Legends, Ghosts and Hauntings
by Phaedra Greenwood
La Muerte © Max Roybal.
Photo by Phaedra Greenwood
The Land of Enchantment is rich with folklore, legends and ghost stories told by three different cultures. Anywhere you go, the locals will recount their best ghost stories to scare the wits out of you. One of the oldest stories in the Southwest, which has survived in Spanish folklore for over four centuries, is the legend of La Llorona, the weeping woman.
The version most New Mexicans are familiar with comes from Mexico and Bolivia. The legend speaks of a love affair between a peasant girl and a rich man who refuses to marry her. She gives birth to two of his children and later murders them in despair, or for revenge, or to keep them away from their father. In some versions she uses a hatchet, dagger or axe, while in others she drowns them in a nearby stream. After her death she haunts the waterways near the villages and towns, searching for her lost children.
According to Ray John de Aragon in his book, The Legend of La Llorona, New Mexicans sometimes claimed the tragic lady as one of their own, a girl they knew personally. In retelling the story, they might even say that they had been to her trial.
“It was late at night and I walked out behind my house looking up at a full moon. I heard a strange cry and as I got closer and closer to the ditch, it sounded like the cry of a demented woman. Then I heard a weird cat noise. They say when a cat makes that noise, it’s a sign somebody is going to die.”
De Aragon told the Albuquerque Journal of his encounter with La Llorona. “It was late at night and I walked out behind my house looking up at a full moon. I heard a strange cry and as I got closer and closer to the ditch, it sounded like the cry of a demented woman. Then I heard a weird cat noise,” he said. “They say when a cat makes that noise, it’s a sign somebody is going to die. Sure enough, my grandfather died the next day and another time when I heard another cat cry, my uncle died.”
Indian legends from New Mexico, Texas, Arizona and California tell of another ghostly lady who walks the land, known as the Blue Lady. According to Living Legends of Santa Fe County by Alice Bullock, the Blue Lady walked alone into Indian camps, wearing the habit and veil of a nun, to heal the sick and teach Christianity. She never stayed for more than a few hours, did not eat food or drink water and told the natives that teachers would follow to tell them more about the Christian God, the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Records from the 1600s show that mission priests who had no contact with each other reported that Indians came to the missions to be baptized because the Blue Lady had sent them.
Fray Benevides, the first custodio, or guardian, of the New Mexico missions, learned of the Blue Lady in 1631 on returning to Spain.
He visited a beautiful young nun there by the name of Maria de Jesús (Maria de Agreda) in the province of Soria. She told him of her “flights” to New Mexico where she had spoken with the Indians in their own language. She described baptisms and details of New Mexico that only Fray Benevides knew, saying she was present and the Indians could see her but the Europeans could not.
Haunted houses and public buildings are also common in New Mexico. In Mysteries & Miracles of New Mexico, author Jack Kutz tells of a rectory in La Villa Real de Santa Cruz, across the Rio Grande from Española. In 1892 the pastor, Father Halteman, placed his housekeeper, Doña Teresa, in charge of the rectory and rode off to see the bishop in Santa Fe.
As the women described the click-clacking sound, his eyes opened wide. “So that’s why they keep coming back!” he exclaimed. “Every time I leave town, they sneak back in there to shoot pool,” he said.
Doña Teresa had been warned by the townspeople that the rectory was haunted. One of the early pastors had met with violent death at the hands of marauding Indians. His replacement, Fray Juan, had died in a bizarre accident when he fell under the wheels of a train. After his death, lights were seen passing the upper windows of the rectory at night. Sometimes the back door was found wide open the next morning.
Just as Doña Teresa was dozing off in a bedroom on the first floor, she heard footsteps ascending the staircase. The door of the drawing room opened and closed. Too frightened to go see what it was, she listened to the floorboards creak above her head until she fell asleep.
In the morning, she told Doña Elenita, a visiting schoolteacher, who said she had heard the same sounds. They checked the outside doors. They were all still locked. The second evening the two women waited together in Doña Teresa’s room. Just as before, footsteps ascended the stairs. Listening intently, they determined that it was two people. The drawing room door opened and closed and the floorboards creaked. They seemed to be circling a certain spot on the floor. When the footsteps halted, they heard a soft click-clacking noise but couldn’t imagine what it was.
When Father Halteman returned and they told him about the experience, he replied he had heard these stories before. As the women described the click-clacking sound, Halteman’s eyes opened wide. “So that’s why they keep coming back!” he exclaimed. He took the women upstairs to the old parlor and showed them its principal attraction: a billiard table. “Every time I leave town, they sneak back in there to shoot pool,” he said.
