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Local News
La Llorona haunts barrios, waterways of Yuma BY BRYON WELLS, SUN STAFF WRITER If you've ever been walking by the Colorado River at night, or any of the canals that run through Yuma, you might have heard her. The moans, faint at first, become more audible, then followed by sobs and intense wailing of: "Mis hijos, mis hijos," or, "my children, my children."
Mary Larona, a descendent of one of Yuma's founding fathers, can remember a much smaller Yuma and a time when sounds carried throughout the city. Sounds from the river. "At night in the summertime, everybody slept outdoors," said Larona. "You could hear the sounds of the river. Later on, when the other sounds died down, you could hear her." Larona, 92, was born and raised on Main Street in Yuma. She has 15 grandchildren, 44 great-grandchildren and 20 great-great-grandchildren. She said she remembers clearly the La Llorona story, told in Spanish, and to hear it is part of being Hispanic. "I grew up with that story. That was what the nursemaids used to scare their charges," she said. "I don't want to hear it again." There are different versions of the legend. A popular one is that there was a mother with a wayward husband who took up with another woman. Distraught, the mother takes their two children to the river and drowns them in an insane act of revenge. Almost immediately she regrets her decision, but it's too late. The children are swept away. She is doomed forever to walk the banks of waterways, wailing and sobbing, in search of her children. The story goes even further back to pre-Colombian times, and different places in Latin America have similar versions.Miguel Leon-Portilla's book "The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico" talks of a series of omens that foretold the arrival of the Spaniards into Mexico. One of the omens is a weeping woman the people heard night after night.n Honduras, an apparition called "La Sucia," or the dirty one, wanders the river washing her clothes and lures wayward men walking late at night. In more recent times, Susan Smith drowned her two sons in a South Carolina lake so she could be with a man who didn't want a woman with a family. "It's not far-fetched," Larona said of the Llorona tale. "It could have actually happened and carried on from generation to generation. But that's a frightening one." Asked if she believes Llorona still haunts waterways, Larona said: "I don't know, but I wouldn't want to find out." Bryon Wells can be reached at bwells@yumasun.com or 539-6852. Court employees believe in ghostly encounter BY JAMES GILBERT, SUN STAFF WRITER Custodian Darryl Brotherton says he, like many others who used to work there, believes the historic Yuma courthouse may be haunted. "I would say so," said Brotherton, who worked nights in the old courthouse for three years. "It's an old place and is going to have noises, but some of them are very unusual." For Brotherton, the possibility of the courthouse having a resident poltergeist goes beyond the creakings of a 79-year-old building. He says he actually saw something one night. "Had I just seen it out of the corner of my eye, I might have just dismissed it and not thought much about it," Brotherton said. "But I was looking right at this." Thinking backon that eerie night, Brotherton said he was pushing a cart down themain downstairs hallway when he saw the figure of a well-dressed man wearing a hat appear next to the soda vending machines. "It looked like something an artist would have drawn using charcoal," Brotherton said. "It didn't scare me, but it sure got me wondering." Brotherton said he isn't the only person to hear loud noises such as doors swinging open and slamming for no apparent reason and footsteps echoing up and down the stairs and hallways."Co-workers have told me about locked doors shaking, hearing children's voices up and down the hallways, keys jingling and other strange things," Brotherton said.While she hasn't seen a ghost herself, Blanca Alvarez said she did have a ghostly encounter one Saturday morning. Blanca Alvarez was a legal secretary at the time she had a ghostly encounter. She said she wanted to catch up on work one Saturday and decided to head into the office. After a while, Alvarez said her 2-year-old, whom she brought with her, suddenly started asking to go home. "She was fine for a while, coloring and letting me work, then, all of the sudden, (she) started saying she wanted to go home," said Alvarez, who is now a legal office supervisor. "So I called my husband and asked him to come and pick her up." Alvarez said while they were waiting her daughter asked if Alvarez was going with them. When she replied "no," her daughter asked her if she was afraid of the "man." "When I asked her ‘What man?’, she said, ‘The one standing over there,’ as she pointed across the room," Alvarez said. "I didn't see anything, but I turned off my computer and we were out of there.”"It was freaky," said Alvarez, who admits she still gets goosebumps talking about the incident. "You can't quit your job because you are afraid to come to work." Brotherton and Alvarez speculate they may have encountered the spirit of former bailiff Adolph Phillips Teichman, who used to live at the courthouse, next to the room where juries deliberated. Teichman died there on Christmas morning in 1949. James Gilbert can be reached at jgilbert@yumasun.com or 539-6854. The ghost of Mary Elizabeth Post BY SARAH REYNOLDS, SUN STAFF WRITER The children at Post School still ask if it's true that they share their halls with a ghost. "The kids in school don't worry about her. They just ask, ‘Is it true that there's a ghost?’ ” said Dagmar Helbig, who has worked as the librarian at Post for 15 years. According to the stories, Mary Elizabeth Post, whom the school is named after, haunts the school herself. Some say people have seen her, and heard strains of piano music playing while she supposedly walked the halls. Post died of natural causes in 1934, before the school was even built in 1945. It was named for her because of her 57 years of work in Yuma as a teacher and intellectual presence. She was not born an Arizona native, but had come here in 1872 from the East Coast to teach in the rough mining towns of the Southwest. Carol Brooks of the Arizona Historical Society said that, the story goes, she came here to forget a love affair gone sour."She had a fiance who she heard was being untrue to her, and she was too embarrassed to bring up this subject of, you know, ‘Are you messing around with another woman?’ ” Brooks said. "So she just cut him off. She wouldn't talk to him ... Finally, to get over this thing, she came out West." Post devoted her life to teaching the youth of Yuma but she never married or had any children of her own. While it is said she still walks with those of the school that bears her name, Helbig has never seen any proof of the legend. "The first year I was here, I worked every weekend here late at night, trying to get to know the books here in the library," Helbig said. "People have stories and everybody believes it, but it's just hearsay. It's just lore." Sarah Reynolds can be reached at sreynolds@yumasun.com or 539-6847. Girl dances with devil BY NICOLE E. SQUIBBS, SUN STAFF WRITER It seems most scary stories are told to keep children in line, including the one about the girl who dances with the devil. This story has made the rounds in communities along the U.S.-Mexico border, including San Luis, Ariz. The story is based on the age-old storytelling device of being punished for disobeying one's elders. The story is of a beautiful young lady who went to a nightclub against the wishes of her parents, but no one was asking her to dance. She was so desperate to dance with a handsome man, she said she did not care if he was the devil himself, as long as she could dance all night. A handsome man appeared, and every woman wanted to dance with him, but he picked the beautiful young lady. While they were dancing, they started levitating. She was so happy to be dancing with the most handsome man in the room that she did not notice. People began to see the couple were floating, so they started saying a prayer. During the prayer, she finally realized they were dancing in the air. Then the handsome man's physical form started to change. She noticed his feet were turning into hooves. After that, she fell to the ground, dead. "It's a pretty old story," said Tony Reyes, a Yuma County supervisor and longtime resident of the Arizona border city. "It comes around every so often. The location and time changes." Jose Gonzalez of San Luis, Ariz., who first heard the tale from his brother, said it is meant to scare young girls from disobeying their parents. In the version Gonzalez was told, the girl made it through the ordeal and then realized her mistake. Reyes said most of these urban legends "have the same basic underlying theme of disrespecting elders or doing something they shouldn't do, and if they do, the devil will appear." Nicole Squibbs can be reached at nsquibbs@yumasun.com or 539-6855. Ghost pinches those who wear RED BY DARIN FENGER, SUN STAFF WRITER Don't believe in ghosts? Well, wear something red, go to Yuma's historic prison and see if you get pinched by unseen forces. There's a dead little girl haunting the grounds of the Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park. She's mad, too, not only because she's dead, but she's also lost her doll. So when she sees a tourist wearing red, she's just gotta pinch. Park Manager Jesse Torres has told The Sun that he always has to chuckle every time he sees someone wearing that certain color walk into the popular tourist destination. "It's fun to watch because ... I always wonder if they'll say anything," Torres said in a past article. "It's strange, too, how often they'll walk up to me later with stories." But why is a dead little girl hanging around the prison? She's there because just below the prison's walls is the Colorado River, the very waters that stole her life years ago. It all happened, as the legend goes, when the girl's doll accidently fell into the water. She went