kind of rebuilt it and made it nice, but there were.
Speaker 2:Every person in my family has a story about this house and some terrifying element of it. One of them the most common is that everyone would hear cowboy boots on the hardwood floor. So there's a very distinct sound of heavy boots walking through the house and everyone heard it and to the point where they think it was real, like, oh, somebody's coming in the door, somebody's wearing boots and they're walking in the door Like everybody would react to it so naturally and then realize there's no one in the house. So the persistence of this through time was very key. And then also people heard it where they were like oh, I'm staying over the night and I was sleeping on the couch, heard someone walk behind me with their boots on, woke up and was like, started talking to it and there was no one there.
Speaker 1:So just oh, that's so scary.
Speaker 2:Terrifying, like the idea that there was someone here. And, truthfully, when they were clearing out the brush around this house, they found an old tombstone like an old grave and they were like, oh well, here it is. So you clean it up, you tidy it up and you just say sorry for intruding ghost, you just still make it your home. And then so many other things dishes, rattling doorknobs rattling. People would see it, the door would shake in its frame and it was never malevolent, but it was definitely making itself known.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so family home. No wonder you grew up to be a horror writer, right? Yeah, no wonder.
Speaker 2:So everyone had stories in that house for sure. And then the one that inspired me to actually write a story in this book is there's a story in this book called Drums of War, which is where a girl visits a ghostly battle site and experiences kind of like a time slip where she kind of maybe falls back in time. And so that was actually inspired by a real experience I had visiting a battle site in Texas. So Texas is well known for Mexican-American War, the Texas Revolution, a lot of battles, civil War. There's a lot of battles that were taking place in the area of Texas, and so we went on field trips all the time to the near the battlefield near you.
Speaker 2:And so one time I was visiting with a cousin of mine and we strayed from the group. Everyone was loading up onto buses. We strayed from the group and we're kind of wandering around this playground area and for a moment all the sound slipped out and everything went way down and it was like you couldn't hear the kids anymore, you couldn't hear the wind in the trees. It went super quiet and the both of us looked at each other in that moment like something is wrong and we can all feel it. We looked around us and there were birds. Black birds filled, uh, the trees around this battle site, but there was no sound, no calling, no bird feathers, no rustling, and we were like something is going on.
Speaker 2:So the two of us looked at each other and, very slowly, you could hear the sound of footsteps in the grass, footsteps, footsteps, footsteps, more and more and more, and it sounded like we were surrounded by people walking in the grass. We couldn't see anybody, so we both got scared, jetted back to the bus, pretended we didn't hear anything. Nothing happened. Everything was fine, but to this day, terrifying to me. I don't know what it was, um, but the that. That moment will always stick with me what a story, oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's like so vivid and it's so interesting because I've actually my mom had a somewhat similar experience at this New England like ghost town called Dudley Town that like her and her father and her brother went to, and there was weird things that happened. Had somewhat similar experience at this new england like ghost town called dudley town that like her and her father and her brother went to, and there was weird things that happened. But one of the things is my grandfather was a forest ranger and so they were in the middle of the woods and suddenly, like it was silent, like there was birds, like, but there was nothing. And and he like was particularly suited to to be aware of that, because that was his like whole job.
Speaker 1:But the added elements of then hearing like the footsteps or the approaching entity or whatever it was, seems so intense to me.
Speaker 2:That's wow, okay, that's very intriguing and and to us it may, because we were like all spent all day talking about it, but the idea of there being like multiple, like lots, of people in the forest, like coming out of the woods. Have you seen? Uh, lovely, dark and deep.
Speaker 1:The movie no, I haven't oh it's.
Speaker 2:It's a uh very, it just came out last year, I think. Uh, she's a forest ranger. She lives out in the middle of nowhere and there's some cosmic horror entity. Should definitely check it out.
Speaker 1:I'm just giving myself a note right now because I will. That sounds very cool, okay. One more question when you were growing up, were you afraid, like how kind of aware that? Like okay, maybe there's things that exist that I'm not sure what they are. Did that scare you as a kid?
Speaker 2:Yes, but there was a thrill to it, a fear of like if something. I think there was always a line for me like if something happens and this ghost gets me, I will be the first recorded case of a ghost murdering a child gets me, I will be the first recorded case of a ghost murdering a child, that's hilarious.
