Hey guys! First time poster, long time lurker, I know this is an international community and there are several Latinos on here. Growing up I was exposed to a lot of myths, superstitions, and weird experiences, I know we share a lot of similar myths and urban legends, and find it interesting that so many different countries with different cultures share the same stories. I’m from Panamá, and here are some of my stories/myths/ experiences.
La lechuza - a white owl that signals death. Usually seen when someone has passed or is closed to passing, as a young boy back in the mid 90s I grew up in a rural part of Panamá with my grandmother and my mother, we had a family that lived across the street from us, consisting of a couple their children and the grandparents. After a long battle with deteriorating health, the elderly gentleman was on his last breaths, he was staying at the house with the family and was in a room surrounded by his loved ones.
Around 8pm one night I heard what sounded like no animal I’ve ever heard before, it was a mix between a screech and a howl, above our house, followed by the loud scream of the mother and grandmother as I can only assume the gentleman passed away. My grandmother informed at the time, that the scream was la lechuza, claiming the old mans soul and taking him to his next life.
Brujas- witches. The flying on a broom kind, except less cartoonish and more terrifying. As any Latino will tell you, our abuelas don’t take no shit, this goes for mine with both her children, and her neighbors. My grandma in all her feisty glory got into an argument with another neighbor about some property, we had a pretty large area, maybe two acres of land, up a hill behind the house there was a tree where I would catch cicadas as a kid, further down that hill on the other side there was a creek, and then up the hill once more was the main freeway in and out of town. Her property stretched to the creek, one of our neighbors started planting crops between the tree and the creek on a small clearing, long story short, she threw a brick at the guy and punched him the face (she’s a little bad ass). Well this guy swore he was gonna get a bruja to put a curse on us, at the time I thought it was silly, but my grandmother is very superstitious and took the threat seriously. She warded the house with sage, put up rosaries, crosses, and even that weird egg in a jar of water thing. One night, I kid you not, I heard something crash into our roof, we had a tin roof so you could hear birds walking on it, or the rain on cool nights which was amazingly relaxing. Well this was one heavy ass bird, it was waking slowly and making long scratching sounds on the tin slats, my grandma came into our room, her face turned white, told me to hold her hand along with my mother and pray with her. We did, I could feel immense pressure on my chest as we recited our Santa Maria’s, it became hard to breathe with each verse, and then all of of the sudden it felt as if my ears where gonna explode. Then it stopped, and we heard whatever was on the roof, run and jump and catch the wind. The next morning we found a few of our chickens and some of our geese dead, their necks sliced open and thrown through our property, the jar of eggs was black and the eggs where hard. It was terrifying, my grandmother insisted it was a bruja, we never heard from the neighbor again, and suspiciously his crops stopped showing up on our property.
Duendes - gnomes/fairies - legend is they prey on children and taken them from their homes in the dead of night. I had friend that lived a few houses down the street from my grandmothers, she was my best friend and sorta kindergarten “girlfriend”, it was silly Kids stuff, innocent and playful, we used to hold hands and go swimming by the creek together, there was a corner store about half mile from my house and her house was on the way, I used to walk to the store with some change that my mother or grandmother would give me and buy a soda or some paletas for her and I. One day I went to knock on her door, and her mother told me she could not play with me anymore because the duendes where after her and she wasn’t allowed to leave the house. I was heartbroken I ran home and told my grandmother, she walked over to my friends house and talked to her mother. Apparently my friend was heard talking to someone in the middle of the night, weird things started disappearing from the house, spoons, glasses, her underwear, her shoes, none of it made sense, their dog refused to go into the girls bedroom, and she even started acting weird, she would refuse to shower, or clean herself up after using the toilet. All of this behavior was completely out of the norm for her, and it all happened within the span of a week, I never got to play with that friend again since I ended up moving with my aunt and mother to the city, but my grandmother swore up and down that duendes almost got her.
La mujer en blanco - the lady in white - this one happened to my late uncle, drinking and driving was not frowned upon back in those days nor as enforced as it was here in the states. One drunken night, my uncle was driving home from the bar, there are several wooded areas around where the old u.s. bases are, Ancon being one of them. As he drive through the dead of the night he swore he saw a lady standing on the side of the road back towards him, white dress and a faint glow about her, he tried to slow down for her, but though better of it and just drove past her. As he looked in his rear view mirror she was gone, about 30 seconds later his light flickered and he heard his name whispered in his ear, he looked back in the mirror and there she was, sitting there, head completely turned 180 degrees from the rest of her body laughing maniacally. He served and almost ran into a tree, he managed to stop his SUV shy of a deep embankment that led into a river. He never again drove that road or drank outside of his house.
That’s it for now! I have other legends that I grew up with both in Latin America and also my time spent in Hawaii! Hope you guys enjoyed the reading, sorry for the errors, I’m on my phone.
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