The Wailing Woman

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I'm no expert on Hispanic heritage or the many cultures spread across Central and South America, but patriotism seems to be a cultural trend.

Statistics tell me that somewhere around 19% of the U.S.

is comprised of Latinos, and that about 19% of our active military force is also Latino.

Some guys really do identify strongly with their heritage and culture, but the military has its own culture, and that's usually why we all get along with each other.

Guys in the military really don't care about where anybody comes from.

Just do your job.

But considering I never really gave it much thought, I will say that I am increasingly fascinated by Latin American history and folklore.

One of my friends Cesar moved here from Venezuela.

He also lived in Panama for a few years.

I asked him recently about this and he said that everywhere you go, people will tell you their chupacapa stories.

The way he said it, it seems like it's as common as talking about the weather.

Then there's El Cucho, a sort of shapeshifting version of the boogeyman.

an entity whose stories seem to be used by Latino parents to scare their children into behaving.

There's also this one well-known legend that sends chills down the spines of those who grew up hearing it, and especially those who say they have experienced it.

For some, it's in the same category as El Cucho, just a folktale used to make sure kids make it home before dark.

But according to people like these two veterans, This legend is meant to be taken as a very serious warning.

If you hear a woman crying,

stay away from the water.

These are just a couple of true stories of American servicemen who have encountered an entity known

as La Yorona.

I'm Luke Lamana,

and this is Wartime Stories.

Huh, just like clockwork.

See, there she goes again.

I told you every night, Sergeant.

I'm just glad you're here with me.

Why is that?

Because now I know I'm not crazy.

What kind of strange woman goes around wailing like that every night?

Always around 3 a.m., too.

Maybe she needs help.

Mental help, most likely.

But, uh,

you know,

just in case,

why don't you, uh,

why don't you go check it out?

I'll hold down the fort.

You try to go find her and let me know.

Uh, yeah.

Just

don't

don't go too far

and get lost out there.

Yeah.

For quite some time, the United States military has maintained a presence in South America.

They've got a number of bases scattered around various allied countries where American troops are stationed to train with and support local military forces.

A former Army National Guardsman found himself deployed to one of these installations, the Sotokano Air Force Base in Honduras, during the summer of 2019.

And doing a quick callback, we've been on this base before in a previous episode about a very large snake.

So now we're dealing with this entity.

Very interesting.

Anyway, this Army National Guardsman writes,

I've never experienced anything like Bigfoot or hovering shadows over OPs, faces, UFOs, haunted barracks rooms, etc.

But I did have one weird experience.

It was the Sunday before Memorial Day when I heard something that reminded me of it.

Some kids were playing outside my house, and one of them scraped their knee pretty badly.

The scream she made.

Dude, I don't spook easy, but it made me stop what I was doing.

Imagine the most painful scream, just pure agony.

And that's what I heard four years ago on a TDY at temporary duty to Honduras.

I was stationed at Sotokano Air Force Base in the summer of 2019.

Being one of the few enlisted and the most junior, I found myself being voluntold to be put on the night shift.

It was pretty boring.

My job consisted of logging things that happened overnight, keeping contact with other units, being there in case of an emergency, and roaming around the office building on patrols.

Outside of training events, very little happened.

I was literally paid to watch Netflix and play Total War for three months.

As long as the coffee was made every morning and everything was logged, I was squared away.

Other than learning how to make coffee and catching up on the Walking Dead and Breaking Bad,

I encountered something strange.

Now, my shift would run from 2200 to 100.

Around 0300, I would hear sobbing from somewhere outside the office.

It would normally last for around 30 minutes, and it would always be a woman crying.

Now, I thought I was going crazy until I had to battle track the nighttime trainings.

Since there were a lot of moving parts, one of the NCOs would join me for that, and he would hear the sobbing too.

Finally, after a few days of this, we had enough of it.

He told me to go investigate the noise and report back to him what I found.

It was around 03.15 when I walked out of the office.

