La Llorona ('the weeping woman') is the single most widely-distributed ghost tradition in the Spanish-speaking Americas, reported from California and Texas south through Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile. The core narrative — which pre-dates the Spanish conquest in its Nahua form (La Cihuacóatl) and has expanded through four centuries of colonial and post-colonial oral tradition — describes a woman in a long white dress who walks the riverbanks at night wailing for her drowned children. Hearing her cry brings illness; seeing her face reportedly causes death. She is said to drown children she mistakes for her own.
The most common Mexican version identifies La Llorona as a young woman named María who, after her husband abandoned her for another, drowned their two sons in a river in jealous rage — then, realizing what she had done, threw herself in after them. Condemned to walk the world weeping until she recovers her lost children, she appears at the edges of rivers, irrigation canals, lakes, and ocean beaches. In Nahuatl-speaking regions, scholars including Fernando Horcasitas have identified the Aztec goddess Cihuacóatl ('serpent woman'), patroness of childbirth and a pre-Columbian omen of disaster, as the likely pre-Hispanic source — with Friar Bernardino de Sahagún's 1565 Florentine Codex recording the weeping-woman omen as one of the 'signs foretelling' the Spanish conquest.
La Llorona is not a quiet folkloric survival. Reports continue to be filed across Latin America and the American Southwest. The most heavily-reported sites include Xochimilco canals in Mexico City, the Rio Grande in Laredo (Texas), the San Antonio River, Lake Xolotlán in Nicaragua, the Chico River in Medellín, Colombia, and the Rimac River in Lima. Mexican and Central American grade schools actively use the Llorona tradition in behavioural instruction to children, warning them against approaching water alone at night. She is the most consequential pan-Latin-American ghost and one of the world's most continuously-reported apparitions.