Speaker 2:So I was like, okay, if they don't murder me, I can experience it and I can write this down. So it was definitely scary but thrilling. I think I was a little tiny paranormal investigator where I was like I must take all the evidence and jot it down and keep it for life.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, I love that evidence and jot it down and keep it for life. Yes, yes, I love that. Okay, so we are really excited because we have come together today to talk about the legend of La Llorona, which is a vast and sprawling legend that varies depending on region, and we're going to talk about all of that and some other folklore that's kind of adjacent to that. And you know, something that Al and I have talked about a lot is making space on this show for legends and folklore from other cultures, and so we're very grateful for you to come on and kind of share some of your experiences with us on this and and hopefully it's something that you'll see a bit more next year from Lunatics Radio Hour as well. But before we jump in, we have some sources to cite. So the first is actually a source that you used a lot in the researching of your book, because you talk about this legend in your book a bit In Legends of the City of Mexico. The chapter is called Legend of La Llorona by Thomas A Hanover and it's pages 134 to 138, so definitely check that out. There's also a Library of Congress article by folklorist Stephen Winnick called La Llorona An Introduction to the Weeping Woman and a Spooky Tales article on the Owl Witch, and a Texas Standard article by Sarah Ashe and Raul Alonso called La Llorona.
Speaker 1:Legend Serves as Both a Cautionaryary tale and a story of revenge, and I'll link all of these sources as well in the description so that you guys can check them out yourselves. So La Llorona, or the crying woman, the whaler, is an entity from Mexican folklore. The story of the weeping woman can vary depending on region. So, for instance, one version of the legend goes that she killed her children by drowning them, and she did this because she discovered that her husband was cheating on her, and so she is believed to be most active near bodies of water, and I think that's something that kind of penetrates through most of the different variations. Even the sound of her wailing is incredibly powerful, and so some believe that anyone who can hear it expect terrible fortune and even death as a result of her curse. I'm going to quote from the Library of Congress article on kind of the variations of the folklore Quote sometimes La Llorona sees you from afar and pursues you, terrifying you as you flee towards your home.
Speaker 1:Sometimes she appears riding a horse. Sometimes she appears in your horse-drawn wagon or in your car, warning you against bad behavior before disappearing, just like that other famous spirit, the vanishing hitchhiker. In some stories, an encounter with her is fatal. La Llorona is often closely associated with children. In some stories, she is said to wail for her own lost or dead children. In many of these stories, she killed her own children when she was alive and is doomed for her actions to be a wandering ghost. In other stories, she appears mainly to women who have children, while in still others she kidnaps children who are never seen again. End quote.
Speaker 1:Regional variations exist across Mexico, the United States, guatemala and Venezuela. In Guatemala, the legend goes that a married woman becomes pregnant from an affair and she gave birth to the child, who is named Juan de la Cruz. She then drowned the child to hide its existence from her husband and as punishment she is forced to live on after death and search every body of water for the son that she killed. In Venezuela, the legend is a bit more vague, but it's always centered around a woman who mourns the loss of her children. In some cases this is from her own doing, and other versions of the story again claim that her children were killed by someone else. And in the United States. The story is often used as a cautionary tale to keep children away from water and to help enforce water safety, which is never a bad thing. But can you tell us a bit about your experiences with this legend, growing up in Texas?
Speaker 2:Yes, so I was recently on the Susto podcast where we were talking about La Llorona and she's kind of the rock star of Mexican, of like the folklore from when we were kids kids, because she is like the prevailing one, the one that is very visual, iconic. We see her in a lot of legends and stories and everybody knows about her, but she was always used to warn us against water. That was always the key. The most common version that I heard when I was a kid was that la llorona was a beautiful woman pursued by a man, but she had two children from a previous marriage and this man didn't want to marry her because she had two kids, so she decided to kill them, she drowned them in a creek and then she returns to the man saying, you know, hoping that they can be together, but of course he was horrified by what she'd done and cast her aside. She then realizes, like the full horror of what she's done, and is cursed to wander the waterways of Texas for eternity looking for her dead children.