I lit up my smoke and took in a few drags before walking towards the noise.

Strangely enough, as I walked in the direction of it, the sobbing seemed like it was going further and further away from me, almost as if whatever was making the noise was luring me away from the safety of our lit office building.

I stopped near a shack that had some chicken coops and put out my cigareo.

Grinding it under my boot, I was scanning the empty cabins for anything, any movement, anything out of place, anyone.

But there was nobody other than myself outside.

Feeling a bit weirded out, I lit another cigario and took a few more deep drags before walking down the road, still continuing to follow these sounds.

I did this until finally coming to a stop by by a drainage pipe at the edge of the road,

and the noises stopped.

I'm not just saying the sobbing noises stopped, but all the noises stopped: the cicadas, the other nighttime sounds, everything.

It was as if I had just stepped into a vacuum, like someone just flipped a switch, and time just stopped.

I stood there for a while, kind of taking in the silence.

Where the hell is that coming from?

It was creepy as shit because I was the only person out there and it was three in the morning.

I felt my hair stand on end and I ran away from that drain pipe, cigar in mouth, and back to the chicken coops.

I remember them squawking at me while I looked back at the end of the road.

There was no one there, but the noises had started up again.

I could hear everything now.

Now I'm thoroughly creeped out.

I put out my second cigar and I ran back to the office.

My sergeant asked me what happened and I told him that we were just hearing the nearby chickens.

He seemed pretty doubtful at the time and even laughed it off, saying, chickens, huh?

Those are some weird-ass birds.

The next morning, nothing was said and he didn't log it in the logbook.

Neither of us said a word about it until I got home and drilled with my home unit.

One of my best friends, we'll just call him Junior, was from Puerto Rico.

I told Junior about it over drinks after some drill.

He looked at me as if he saw a ghost

and he told me, me,

you didn't hear a woman crying, man, because if you did, then you're going to die soon.

I asked him why, and he told me about La Yorona.

Apparently, if you hear her wailing, then you or someone you know will die soon, or might experience something horrible.

Now, that's interesting, because only a few nights after I had heard this woman, I was participating in a cross-training event with some Marines.

We were sling-loading heavy loads to helicopters at night without any nods, night vision.

On the last iteration, sometime between 0245 and 0300,

something happened.

Now, helicopter blades generate static electricity due to the friction in the air.

which means the hookup team on the ground needs to have a grounding man.

The grounding man is the most important person on the team.

He holds a metal pole against the aircraft to make touching it safe.

Everyone on the team needs to beware of the grounding man.

If he lets go, then no one touches the helicopter, because if you do, then the charge that the helicopter generates can kill you.

Now, thanks to the instability of the helicopter, our grounding man couldn't get a good ground, and he let go of the helicopter just as I was going to hook up to the load.

If it wasn't for my sergeant, I would have been fried.

He pulled on the back of my plate carrier, and we both fell back, just as

several tons of helicopter dipped down to where my head was, and hovered just inches away from my face before it rebounded and took off, flew off into the night.

I'm not a very superstitious person, but hindsight is 20-20.

Considering what I experienced the nights before, and having not heard the sobbing ever again, it certainly sent chills down my spine.

Whatever was out there at 3 a.m.

in the morning was there.

I heard it.

My sergeant heard it.

Hell, even the other soldiers on the shift with me heard it.

But none of us have any explanation for it.

No one ever spoke about it.

Because, you know, who would take it seriously?

If anything, we just get piss tested over and over again and our leadership wouldn't give two shits.

I know one thing.

As much as I love a good ghost story, I don't believe ghosts exist.

But whatever was out there at 3 a.m.

certainly did.

And she wanted to let us know that she was out there.

Hey, it's Luke, the host of Wartime Stories.

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This next story can be found in R.S.

Russo's book, Odd and Chilling Encounters, True Stories of the Unknown.

In it, a U.S.

