There was once a young girl named
Maria in a small
Mexican village. She was beautiful, but she knew this and was vain. She thought she was too good for all the men in her village. One day, a rich
Spaniard landowner (Ranchero) came into town. She thought that he was the only man worthy of her. She had a plot to make him love her. She refused to acknowledge him when he talked to her, and she refused all the expensive gifts he gave her. Her plan worked, and soon after, he was
obsessed with her. He asked her hand in marriage, and she accepted. Soon after, they were
married.
Maria and her husband soon had two beautiful children. Life was good, until Maria's husband soon heard the call of the open plains, and his Ranchero blood made this irresistible. He soon was commuting to his ranch, living there for months at a time, leaving Maria and the children in the village. When he came home, his attention was always on his children, never on Maria. She was such a vain and jealous woman that she could not stand to see her husband paying more attention to her children than to her.
One night, Maria saw her husband in a carriage with an even more beautiful woman than she, and sitting across from him were their children. Maria snapped, and that night, she seized her children in their sleep and threw them in the river. She didn’t realize what she was doing until the children had both drowned. She stretched her arms out towards the river, but her children were long gone, taken away by the current.
The next day, the men of the village found Maria’s body dead on the bank of the river, where she had fallen.
The first night after Maria had been buried, the villagers awoke to a noise. They thought it was the wind at first, but it persisted. They listened hard, and heard a woman down by the river weeping. Some of them went out to the river to aid the woman, and when they arrived, they saw a woman all in white, the way Maria was dressed when they buried her. She cried "Where are my children?" From that day on, they never spoke of her as Maria, only to La Llorona, or the one who cries. The Villagers warned their children not to go out at night, for if they did, they might be snatched by La Llorona, and they would never return.
This is a tragic tale / Ghost story often told in Mexico. It has roots in a Roman myth, believe it or not. The roman myth is similar, except rather than the husband having a prettier mistress, he marries a new woman, the daughter of a king, to advance his social status. This story traveled when the Romans invaded Gaul, or Spain, then the Spaniards brought it to Mexico. It is still told today.