Speaker 2:But also any children will do so. That's why it was you know, stay away from the water La Llorona is going to get you. That was the the. The fear was like you know they describe what she looks like long, dark hair, wearing white. She's wandering along the creeks and if she finds you, she'll grab you and take you with her, because she's looking for any kid and that really did help. In Texas there are a lot of little creeks and waterways that you can kind of slip into, so it makes total sense just to like put that in the heads of kids to keep them away.
Speaker 1:Is that something that your parents actually would tell you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it was a parent's family, like raised by a village generally. So you're at gatherings with a lot of like uncles, aunts, grandparents and everybody just says that just in general. Like plants the seed, so kids kind of keep each other in check and don't wander too far.
Speaker 1:And do you remember actually like living in fear of her.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So generally it was like when you're you can, the feeling you get as a kid of like wandering too far, where you're like, wait, I'm a little too far away, I'm on my own that kind of like feeling of like this is a little bit of danger. I think it's a very primal instinct that is kind of natural, like as a child you were a little bit helpless. The instinct is I should be, I'm safer with everyone else. So I think that feeling just like heightens. Like if you've already had that story in your head and you have a visual of what you should be afraid of, that you kind of equate the two things. You think, oh no, she's somebody's watching me, there's somebody there. So I remember that being scary. So you kind of put that in your head.
Speaker 2:But also if you've been outside in the middle of nowhere Texas I mean middle of nowhere really, but in middle of nowhere Texas sound is weird. It's pitch black. So you can hear things and some things sound human. There are screeches or screams or wails or cries, even like a coyote crying in the distance. If you don't quite pick out that it's a coyote pack pack, it does just sound like a whale from a distance and it carries through the trees and stuff. So if you have that in your head, that there's like a screeching, wailing person out there, you can already say, okay, I heard, I heard her, I've seen her, I've heard her. Um, so, yeah, this.
Speaker 1:I love that. That's so. I love it. It's so cool and haunting and it makes total sense. So we wanted to try to like dig a little bit deeper to understand some of the roots of this legend, which I think is going to be one of those things that's impossible to pin down. But one real lead here is looking back at ancient Aztec mythology. So there's some speculation that this folklore started with what's known as the hungry woman mythology from the Aztec people. And there's some speculation that this folklore started with what's known as the hungry woman mythology from the Aztec people. And there's some similarities between La Llorona and Siwa Kodal, or also known as Keylast Lee.
Speaker 2:So Siwa Kodal was an Aztec fertility goddess, one of many, yeah and I mean this is very interesting to me because La Llorona was always just kind of like folklore that they told to us and I just thought kind of sprung up amongst you know just stories of people.
Speaker 2:I thought it was a very modern story. So the idea that when I was researching things in the legends of the city of Mexico, they have footnotes in there that reference the story and they were saying that yes, there's this Aztec goddess that potentially could have been the original inspiration for some of this and it just carried as people from the area region moved into other parts of North America, south America, they kind of took that story and changed it with them. But in that story they mentioned that the Aztec goddess Iwakodl was said to be dressed in white, bearing on her shoulder a little cradle, as though she were carrying a child, and she could be heard sobbing and shrieking and that sound was considered a bad omen. So if you were out too late or you were out in the area and you heard that's that wailing woman or you saw her, even it was considered bad you would die.
Speaker 1:It would bring with it bad, bad, bad omens which is so interesting because there's so many similar through lines there. Right, there's obviously the sound and the shrieking being the bad omen and the association with the cry. It's just being dressed in white, right, so it's. It's fascinating to kind of like make the leap, and of course it is making somewhat of a leap Right. It's so impossible to actually trace these things back, but I would say it's a pretty strong case Right that there's yeah, there's like scenes there.
Speaker 1:Yeah Seats, yeah, exactly, yeah, seats, yeah, exactly, okay. So I first became aware of of this legend with a very controversial film, I would say, called the Curse of La Llorona, which is part of the Conjuring universe. It came out in 2019 and it was produced by James Wan, alan and I watched it. Actually, if anyone listening is a Patreon, there's an old Patreon horror movie club which is a Patreon exclusive podcast that we do every month where we watch this film and we talked about it. I think we actually, to be totally candid, like ripped it apart. We thought it was not a great film. It totally like is a film about white people, like it just was like such a missed opportunity, we think and I'll let you talk a little bit about that as well but I was grateful that the film introduced us to this, because this was the first time I really became aware of this legend. But beyond that, I thought it was kind of a failure of an execution.