Marine, writing under the handle Chirio Martinez,

recalled something unnerving that happened to him just prior to enlisting.

He writes,

It was during the summer when I decided to take a trip to Mexico to visit my family.

I was about to join the Marine Corps, so my mother wanted me to go see my family just in case something bad happened.

At the time, I was with my pregnant girlfriend who would later become my wife and then ex-wife.

Since she was pregnant, I didn't want to leave her alone, so I bought her a ticket so she could come along as well.

Her being Caucasian, with blonde hair and hazel eyes, made everyone around my grandma's house curious, and a lot of our extended family came to see the beautiful American girl.

After greeting everyone, we all started to talk about what had been going on since we had left.

My girlfriend was sitting next to me, having me translate parts of the conversation.

One of my aunts, who I knew was into the paranormal, brought up the subject of Lajorona, the wailing woman.

My mom quickly told my aunt to shut up since she knew that it would get me both interested and scared regarding it, but I was able to push my aunt to keep on going.

I mean, I was going to be a marine after all, and I couldn't let this silly myth scare me.

So she proceeded to tell us about how whenever she would sleep over at my grandma's house, which we were currently at,

if she stayed up late enough, she would be able to hear her wails.

The wails of La Yorona.

My mom rolled her eyes at this point and jokingly pushed my aunt, and then the topic died at that point since one of my other aunts changed the subject.

Seeing how serious everyone had gotten for a brief moment, my girlfriend nudged me and asked what we were talking about.

I told her the myth of the wailing woman, La Yorona, about how she had drowned her children in a river and was destined to walk along all the rivers in Mexico looking for her dead children.

When I finished telling her this, my girlfriend just laughed because she didn't really believe in anything paranormal.

Later that night, my parents decided that my girlfriend and I should go and stay at our old house where I had grown up.

since we were both adults and needed our space.

The house was currently being worked on, so the the bedrooms had no doors or working lights.

The only doors the house had were the ones that led outside.

Once we got inside, we had to use a candle and a flashlight for our light source.

I remember we even used a bedsheet as a temporary door to give our room a little bit of privacy, even though we were the only ones in the house.

As the night went on, my girlfriend and I stayed up talking, and eventually we both fell asleep.

I don't know at what time exactly, but something woke me up.

I realized that my girlfriend had stolen all the covers, so I

slowly tried to get some back.

And as I was debating on closing the window that was located right above our heads,

I heard a long wail.

I didn't have a cell phone, and my watch at the time was really cheap, so I wasn't able to tell what time it was, but I heard it.

It was a long, distorted wail.

A woman crying.

I could distinctly hear the old raspiness in her voice,

as if she'd been yelling for such a long time that her throat was getting ready to give out.

I was both excited and scared shitless at the same time.

A cold chill then went down my spine, which just reinforced my fear.

But what confused me was that her wail sounded as if it was being played through an old gramophone.

I don't know if it was the scratchiness of her voice or what exactly, but it sounded like an old, creepy record playing over and over.

After listening for a bit, I could make out what she was saying.

She was crying her trademark, Ai mis ihos, or oh my children.

That wail is what made her famous, not just in the paranormal community, but with most people living in the rural parts of Mexico.

The whales then started to grow louder, making it seem as if she was slowly heading towards us.

There's a myth that if you hear the whales close, she's actually far away, but if you hear them very far, she might be somewhere near you.

My girlfriend started to stir.

I don't remember if I woke her up on purpose, but either way, it wasn't the smartest move for me to do since now

she would also hear the wails.

She had this kind of incredulous look on her face, and she said,

What the hell is that?

I just motioned for her to be quiet and listen.

Hearing the tone of my voice, she knew something was wrong.

Another loud wail passed by, felt like it was echoing inside the house.

My girlfriend started shaking, clearly terrified of what could be outside the house.

My arm was still under her head, and

I could feel tears running down her face onto my arm.

Each time the wail came, she would shake a little and I would try to comfort her, you know, hold her close.

