La Llorona, the Weeping Woman

The most famous legend in Mexico and much of Latin America. La Llorona is the ghost of a woman who drowned her own children in a river in a fit of grief or jealousy and now wanders the waterways at night, weeping and crying “¡Ay, mis hijos!” (Oh, my children!), and it is said she takes any child she finds out after dark. Some trace her to the canals of Xochimilco and the lakes the Aztec city stood on. She is told to children across the whole country and beyond, a piece of living folklore centuries deep. Told as exactly that.