Speaker 2:So true, I mean, I distinctly remember when this movie came out how excited my community back home was for this. Like for the first time we're seeing you know, everybody's seeing ghosts and spirits and Annabelle and talking doll and all kinds of like the exorcist. You've seen a lot of like these, these iconic horror movies on camera, but for the first time you were getting a very uh, south Texas, uh, mexican American folklore story of La Llorona, the key, the rock star, the one we all know, um, so we were so excited Like everyone was lining up to go. I got my tickets. Have you seen it? Oh, my goodness, this is going to be great and truthfully, they even. I don't know if you remember some early trailers, but some of the early trailers even show like it's really just showing the kids interacting with the spirit and you know there's going to be jump scares. You know it's going to be a little B-horror movie, but it was like for the first time we were seeing in person.
Speaker 2:What they don't show is that the sinner is an entire story on a white character. Essentially it's a white woman, she's married to a Hispanic man and essentially, like in the very first five seconds, they're like oh, he's dead and it's my story. You're like, wait what? And then her two children. And you're like, ok, I guess Maybe we're going into, but because it centers the story there, it means that you're approaching all of the legends as an outside observer. You're like what is la llorona? Please tell me more.
Speaker 2:What is mexican folklore? So there was so much of just like, kind of like there was definitely like a glass wall between you and the stories and the other people who were experiencing things. Um, plus, you had, uh, patricia velasquez, who's's a Venezuelan actress who plays Anaxuna Moon in the Mummy, which everybody knows. But she is a fantastic actress and they have her in there as like a total side character. And I was like you're telling me this whole movie could have been centered over. You know, it could have had great characters and they just kind of didn't center it.
Speaker 2:One of the things that it also does in the movie is it others, the practice of curanderismo, which is, uh, you know, curanderos, curanderas, which are like kind of like mexican folk, natural healers. Um, there's a whole practice of this that exists in the community. People have done this for generations and centuries and it makes it such an other thing like oh, light some sage and bring it around your house and it'll help cure the spirits. It really takes kind of. It puts all of this great folklore and mysticism and mythology in the back seat to like a very probably what you guys ripped apart was a very familiar kind of jump scare, yeah, uh like, like, like formulaic scary movie.
Speaker 1:so I wished, I wished it did more um, but it was a great start to what could be a big universe yes, yes, exactly, and I also just think that whole universe, like the Conjuring universe in general, like jumped the shark long before this film joined its, yeah, yeah, it's right.
Speaker 1:So I I hope that there's. There's some other films we're going to talk through, but I also hope that there's maybe another big blockbuster version of this on the horizon, because I I think that, where everyone is owed, that, yes, so the first time that the Weeping Woman appeared on film that I could find was a 1933 Mexican film called La Llorona and it was directed by Ramon Pion, and this was actually the first Mexican horror film with sound, which I think is really cool. That's amazing. Yeah, also David Lynch's film, very famous film Mahal and Drive from 2001,.
Speaker 1:Explores this legend which I totally forgot about and didn't kind of clock until I was researching this. So Rebecca Del Rio plays the role of La Llorona de Los Angeles and she's a singer and she performs a Spanish version of Crying by Roy Orbison, and she's a singer and she performs a Spanish version of Crying by Roy Orbison, and you can see kind of through the lines right that her performance here causes anyone who hears you know her to suffer the consequences, and so, even though maybe it's a little bit of a subtle reference, obviously he's pulling on this legend quite directly. There's also a Mexican horror film from 2008 called Kilometer 31, which was heavily influenced by this mythology and the film was the highest performing in the Mexican box office the weekend that it was released, which I just think is say people are hungry for this kind of a story.
Speaker 2:I think, I think people people really crave this, they want it and I think once we get more diversity all through the layers of film production is when you'll start to see more stories centered on the legend and the people and the people who brought the legend through the generations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, exactly. So there's actually six other low-budget films, I think, mostly from the early 2000s, to mention the River, the Legend of La Llorona the Whaler, a film just called La Llorona, the Curse of La Llorona and the Revenge of La Llorona. So lots to explore if anyone wants to kind of dive deeply and see the different iterations of this mythology and film, film Coco from 2017, which includes a song called La Llorona, which was actually first popularized in the 1940s by Andres Henestrosa. Yes, oh my God.
