This Mythology Monday will be highlighting something different. I did a Mythology Monday on Patheos on Joaquin Arrechavala a Nicaraguan ghost, so for the Mythology Monday on here, I wanted to share some videos made by Latin Americans throughout Latin America which highlight local monsters, myths, tales, and legends. There have been efforts throughout Latin America to promote interest in their old monsters, and they are worth discussing.
“When night falls, don’t walk alone, because in the darkness it’ll be waiting… the Cadejo!” “The night is bad for drunkards!” Some good advice that was evidently ignored by the people in this trailer.
The Cadejo is a spooky spirit dog found in Central American stories. It’s known to appear generally dog-like, with goat hooves and occasionally blazing eyes. There are two Cadejos, and they are typically white and black, and usually (but not always) the white Cadejo is good, and the black Cadejo is bad. This trailer seems to focus on the Cadejo as a bringer of darkness and death to those who disobey good advice.
A little warrior. A tiger. A cute story about an unlikely friendship, that despite the title “Stories so you don’t sleep”, this story ends well. The Mapuche are an Indigenous culture in Chile and Argentina. This story is easy enough to understand, even without an in-depth understanding of Spanish.
Urban Legends from Argentina. 6: The Devil Dog (In Spanish it’s called something else, something along the lines of “the family dog”). A man makes a deal, for the sake of his business. It involves a dog. And peasants. I think that this could easily be understood, but the dude’s business flourished supposedly because the dog’s owner, would feed the dog people. 5: This is (according to the video) a super famous urban legend, and that’s why it’s ranked at 5, because it virtually isn’t scary. It’s a gigantic rat. Two dudes get a rat, think it’s a dog (which has been injured), send it to a vet, and the vet is like “This… is a rat”. 4: (Wow a creepy-pasta. This is about a photo) There’s a ghost in the background of the photo. But when the photo was taken… there was no one in the background. Just the two people at the front of the picture. Oh and some people think it’s not a ghost, but a spooky demon. 3: The woman of white (or the woman in white). Two versions of this story exist according to the narrator of the video, in the first the girl was somebody’s girlfriend, and her boo-thing died on the road. She lures people so that they die in the same way. In the other version a girl died on the road, and then another girl exactly a year later, and so on and so forth. Oh, and sometimes a ghost bothers taxi-drivers. 2: (The last two are related to drivers or roads of some sort) The Driver’s Accident. A driver is nearly done with his work for the day, when for a few seconds he saw a lady in front of his vehicle. He couldn’t stop in time and ran into her. He decides to try to hide the body because he figured he’d be blamed for the accident. Fast-forward and he feels a chill. He sees in his mirror, the lady he slammed into, in his backseat. 1: (This one is read in its entirety, and it is according to the narrator, disturbing and perturbing) A driver is on the road, and sees a young man. He sees a would-be hitchhiker. He at first slows down to pick up the young man, but decides against it (reasoning that he might be a victim of a crime if he decides to help, or that the person is abusing his generosity). He gets closer to the hitchhiker(s) and then proceeds to slam on the accelerator, zooming away. The would-be hitchhiker(s) looks annoyed. He drives on, until his gas-tank is nearly empty and then stops at a gas-station, to fill it up. At the gas-station (service station) he gets a terrifying surprise (That I can’t really understand/translate accurately).
If you’re interested in more of these here’s another gas station one. It’s about serial killers, gas stations, and is similar too a common urban legend in English (which was vaguely referenced/is somewhat similar to a story told in Scream Queens episode 9 “Ghost Stories”) featuring the “Killer In The Backseat”.
I know this was different, but it’s cool to highlight efforts by Latin Americans to highlight our own legends, myths, and spooky stories. I hope you enjoyed this, because I know I did.
Interesting! Though I must say that I hate when videos are narrated by text reading programs. Do their authors think they have horrible voices, or what? Personally, I’d rather hear an annoying human voice over a machine monotone. Anyway, let me tell you that there’s an actual English name for The Devil Dog, and it’s similar to the Spanish one: a familiar, specifically an evil one (look at the “witch trials” section of the Wikipedia article.)
Oh, I forgot: coincidentally I recently bought two books of Argentinean urban legends, part of a collection. Would you like me to post the most interesting ones I can find here?
Totally! I’d love to read them! 🙂
Luciano, I’ve started reading the first book and I can’t help but recommend it to you. As in your articles, each urban legend is introduced in the form of a short story, and then the authors detail how they went about interviewing people in order to gather the details of the legend. Here’s the Amazon link to the revised version I’m reading, and another one to the original.
A couple of legends, just to give you a taste:
1) La Chacarita is Argentina’s national cemetery, the largest in the country. It is said that a mysterious old taxi sometimes wanders around, picking up passengers exclusively at the cemetery’s gate. Those who enter the taxi usually take too long to notice the cadaveric look of its driver, and by that time it’s already too late: they are dropped off once again at the entrance of the cemetery, this time as one of its ghostly denizens. An old man claimed to have escaped the taxi thanks to the intervention of his father’s ghost, who alerted him of the danger in the form of a young man on a bike. The witness had scars on his face, which he claimed to have been caused by his fall from the vehicle.
2) The metro system of Buenos Aires is very old. There’s a section of the tracks in between two small stations (they exist, the book gives the exact names but I don’t have it on hand right now) in which the lights of the wagons go off. During those few seconds, some people have claimed to experience an upsetting vision: an old, unfinished metro station in which the ghosts of two workers sit, looking at the passengers with an extremely sad look on their faces. Apparently, near the beginning of the 20th century the plan was to build a large central station instead of two small ones, but the plan was discarded when the terrain proved to be unstable and two workers were killed in an accident, the same workers that now haunt the place.