The Weeping Woman by the River

La Llorona, "the weeping woman", is the central ghost figure of Mexican and wider Latin American folklore, a spirit who drowned her own children, in most versions after being spurned or abandoned by their father, and who now wanders near rivers, lakes and irrigation canals at night searching for them, her wailing cry giving the legend its name. Encountering her is traditionally considered a bad omen, and in many regional tellings she poses a direct danger to children out after dark, making the legend function as a widely used piece of cautionary folklore that parents invoke to keep children away from open water at night as much as a ghost story told for its own sake.

Scholarship on the legend traces likely roots to pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican goddess figures associated with weeping and misfortune, including accounts recorded by Spanish chroniclers of a weeping female spirit said to have been heard in the streets of Tenochtitlan shortly before the Spanish conquest, though the story as told today is a colonial and postcolonial synthesis rather than a straight survival of any single pre-Columbian source.