Speaker 2:I'm so glad you shouted out Coco. It's my favorite Pixar movie. It's beautiful, it's amazing. I watch it every Dia de los Muertos season and it makes me cry every time because it's like so many of the characters, even the way they're drawn and portrayed, look like my family members and I just love it. And then the story of remembrance, the story of sharing stories, like all of those things are just things I carry with me on a regular basis, so I cry every time. So I had no idea. There was a song in there called La Llorona, which now I have to go back and find and think about and hear and listen, listen to the words of, because it has such fantastic songs and music throughout.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's just such a beautiful film and, yeah, I was very excited to see that. I also did not pick up on that when I watched it the first time, of course, so I'm excited to watch it again.
Speaker 2:It inspired my. I built an ofrenda this year, so now I have an official altar with all the pictures and the colors and all the things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there is a. Also, for those of you who don't know, there's a special like pet day of the dead. So October 27th is the year is the day that they say our pets come back to us in dreams. So anyone out there who wants to celebrate you are more than welcome to build your own little ofrenda to your past family and do a little research on Dia de los Muertos and learn and see how you can apply it to you this holiday season.
Speaker 1:And do a little research on Dia de los Muertos and learn and see how you can apply it to you this holiday season. I love that so much. I did not know that. So October 27th, that's going to be a very special day, I think, for a lot of people.
Speaker 1:I love that, in addition to the Conjuring Universe film from 2019, there's another film called, again just La Llorona. This was a Guatemalan film which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival that year, which I think is really cool, and I'm really interested to watch that film Because Toronto is, for anyone who doesn't know, like one of the top five film festivals in the world, so it really typically centers a lot on, like non-American films. So I'm very, very curious to watch that and I bet it's fantastic. And finally, in 2022, a film called the Legend of La Llorona starring Danny Trejo, was released, and the Legend also appears in many novels and other forms of art and, of course, it's penetrated across all the different types of media, but notably it's referenced in Nancy Farmer's 2002 novel, the House of the Scorpion, and in Rodolfo Anaya's novel Bless Me, ultima. So those are some books to check out if anyone is more in the mood to read versus watch films. And then, finally, it's also been used in the television series Grimm Riverdale and Supernatural.
Speaker 2:I did not know that. I want to go check. I want to go check out just those episodes, the Monster of the Week episodes. I hope she's in there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that those are like good series because they're almost like anthology series in a way. So if you're looking for a certain thing, you can just watch that one series and you don't need to worry about the ongoing drama of the main characters.
Speaker 2:I don't need to know Riverdale drama from like no, never.
Speaker 1:Anastasia also suggested this legend and kind of some of our pre-conversations, and I was so intrigued that I wanted to fit it in as well, because I had never heard of this and it was really, really cool. So we're going to talk a little bit about the history of La Lechuza, or the Owl Witch. La Lechuza is similar in that it's folklore from a similar region as La Llorona, mexico and the United States and Texas, and it's also similar because it centers around revenge and children. The legend tends to take the form of a story about a man walking alone at night who encounters glowing eyes and the rustling of wings from a nearby tree. So I'm going to quote from the Texas Standard article.
Speaker 1:Quote there are many versions of La La Chuza, but in all of them she begins as a woman who has been wronged. According to Rachel Gonzalez-Martin, a professor of Mexican-American studies at UT Austin who specializes in folklore, la La Chuza lived on the far end of a small town, which people normally classify as somewhere in the desert area in northern Mexico. She lived alone and that made townspeople suspicious of her. She said One season, a small child, a little boy, goes missing from the town and no one is able to find him. End quote. In this version of the story, the woman is accused of being a witch responsible for the boy's disappearance. For revenge, she makes a deal with the devil to come back as a shape-shifting owl woman. End quote, which is also just very badass and cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this to me is super interesting to hear because I've only actually ever heard I've never heard this version before like I've never heard her backstory. But it's very in line with a lot of these familiar fears that appear in folklore, like missing children, danger beyond the edge of town, and then, of course, familiar stereotypes of women who live alone are somehow like evil in some way and then being accused of witchcraft, like if a woman just wants to hang out on her own and practice and make some potions or, you know, have a great garden, she'd be considered a witch in some way. So this story very much plays on a lot of those familiar themes that I see through folklore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah absolutely. And it's so interesting that all of those themes seem to penetrate like folklore in every different region of the globe. Like in every region of the globe, women with gardens are witches, like it really doesn't matter. And people will go to them for healing properties and then also, like, condemn them. You know, it's just, it's a universal truth.
