Ah, October.  I do love you so, with your turning leaves and your crisp air and your multitude of horror stories.

Please be thinking about your favorite stories because I’ll need ya’lls help at the end.

I will admit that my dirty little secret is that if I’m going to watch a movie at all, I absolutely love horror movies.  The more ridiculous, campier, badly acted and filmed the better.  But if they take themselves seriously and then don’t follow through, well, that just pisses me off.  Like The Ring, I seriously hated that movie. It wanted to big and bad but really it was just a giant commentary on why follow-through of every idea you start is so important because otherwise continuity gets wacked and things start not making sense and pretty soon you have The Ring.  I’m big Bruce Campbell fan and the Evil Dead movies are close to my heart.  But my absolute favorite and the absolute scariest is the old black and white The Haunting of Hill House.

And I love horror novels too.  Even more than the movies.  Especially those involving the supernatural.  When I was a kid we had those Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown books and I just poured over those things.  Especially anything about ghosts.  I remember being especially freaked out by the ghost ship Mary Celeste which has a relatively reasonable explanation but as a child I didn’t know it and the idea of an entire ship full of people just *poof* well, that freaked the heck out of me.

But the reality is that anything but reality has a difficult time scaring me.  Movies and books just don’t seem to have what it takes.  But if you walk up behind me while I’m typing, well, that will scare the holy living crap out of me.  And I don’t mean those who are part ninja.  I mean herds of elephants on the stampede could come up behind me and for some reason I just don’t notice until people touch or speak to me and then, like as not, I will literally scream.  But it’s almost impossible to scare me in a movie.

I remember reading Something Wicked This Way Comes when I was something like 14 or 15.  I checked it out from the school library.  That book has the distinction of being the single most frightening thing I’ve ever read.  I was so freaked out I didn’t go to another carnival again until my kids were old enough to start complaining.  And to tell you the truth, I don’t remember much of what that book was about except the carousel.  That I remember.   But I do recall how it made me feel.  And I like that feeling.

I also like a good scary folk tale or ghost story too.  I live in New Mexico and I am half Mexican so when my family felt like it they would spread a little Mexican folk tale around.  In New Mexico it isn’t unusual for flash floods to come down off the mountains because when it rains the ground is too dry to absorb the water.  Instead it just floats on top of the soil and builds up until the floods come.  So to avoid that, Albuquerque has built an entire system of arroyos to redivert the flood waters.  Arroyos, for those who don’t know, are deep cement ditches that will fill very quickly with water in the event of a flood.  People drown in them all time.  They aren’t careful and they walk in them even though everyone knows that they could be bone dry one minute and a raging flood the next.

When I was a child and we’d hear about someone who drowned in an arroyo usually, though sometimes other places, we’d hear the whispers of La Llorona in the hallways.  Someone would inevitably say they’d been taken by La Llorona.  La Llorona, the weeping woman or the crying woman, is a tale prevalent in almost all Latin cultures.

Though the origin story varies from person to person the basic idea remains the same.  A woman either kills her children for a man or a man kills her children against her will.  She dies from her grief and spends her time wandering through the night crying for her children, “Mis ninos, mis ninos!” (My children, my children!)  And if she catches children out alone she’ll steal them as her own and drag them down into the water with her, drowning them.

The story is so pervasive in these cultures that there are songs and movies and multiple stories using La Llorona as a theme.  One folk song begins, “Don’t go down to the river child, don’t go there alone.  For the sobbing woman, wet and wild, might claim you for her own.”  The song goes on from there, progressively dark and slightly demented.  I couldn’t find a specific video of that song but there’s this one that is a traditional song for La Llorona.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbmqwC1mmaA it’s live so the sound is a little wonky at first and may need adjusted.

What I’d like to know is your favorite scary movie or book, but more so what I’d like to do is hear your scary cultural folk tales.  I’d like to write about several this October.  So leave me some stories in the comments, just the names should be okay and I can look them up myself.  And then we’ll feature them on Amber’s scary blog   I’d love to hear how your families and their families and those before them keep people in line with scary stories.

AMBER