The Crying Woman

Here in Mexico, there’s a very well known legend about a woman who killed her children for love of a man who didn’t love her back. The legend says that she drowned the children in a river and when she found out that the man wouldn’t be with her she commited suicide and her soul still wanders around the rivers in the search for her children, and people would still hear her crying "Oh! My children!" That’s why they call her "The crying woman".

Well, my story is about my own experience with the crying woman. I grew up in a neighborhood next to a river, my mother’s sister lived a few blocks away from our house, so I usually go to sleep over my aunt’s house with my cousins.

One night we were talking about the crying woman and how my aunt heard her a couple of nights ago. My cousins told me that my aunt was awake late night when she heard the scream of a woman. She thought someone was in trouble so she went out of the house searching for her, she thought she was like a block away in the river’s direction, so she followed the screaming. When she reached the point where she thought the screaming was coming from, she heard it again, but in the opposite direction, a block away. Then she got scared and went back home. The next day she acknowledged that some other neighbors heard the screaming too.

We were just talking about that when we got scared (I was 13 years old at the time) So we change the subject and started talking about something else. It was late and my aunt told us it was time to go to bed, so we turned off the lights and went to bed, we didn’t fall asleep immediately, we were still talking and laughing in the dark when one of my cousins said "Quiet!"

We stop talking and she asked "Did you hear that?"

I said I didn’t hear anything, my other cousin said the same thing.

"There it is again!" she said. The window was open as it was a warm night of summer. We listen carefully and we could hear a screaming far away, I mean, like miles away. We were amazed "Maybe it’s the crying woman" I whisper, hoping we could hear it again. We stood there in the dark expecting maybe another screaming in the distance, but then seconds later we hear a really loud screaming just outside the window. It was a creepy screaming, like a woman’s crying of pain. We all screamed our lungs out and my aunt came running to the bedroom we were staying at, and we told her what just happened, and she went outside to see if there was someone. But there was nothing.

Needless to say we went to sleep with the lights on and the window closed.

Few days later, me and my older sister were home alone since our parents went out for a party, we were watching TV and I heard the exact same screaming far away. I muted the TV and told my sister (who I had already told her about my experience at my aunt’s house) so we both listen carefully.

Then we heard the screaming but it wasn’t as far as I first heard it. My sister was so scared that she turned pale, but she wouldn’t admit it, she said "It was probably some drunk girl partying hard or something" But we both knew it wasn’t that. It was a painful long crying.

I heard it a few more times after that, and I’m not sure if it was the crying woman, still wandering next to the river, searching for her children, or some other spirit. There’s people in the neighborhood that say it was a banshee. Only one thing is for sure, it was scary as hell.