The wailing sounds continued to get closer and closer.

They eventually came to a peak where it sounded as if this woman was right outside our window.

And at this point, we were both terrified.

Doing the only brave thing I could think of, I pulled the covers over us and tried to remain as still as possible.

The wails eventually faded out,

but just as we thought she had gone, we heard something viciously fighting and slamming against our outside door.

Scared the bejeebus out of us.

My girlfriend had grown attached to this stray dog that used to walk around my grandma's farm.

So while we were staying there, he would always sleep by the outside door and he would greet us whenever we left the house.

I figured now he's like fighting with another dog or something.

The dogs, or at least what we thought were dogs, fought for a good minute, slamming against the door, snarling, barking at one another.

And then, as suddenly as this fighting started, it stopped.

We were too scared to get out of bed, so we just tried to stay awake for a while to see if we heard anything else.

And eventually, we just fell back asleep.

The following morning we talked about what had happened and we walked outside to find our stray dog.

He was always by the door waiting for us but he was gone.

The dirt was clearly stirred up from a fight that had happened the night before

but we never got to see that dog the rest of the trip.

This all happened in 2008 and to this very day, whenever I go and pick up my daughter, sometimes I ask my ex about what happened in Mexico, but

she doesn't like to talk about it.

I haven't been back to Mexico ever since.

As indicated by these two men, the legend of La Larona is one of the most popular and enduring stories in Latin American folklore.

Some historians believe that La Larona's origins can be traced back as far as ancient Aztec mythology.

There is, however, a notable variance in the way the story is told, or perhaps over time, different legends have all been merged into one.

So, we'll begin with the first.

When Christopher Columbus arrived on the shores of South America in 1492, it was only a matter of time before the forces of Imperial Spain came to blows with the region's leading territorial power, the Aztecs.

Controlling 80,000 square miles of lands and boasting a population of around 5 to 6 million people, the Aztec Empire would be seen as a formidable obstacle standing in the way of Spain's colonization of Central America.

The Aztecs had conquered much of the land themselves over the previous centuries.

It wouldn't be easy to take it away from them.

But about a decade before the Aztecs ever saw a Spanish soldier, something strange happened in their capital city.

In 1509, the residents of Tenochtitlan were awoken in the middle of the night by an unnerving sound, the painful mourning cries of a woman.

They looked and looked, but nobody ever found the wailing woman.

But some could make out what she was saying between her heavy sobs.

In some accounts, she was heard to cry out, My children, we must flee far away from this city.

While in others, she was reported as saying something along the lines of, My children, where shall I take you?

Night after night, this mysterious woman was said to wander the darkened streets of the capital city, her mournful cries piercing the still quiet.

And night after night, no one ever saw her.

And then one night, as quickly as they had started, the screaming stopped.

Unsure of what her mysterious cries meant, many Aztec people felt a sense of foreboding.

Something dangerous was coming to their city.

But what?

In February, 1519, Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortez landed on the Yucatan coast in order to begin his march on Tenoctitlan.

Under his command were 11 ships, 500 soldiers, and about 100 sailors and 16 artillery pieces.

The Aztecs mustered a force of over 80,000 warriors.

So Cortes knew he was severely outnumbered, but he had planned this war with the Aztecs very carefully.

His scouting throughout the region revealed that many tribes and other natives in the surrounding provinces hated the Aztecs.

The Aztecs had subjugated most of them, demanding regular and frequent tributes from them, what Europeans might have called taxes.

Then there were the Aztecs' religious practices.

Smaller tribes were often raided, their people being stolen and offered to the Aztec gods as human sacrifices, sometimes in numbers of hundreds or even thousands at a time.

The Aztecs maintained their political, military, and economic dominance through this violence and tyranny, and they were hated for it.

By appealing to this hatred, Cortes conscripted many of the regional tribes he encountered into his own army.

The further Cortes marched into Aztec territory, the larger his army grew.

