A woman in a white gown who walks waterways at night, weeping for the children she drowned — in grief, in madness, or in vengeance, depending on the telling — and condemned to search for them until the end of the world. She is the Americas' most widespread ghost, known from Chihuahua to Buenos Aires, and her story has kept children away from canals for four centuries.
The acoustic signature is the inverse-distance motif the archive has now documented on three continents: when her cry sounds distant, she is close; when it sounds close, she is far. Witnesses describe the wail — '¡Ay, mis hijos!' — as arriving from every direction at once along the water.
She is dangerous specifically to children out after dark near water, whom she is said to mistake for her own. Adults report paralysis, dread, and cold — and a face, under the veil, that is either a void or their own.