Los Espantos The Ghosts

I remember back when I was a child that my father, mother and his grand aunt used to seat us around them to relate stories of their own childhood, or legends they either heard or were told by their own parents. The best stories that I remember were the stories of spirits, ghosts. People called them "espantos;" like the Llorona (The Weeping Lady) El Cadejo (Demon Dog), La Siguanaba, El Sombreron (The Little Man with Big Hat), La Casa Espantada, (The Haunted House) and the ghost who had no behind. This last I think was made up by my father because I haven't heard it anywhere else.

Maria was the name of a beautiful native who had fallen in love with a young Spanish fellow, he promised to take her back to Spain and married her, he asked her to leave everything behind, she was so crazy in love with this young man and the future life she would have with him. One night under a full moon, she took her three children to wash her clothes and bath herself to be presentable to her lover, on the way to the river she heard these two fellows talking behind some trees, she heard her lover saying to his friend, *I have fallen in love with this beautiful virgin maiden, and I have proposed to her to eloped with me to the old World*, hearing this she hurried to the river and took her children into the waters drowned them. When the children were found the church excommunicated her, and cursed her to roam the Earth for eternity until she found her children. Her lover hearing this since he was devoted to God and his teachings abandoned her. Now every full moon in the woods of Guatemalan mountains we hear from afar the weeping lady calling her children.

El Cadejo or Demon dog, is a humongous dog that protects men who are pure at heart and travel the roads at night either from their home to work or vice versa, but will kill those who are not good people, other people have also told the story that El Cadejo is a protector of drunks, some people say they are two different dogs, one black and the other white with fire red eyes. Either way they are very scary. Both of my parents said to have seen this beast up close and personal, once my father said that El Cadejo followed him back home after visiting one of his girl friends and had cross the cemetery to take a short cut, my mother said that when she was a teenage living with her grandmother and her older sister, El Cadejo had jumped from behind some trees right in front of her and stare at both she and her sister and jumped back into the woods.

There are many versions of the story of La Siguanaba, the one I was told by my elders was that she was a Virgin beautiful maiden with waved golden hair, porcelain skin and slender body. She was promised to an old Sugar Plantation owner in the Caribbeans, but she had fallen in love with this young naval officer, he had promised her to marry her and take her away from the old man and the plantation and her family. The night they were to be married she found out that her young officer was already married, feeling betrayed and heartbroken she threw herself down a cliff where there were long thorns in the bottom, before dying she made a pact with the Devil, to lure men to the edge of the cliff if they were unfaithful to their wives, so it became the legend that this beautiful maiden combs her hair by the river or the edge of a pond enamoring men with her beautiful profile, and than bringing them to the edge of the cliff and show herself to them, once she turns around her face is either a face of a horse or a skull of a horse, the men are so frightened that they fall from the edge to their deaths on the thorns.