And by the time he reached the gates of Tenoctitlan, his small handful of Spaniards stood alongside 200,000 indigenous warriors.

In the bloody siege on the city that followed, it is estimated that nearly a quarter of a million people died.

including both warriors and civilians.

What's not recorded are the countless indigenous lives that were later lost due to disease and a smallpox epidemic unleashed by the Spanish invaders.

With the fall of Tenoctitlan in 1521, the Spanish Empire, for the time being, established itself as the uncontested ruler over the Americas.

Over the following years, the Aztecs and many other smaller indigenous civilizations slowly faded away.

in the wake of European expansion.

As Spanish scholars attempted to learn more about these people and the respective cultures before they disappeared entirely, one haunting story inevitably resurfaced.

About 30 years after the fall of the Aztec Empire, Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún began working on what would become known as the Florentine Codex, or the general history of the things of New Spain.

During his interviews with native speakers of the local Nahuatl language, many of whom were former residents of Tenoctitlan, Bernardino became fascinated by repeated tales of a ghostly, crying woman.

After pressing for more information about who or what this spirit was, the indigenous people often referenced a deity known as Chihuahu.

a goddess of Aztec mythology associated with childbirth, fertility, and and motherhood.

Chihuahuatl is often depicted as a fierce, skull-faced woman brandishing a shield and spear, a symbol of motherly strength and endurance.

According to the native people, she was also known to carry a crib or cradle.

All of this was documented by Friar Bernardino in his writing.

And

they also say that

She carries a crib with her, as someone would who carried her child in it, and she goes to the market among the other women and disappearing she would leave behind the crib.

When the other women discovered that the crib had been forgotten there,

they would look to see what was inside and there would be a flint like iron of the rough kind with which they killed those they sacrificed.

By this they understood that it was Tihuaquatl who had left it there.

While often worshipped in Aztec culture, there is a darker side to Chihuahu that often links her appearances to childhood death, particularly the murder of a child.

In this regard, Chihuahua is said to be a spirit that comes to mourn the death of children, a sort of spiritual mother to all Aztecs.

And many children were killed during the Spanish invasion 10 years after the appearance of the wailing woman in Tenochtitlan.

In other interpretations, Chiwa Cotl is not so motherly.

More akin to stories of La Yorona, this ancient goddess is painted in a much more predatory light, a demonic entity that devours children.

In Book 8 of the Florentine Codex, Friar Bernardino wrote of the goddess's more murderous tendencies, as told of the friar by the then governor of Huatulco, Don Martín.

In his time it came to pass

that the demon that in the form of a woman walked and appeared by day and by night and was called Chihuahuatl, ate a small boy who was in his cradle in the town of Azcapotzalco.

Legends do change hands over time.

Stories passed down through generations of families and tribes can change.

Whether the stories of this ancient goddess and the future stories of a wailing spirit named La Yorona are one and the same remains to be seen.

But they do share a commonality.

Both of these entities are known to prey on young children.

300 years after the fall of Tenoctitlan and the writings of Friar Bernardino, the legend of a weeping woman once again surfaces in the annals of history.

In 1849, Manuel Elojio Carpillo Hernandez published a short poem simply titled La Lorona.

The poem speaks of a woman who was brutally murdered by her husband and then returned.

Pale with terror, I heard it told when I was a child, an innocent child,

that a a bad man in my town once did to death his wife, Rosalia.

And since then, in the shadowy night,

the trembling, frightened people

hear the sad whimpering of a suffering woman,

whimpering such as she made in her agony.

For a certain time, she ceases in her lament,

but then

she breaks out out in prolonged weeping,

and alone she traverses the streets.

She fills everyone with mortal fear.

And close by the river,

in the thick darkness, she goes weeping wrapped in her cloak.

Among all the different haunting stories of a weeping woman told in Latin culture, Manuel Hernández's poem, or at least his version of of events, is occasionally cited as the origin of the spirit of La Lorona.