Speaker 2:Universal man.
Speaker 1:So Lollachuza became a cautionary tale meant to scare children into being well-behaved and home on time, otherwise Lollachuza would find them, I guess, kind of similar to how La Llorona operates as well, right?
Speaker 2:Some of the more haunting reports that I've read about Lollachuza encounters include people who claim to have heard what sounded like a person imitating an owl or a bird, and that, to me, is so creepy Like the idea of, like you and your brain, it sounds like an owl, but you and your brain are like wait, that sounded like a human, making it sound like an owl, like all of those things just sound terrifying to me.
Speaker 2:I mentioned it earlier that when you're like kind of out and alone in the woods, your ears will play tricks on you and they convince yourself that you've heard all kinds of things, that that, that, that owl might have been a woman or that person might have been an owl. And then there are so many sounds If you're not familiar those of us who live in cities or don't spend time alone in the woods for hours at a time there are so many animals out there that sound human, like screeches, mountain lions, even just like general, like birds, can make, can imitate sounds that sound very familiar to us. So there are just so many things that we don't know and the woods is full of it. That's what makes it scary.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorite childhood stories is there was a night me and my sister camped in our backyard, just we were like in a tent and we were little, and they had released fisher cats into my home state to like control the deer population for some reason, I think, because like deer ticks, it was some, something was happening. But fisher cats sound like women, screaming like a bloody murder. And there was in the middle of the night like one on either side of the tent and my parents were like how do we get our daughters out of this tent alive? But I remember growing up these blood-curdling screams that just sound like a woman is being killed in the worst way and it's fisher cats just outside your house.
Speaker 1:And it's wild.
Speaker 2:Terrifying, terrifying, yeah.
Speaker 1:So La La Chuza is specifically known for targeting men, especially men who are alone, walking at night and usually drunk, which is something that came up in almost all of the examples that I found online. According to Gonzalez-Martin, who we quoted earlier, the legend has evolved a bit from a story about someone different and othered to a revenge story for women who have been wronged, which I think is really interesting, and I totally can see that kind of natural evolution. And, either way, the legend gives power to women and power to people who have been othered in general, which I think is an incredibly powerful mechanic. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think folklore steps in to kind of solve and provide language for, and stories for, morals and things we need to learn and teach each other. I think they've passed through the generations in that way. We kind of form them to what we need to know or what we need to teach someone, and I could see how that definitely changed and moved around In my childhood. La La Chusa was always a witch, always a woman with the power to transform into an owl, which is always just cool Like the idea that a woman just has this cool power like where do you get it? I would like one. And she was always.
Speaker 2:And the owl was a scary, powerful creature that could swoop down and snatch you up in her talons, so she would grab you on the shoulders and lift you up and take you with her. Truthfully, for us it was used similar to La Llorona, warning you away from creeks and rivers and waterways. La Luchisa was used to warn us away from barns, abandoned houses in the woods, all by herself. So it was like she had. She lived in these spaces. Anytime you're driving past one or anytime you were near one, it was like ooh, a lot of the shoes is in there, don't walk in there, don't go in there, she's going to get you, and then they'd grab you on the shoulders like she'd be taking you away. So it was truly fun, but made sense to me that that's the way that culture, my culture, my community used it to kind of like warn us away from those spaces.
Speaker 1:Are there other things like this that you were told growing up, and are do they mostly center women? I'm curious.
