When I was little, my grandma used to tell me this story called, “The Crying Lady.”  

It’s a Hispanic story about this beautiful woman named Maria.  She was beautiful, the prettiest woman ever alive, and she was very conceited and full of herself.  She wouldn’t give anyone the time of day, she wanted the most handsome man in the world.  She then met a man that was just as beautiful as she was, a guy that can play guitar, a guy that can sing.  But not really knowing him, just knowing that he was a good looking man, she ended up marrying him.  They were happy for a few years, had a couple of boys, and he then returned to his old ways: he would party, not come home for months at a time.  One day on her way home, she caught her husband with another woman.  She was so angry and hurt that she drowned her sons in a nearby river.  She regretted it right away, and tried to save her sons but it was too late.  She died of grief on the river bed, and is still said to haunt Mexico.  And so goes the story of Maria the Crying Lady.
Just because you are beautiful, doesn’t mean you are beautiful on the inside.  You must be humble, and nice to people even if they aren’t beautiful on the outside, because it is the inside that counts.  I just remember growing up she would constantly tell me this story.

Francine thinks of this story as a lesson of character, not a ghost story.  However, she told me that this story isn’t generally seen as a “moral story,” but is instead a very well-known ghost story in Mexico.  But her grandma, who wanted to instill good morals in her, told her the story stressing the character flaw in Maria.  She told me that, even though her grandma told her this story quite frequently as a child, her grandmother would sometimes even leave out the part of Maria still haunting Mexico as a grieving ghost, because she didn’t Francine to focus on the ghost aspect of it.  The message really resonated with Francine, as a pretty Mexican woman herself, and plans on telling her children the story once they are old enough to understand.

This is not an uncommon theme in stories.  When a person is so wrapped up in themselves that they somehow end up being bitten in the butt later on (e.g. the story of Narcissus). But I can really appreciate the fact that Francine’s grandmother wanted the emphasis of the story not to be the superstitious element, but the moral element.  Especially in regards to children, ghost/superstitious stories can stick with a person for their whole lives, as I saw with many of my other informants.  Maybe telling more superstitious stories at an older age would not have such an effect, because children are very, very impressionable at a young age.  I mean this isn’t the most horrible/gruesome ghost story around, and the moral component is very evident, but I still think it was smart of the grandma to play that part down.

When I was little, all of the stories I was told tended to be very supernatural oriented, as the culture in the Philippines tends to be very superstitious.  There were a lot of ghosts, exorcisms, and other spooky stuff.  So I remember a story that my dad, grandpa, used to tell me, which was an account of something he actually saw when he was a teenager.  I didn’t know this was even a folktale until much later in life. 

He said he was walking along the road with his friend at night, it was dark, and he felt like there was somebody behind him.  So he looked behind him, and he said it was a lady with dark hair, long dark hair, wearing all white.   She was wearing a long white dress, and he thought she was real. He yelled to her, and he said she was just kind of floating and coming towards him, so he and his friends started to run.  And I remember he told me that story when I was a little girl, so I went into the closet with my friends and I swore if we just sat there and waited we would see the lady in the white dress. 

Then I started looking at Filipino folklore stories – I even bought you and your brother a book, but you found it to be very boring – and I came upon a story called “The White Lady”  and it is a very popular folklore ghost story that the Filipinos tell.  It is about a Caucasian-European descent female  that had been killed on the side of the road by a taxi driver.  And she appears as this ghost in a long white dress with long dark hair.  However, she is sighted all over the Philippines, and continues to be seen by many Filipinos, whether it’s in the mountains, on the road, by the beach, so I don’t know.  Apparently grandpa saw the white lady in the white dress.

I remember that because ever since grandpa told me that story, I’ve been afraid of walking alone by myself in the dark.  So I always sleep with a small night light or a candle or something whenever Dad is gone and I have to sleep by myself.  When people tend to Westernize, or come to America, they don’t seem to talk about the ghosts anymore.  And when I was little, I remember seeing voodoo dolls.  I didn’t know what they were then, I didn’t figure it out until I was much older.  Witch doctors were huge as well.  So superstition huge in the islands.  But once they come to America the superstition seems to evaporate – which is a good thing.

Like I said in one of the earlier posts (“The Crying Lady – Mexico”), superstitious/ghost stories resonate with children of young ages.  As seen by my mother, the effect of this story has stayed with her: she is still afraid to be alone in the dark.  I didn’t even know that.  But according to my mother, these Filipino superstitions seem to evaporate as the later generations come to America.  She told me that she used to be much more afraid when she was actually in the Philippines, but now that she lives in America, she feels like the stories only apply to those living in the Philippines. But her fear didn’t completely go away.   I myself am SUCH a baby when it comes to scary stories, so if I lived in the Philippines I would probably sleep with the lights on every day.  That’s probably why my parents never told us scary stories, showed us scary movies, and discouraged me and my brother from sharing scary stories with each other.  And it’s not like we really lived by anywhere “haunted,” because I feel like superstitious/ghost stories in the United States if very dependent on location, while stories in the Philippines, such as this one, transcend throughout the whole country.