Around midnight the entire family heard slow, heavy footsteps come out of the professor’s room and walk down the stairs. At the breakfast table Grandmother Nelly questioned the family around the table but they each denied having gotten up in the middle of the night. “It wasn’t me!” Old John said. He rose from his chair and fled, leaving an untouched plate of ham and eggs. That was the last time he ever stayed overnight at the Palace Hotel.
Long-time Taos resident Glenda Gloss recalls her childhood in the haunted Palace Hotel in Cerrillos where she lived with her mother’s family while her father was overseas. The hotel was built in 1840 as a stage depot but by the 1890s Cerrillos was a booming mining town. The Palace Hotel grew to three stories and an L-wing was added. Teddy Roosevelt used it as headquarters while he drilled his Roughriders. Lew Wallace wrote several chapters of Ben Hur within its walls and Thomas Edison boarded in one of the 32 rooms while trying to discover a method of extracting gold from the soil by electromagnetism. The floor of one bedroom was stained with the blood of Black Jack Ketchum. In a north room on the third floor, the moody and temperamental Professor Gottschalk had hanged himself.
By 1945 Cerrillos was a ghost town. Gloss’ grandmother, Nelly Trigg, bought the Palace Hotel for only $1000. Gloss’s mother, Maggie Day Trigg, wrote in Cerrillos Adventure at the Bar TH Ranch, the hotel was known for its many strange and unaccountable happenings.
While Gloss’ mother was alone in the house oiling the floor in one of the bedrooms, an eerie cold invaded the room, followed by a tremendous crash from the third floor. Maggie Trigg shrieked and ran outside to stand in the falling snow, trying to work up the courage to go back inside. When she returned to investigate, she discovered something very strange: where she and her brother Henry had stacked four 2x4s behind a door, “One of those 2x4s was smack dab in the middle of the room,” Gloss’ mother wrote.
Every evening after dinner the family and guests retired to what was called “the death room” where they regaled new guests with ghost stories until bedtime. One of the guests was Old John, a little Hungarian tailor who came by twice a year to see if they had any sewing or mending to be done. They put him to bed in Professor Gottschalk’s room. Around midnight the entire family heard slow, heavy footsteps come out of the professor’s room and walk down the stairs. At the breakfast table Grandmother Nelly questioned the family around the table but they each denied having gotten up in the middle of the night. “It wasn’t me!” Old John said. He rose from his chair and fled, leaving an untouched plate of ham and eggs. That was the last time he ever stayed overnight at the Palace Hotel.
Larry Torres exchanges ghosts stories with Taos High School math teacher Nikki McCarty. Torres, a foreign language teacher, says he’s seen lights come on and a little boy in the school’s halls late at night.“Suddenly a little boy about nine came running around the corner, laughing for all he was worth. He was barefoot, wearing bib overalls. He jumped up and disappeared into thin air.”
Photo by Phaedra Greenwood
Some people seem more sensitive to spirits than others. Larry Torres, a storyteller and foreign language teacher at Taos High School for 17 years says, “I think as children we can see into the spirit world. Many of us are attuned to the psychic world until we’re taught that we can’t see these things.”
He told a story about a personal experience at Taos High School about seven years ago. Sometimes, after putting on variety shows for the parents, he stayed late to clean up and might even sleep over on a cot he kept in a closet. “I was the only one in the building in the middle of the night,” he says. “Two things would frighten me. Around nine at night and sometimes as late as midnight, a light came on in the classroom across the hall.” He would go turn it off but after he’d settled down again, the light would come back on. Two teachers had died in that room of massive heart attacks, he recalls.
The second incident was even more inexplicable. One night, while cleaning up after his students, he was vacuuming the hall, he says. “Suddenly a little boy about nine came running around the corner, laughing for all he was worth. He was barefoot, wearing bib overalls,” Torres says. “He jumped up and disappeared into thin air. I saw him twice.” When Torres mentioned the apparition to the janitors, they had seen the boy, too, but would not report such a thing because they were afraid of losing their jobs. “They would think that we had been drinking,” one of them said.
Torres says, “I’m not sure if the boy died there at that time or before the high school was built. Seeing spirits can be unnerving. I usually pray for whatever happened there.”
He pauses and looks out the window into the courtyard. “Do I believe in a world of the spirit beyond our immediate perception? I do.”
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