Names and dates might vary from one telling to the next, but it is hardly the most well-known version of her story.

It seems that many children raised in Latin America and even parts of the southern United States are familiar with another version of the story: a tragic story about a young woman named Luisa.

Luisa lived during the time of Spanish dominion over the Americas.

Luisa was not born into a wealthy family, but her beauty alone was enough.

When he first laid eyes on her, Don Muño de Montes Claris, a wealthy Spanish nobleman, fell madly in love with Luisa, and she was equally smitten with him.

They courted for a time, but neither their families nor the societal rules approved of their marriage.

Noblemen were forbidden from marrying members of the lower classes, so Luisa and Don Muno were married in a secret ceremony.

Over the following years, the two had to keep their marriage a secret, but they managed to live a relatively happy life far from the public eye.

Luisa gave birth to three children, and Don Munio visited them in their small home on the poor side of town, disguising himself as a laborer.

Even though Don Muno's duties as a don often pulled him away from his family for days or weeks at a time, time, their love for one another seemed unbreakable.

Everything changed when a Spanish noblewoman arrived from Madrid.

Don Muñoz's faithfulness to Luisa began to waver.

Since his marriage was secret, he took advantage of his appearance as an available bachelor.

Don Muño's prolonged absences did not go unnoticed by Luisa.

Keeping their marriage a secret had been hard enough.

But now, it was as if he never came home.

Then one day, Luisa overheard some women in the town excitedly talking about the Don's upcoming wedding to the woman from Madrid.

Luisa was stunned.

His absences now made sense, but she refused to believe that her husband would actually betray her and his children like this.

She had to find out for herself.

On the day of the wedding, she snuck onto Don Munho's estate, where the event was being held.

She saw her husband there, on the balcony.

She watched, heartbroken, as Don Muño raised a glass and proposed a toast to their new future.

But not with Luisa.

No, with the woman now hanging on his arm.

The woman from Madrid.

Feeling lost, betrayed, and hopeless, Luisa quietly slipped away from the party and made her way home to her three children.

To Don Muñoz's three children.

No one knows why she did it.

Some say it's because they looked so much like their father.

But when she returned home, possessed with rage, Luisa grabbed a knife.

and murdered her three small children.

It was said that Luisa's neighbors, startled by her screams, went outside to find her staggering around in the streets, covered in blood.

Luisa was tried for murder, and the sentence was swift.

She was condemned to death.

But this was not the end for Luisa.

From that day forward, Luisa's spirit, dressed in white, is said to wander all over the provinces of Latin America, trapped in eternal mourning for the loss of her family.

Her cries are considered a terrible terrible omen.

Anyone unfortunate enough to hear them is doomed to die within a week.

Seemingly the most common version of the La Yorona story is not involving a woman who kills her children using a knife, but instead leads her children down to a nearby river.

before proceeding to drown them.

This version of the story aligns more with the spirit's connection to water, where she continues to lure unsuspecting children before dragging them beneath the surface.

The story of La Yorona is often used by parents who want their children to think twice about playing near water or staying out late after dark.

Because of this, many will simply write off the story as yet another simple folktale born out of superstition.

But the stories shared by these American servicemen are among thousands that say otherwise.

It's a good idea in any case to avoid straying too close to the water when it's dark.

Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke Lamana.

Executive produced by Mr.

Bollin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt.

Written by Jake Howard and myself.

Audio editing and sound design by me, Luke Lamana, and Alex Carpenter.

Additional editing by Davin Intag and Jordan Stiddam.

Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callahan.

Mixed and mastered by Brendan Kane.

Production supervision by Jeremy Bone.

Production coordination by Avery Siegel.

Additional production support by Brooklyn Gooden.

Artwork by Jessica Cloxen Kiner, Robin Vane, and Picada.

If you'd like to get in touch or share your own story, you can email me at info at wartimestories.com.

Thank you so much for listening to Wartime Stories.