the Slavic tradition, she’d be the dangerous old woman of the woods, Baba Yaga — and so on.

La Llorona belongs to the category of tales that the cantadoras y cuentistas in our family call temblón, shiver stories. These overtly entertain, but are meant to cause listeners to experience a shiver of awareness that

Ghosts are liminal (interstitial) creatures. They exist in the netherworld between life and death, and they challenge the idea that there is a clear separation of the two. The dread evoked by such beings can be profoundly disturbing. Surprisingly, parapsycholo-gists have largely neglected this, but folklorists have drawn attention to it.