Speaker 2:No, we heard El Kukui. El Kukui was essentially the boogeyman. El Kukui was a I guess would be just an entity that warned us away from the dark. So if you were trying to get outside at night or you were trying to do something that you're going away over there where there's no lights and they can't see you, it just warned you away from the dark. Not all women, but there is probably. The ones that stuck with me personally, as a woman, were the ones about women and the stories about powerful women, or powerful women beings, even if they were in the negative you know, she's going to get you, she's going to eat you, she's going to eat you, she's going to kill you, like. That was interesting to me because it was the idea of giving these entities power in that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I love that, I love that. So we are all very blessed because we are about to hear a little excerpt from one of Anastasia's amazing, haunting, incredible stories. So, again, this is a story from Ghostly, ghastly Tales. It's called Don't Cry, and maybe you'll tell us a little bit about it before we get into it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this is one of the stories in the collection. Two brothers are abandoned on the side of the road and they're lured to the water's edge by a crying woman. I'll help set the scene and I'll read kind of a short snippet from us of the coolest part. So in this story Mateo and Arturo are traveling down the long back roads of Texas with their uncle Manny. They wake up to find their uncle is missing from the car and they are parked on the side of an abandoned road near a creek. This is a very familiar location for me, being being from Texas, and so I love the idea that this is where they kind of sit. And it's a little scary because every little kid sitting in the backseat of a car can see this in Texas. The eldest brother, Arturo, gets out to look for his uncle, but he never returns, and now Mateo is forced to investigate himself. So this is where we are.
Speaker 1:Amazing, amazing. Okay, take it away.
Speaker 2:Mateo is a little afraid to get out of the car, but he's also afraid to be alone any longer. Just as he unbuckles his seatbelt he sees something, or maybe someone, through the tall brush and the crooked trees. It looks like someone in all white walking along the creek. He blinks and the figure is gone. Maybe it was never there. As soon as he's out of the car he breathes in deep the smell of cool, sweet air. It smells like it does just before a rainstorm. With a car behind him, mateo checks for his brother, arturo. He climbs over the barbed wire fence and hops down into a bed of knee-high grass. He shuffles through noisily to deter any snakes hiding in the brush. He's not as brave as his older brother, but he is more careful.
Speaker 2:Mateo approaches the creek's edge Down the embankment. A creek is swollen, with rainwater lazily coursing through the soft-flowing current. There's nothing in either direction. Then he hears the sound that Arthurow went to investigate. It sounds like a woman crying. Her whimpers turn to low moans and then sniffles. The sound raises goosebumps on his skin. It's not right, it's out of place.
Speaker 2:Suddenly, an unwelcome thought rushes in. Mateo remembers a story his cousin told him when they stood around a bonfire in the backyard, the one about the wailing woman, the one who cries, who lives near water. It's why no one is supposed to play by water alone. She's down there, she cries for her missing children. She's doomed to float along the creeks, the rivers, the lakes looking for her children. And when she finds you, mateo shudders and tries to shake the thought from his mind. But the sound of the wailing grows. And then a figure in the water. Mateo chills as if a bucket of ice water rushes down his back. It's a woman with long, dark hair hair wearing a white dress. She's hunched over something. Her shoulders shake from her crying, her sobbing, her mournful moans help us. She whispers, tears streaming down her face. She glides through the water towards mateo, her long fingers with blacking fingertips reaching please got you. She hisses, her clawed nails bearing deep into his forearm what a treat.
Speaker 1:It's so good, it's so creepy. I really, really hope that everybody checked out this book and I should also just say, on top of the content being 10 out of 10, the design of the book is so beautiful.
Speaker 1:It glows in the dark, it's so fun and beautiful and I would say I don't know if you would agree, maybe I'm a bad influence I would say it's great for kids especially kids of a certain age because it's beautiful, it's fun and it gives you like a scary meter, which I find to be very helpful, so you you kind of know before you get into it, like which stories might be more or less palatable for kids depending on their age. But I love it, it's so beautiful and heavy and hardcover and I really, really hope that everyone checks it out. Thank you for sharing that. That was so great yeah.
Speaker 2:So the book itself. We to me, all the books for kids used to be designed in like that goose, bumpy, like newspaper-y feel where it was kind of. You know you scrunch it up in your backpack and you lose it. But this book, they spent a lot of time making it like hardcover, a little bit more premium, a little bit more giftable, so you could give it to your friend, you could share it, you could gift it and, yes, it's glow in the dark hardcover. All designed by this fantastic artist, teo Scaffa, and he also did 22 full color illustrations inside the book with, like, some little call outs and snippets. They did a great job designing it to look neat, like you want to keep it and go through it. And, yes, the fright meters.