after the toy but failed to find it and drowned. The girl was supposedly wearing red when she died, hence the explanation for her hatred of the hue. Gale Hall, Torres' assistant, said most complaints of being pinched come from visitors to the dark cell, the prison's solitary confinement chamber. "That's where we hear about people getting spooked," Hall said, laughing just a little. "They really think something's going to get them." Darin Fenger can be reached at dfenger@yumasun.com or 539-6860. Beware of El Chupacabra, mass livestock massacres BY BRYON WELLS, SUN STAFF WRITER Farmers and ranchers: Beware of unexplained mass livestock massacres. It could mean the legendary El Chupacabra is back. In the recent past, the Chupacabra craze has grown like wildfire, and, capitalizing on popular culture, street vendors along the U.S.-Mexico border began selling Chupacabra T-shirts, piñatas and porcelain figurines resembling the lizard-like creature. An episode of the popular science fiction television series the "X-Files" even had a Chupacabra episode. But then it sort of went away. Sergio Fernandez, who works locally as a consultant for the Arizona Department of Economic Services, has been researching the supernatural for a book he is writing about highway memorial shrines and people who claim to have had encounters with spirits. Fernandez described the Chupacabra phenomenon as more of a popular culture phenomenon or an urban myth rather than folklore. There is talk in Mexico that the Chupacabra myth got started as sort of a "wag-the-dog" rumor created by a former president to distract national attention away from his corrupt administration. Fernandez said. "They're saying that thing was created by Carlos Salinas to take the focus off the problems of Mexico." According to Wikipedia, the Internet encyclopedia Web site, the "name translates literally from Spanish as ‘goat-sucker.’ ” It comes from the creature's reported habit of attacking and drinking the blood of livestock. Chupacabra is also supposed to have extraterrestrial connections and is common in areas with UFO sightings. As Wikipedia explains: "The legend of cipi chupacabra began in about 1992, when Puerto Rican newspapers El Vocero and El Nuevo Dia began reporting the killings of many different types of animals, such as birds, horses, and as its name implies, goats." Often, legends have some practical purpose or cultural significance behind them, Fernandez said. Faron Owl, a teacher at San Pasqual High School and a member of the Quechan Tribe, said every culture has it's own stories. And, "almost every tribe has its own monster," he added. A figure in Quechan culture that resembles the Chupacabra is the "goat man," Owl said. "It's one way that if your children are not behaving or (are) making the wrong decisions, that guy's gonna come and get you," Owl said. Bryon Wells can be reached at bwells@yumasun.com or 539-6852. The Witch of Black Mountain BY DARIN FENGER, SUN STAFF WRITER If townfolk couldn't hear her wild cackling floating down Black Mountain, they certainly could smell the stench of her putrid stew. Meet the Widow Black. At least that's what everyone called her by day. Because at night, when she would be high on her favorite hill making her smelly concoctions, the townsfolk had a different name for her — The Witch of Black Mountain. According to stories printed in The Sun throughout the years, Widow Black lived in the shadows of Black Mountain, where she could always be seen walking on cold and moonless nights. It was said that no one liked the lady either, well except for her gardener, a loathsome fellow described as cadaverous-looking, who was blessed with no sense of smell. Don Swain with Yuma Spirit Hunters has never seen Widow Black himself, but he used to include her story in tours he'd give around Halloween.He has conducted real investigations into her story, too, and the information he gathered left Swain knowing that Widow Black's story isn't just tantalizing, it just might also be true. "I think she was actually a real person," Swain said, giving a modern explanation for the legend's distortion of the truth. "She probably practiced what we know today as Wicca. She was probably just an herbalist, a medicine woman." As for that foul-smelling stuff she was always making, Swain guesses that it was probably just lye soap. Black Mountain, otherwise known as Black Hill, is the big dirt hill off of First Avenue.These days it's private land owned by Zeller Excavating and Paving and Swain warns legend hunters not to go poking around. According to the legend, when Widow Black died, her faithful goon followed her orders and buried the witch's body up on Black Mountain. "But when townspeople found out about that, they just wouldn't have it," Swain said. "So they sent the Sheriff up there to go looking for it." The body was never found — and Swain thinks he knows why. "I think he just covered her up real good, so no one will ever find her." Darin Fenger can be reached at dfenger@yumasun.com or 539-6860.  |
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