Speaker 2:I, I rated each story one to three. So kids, maybe kids who are really into scary stuff, go straight for the threes. Maybe kids who are just dipping a toe into scary things will start with the ones and grow. Um, I'll say that my rating is apparently super controversial because some kids are like the ones were terrifying and the threes were not scary at all. So, um, but it was truly, truly a fun, fun activity to find. And then the book also has. For each story there's a small footnote like a narrator kind of giving you a little bit of that horror history which I think your fans will enjoy. And then in the back there's also I dove a little bit into like the folklore and kind of, where I found stories and I included a little bibliography. So hopefully little academic, creepy kids will want to go through and read some of these original folktales.
Speaker 1:I think so, and I've actually gifted a few to like spooky kids in my life and they've been, they've gone over so well and we so Alan and I actually have kind of a tradition of exchanging gifts on Halloween, as opposed to.
Speaker 2:We do.
Speaker 1:That's adorable but I've kind of been thinking of like, okay, what kids in my life can I also give this to, kind of like as a Halloween gift? And it's it's just a beautiful like coffee table book too. In addition to kind of being a fun interactive gift for kids, it's just beautiful to have out. Yeah, it's, it's that's really cool to see kind of how it came to life visually for you. And I just have to say, of course, like our podcast is all about the history of horror and I appreciate so much that those footnotes where it kind of calls out the legends and I've been learning so much stuff I want to go research and look into, and so I think that's a really cool element of it that you very, very rarely see in like anthology horror books.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was speaking fully to those little kids like me. I was speaking fully to myself as a kid who used to sit at the library and read every book on the occult and the supernatural and the mysteries of the unexplained, and I hope that there are kids out there still to this day who do the same, who like a library research scene in a movie and or book, and hopefully this will be a part of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know there are. I know that there are. Thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about La Llorona, and this is exactly what we do, right, we trace modern horror back to its roots, and so it feels so fitting to have you on, finally, and to talk about your collection of short stories and then kind of taking one of those and tracing it back to your roots, right, and it feels very perfectly what this podcast is about. So I'm very grateful that you joined us today and I just want to kind of close out with a little bit on the folklore here.
Speaker 1:So there are many similarities, obviously, between the legend of La Llorona and La Luchusa. Both involve a woman, wronged usually, and revenge. It's so interesting to me to trace these stories back to their roots, kind of as far as we can and generally directionally right there's obviously people out there far, far better suited for this research than I am that are doing that too but to try to kind of understand the mythology that has evolved over the years and perhaps in this case even from ancient Aztec belief to modern day urban legend. So we're just so thrilled that you came on to kind of talk about this and to teach us something new, to bring us into kind of your culture a little bit, and we hope that there'll be more collaborations for us in the future.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, thank you so much I mean shout out to Lunatics Radio at our podcast for being what I consider fully academic in your approach to horror history and researching and sharing all of these spooky tales that we all love so much. You treat each of our scary stories and like these things that are silly but fun but serious but engaging, with such respect and dedication to the art and the form. So I mean thank you for keeping all of these stories alive for the next generation, for us to pass on as we continue. So thank you for all the work that you all do to keep this going.
Speaker 1:Thank you, thank you. That's very kind of you. Thank you so much, and I hope that you really do consider getting yourself a copy of Ghostly Ghastly Tales. I'm going to link everything that you need to do that in the description of this podcast and on social media, but please follow Anastasia on Instagram at Anastasia Writes. We'll leave that below and you can check out the book's website, ghostlygastlytalescom, to purchase the book and kind of to learn more about it. So we'll make it very, very easy for you. But I could not recommend your work more, and we didn't even say that your work has also been featured on this podcast before. So you've been part of the lunatics community for a very long time and it's long overdue that we sat down and had a chat.
Speaker 2:Yes, well thank you so much for having me on. Yes, I hope to continue to be one of your fans from afar, just wishing you and the podcast so much luck and all the fans out there Stay tuned to hear more from this wonderful group of people and all the things that they're doing to research and share stories with our community. So, yeah, thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Thank you. Talk to you soon you.
