BLASTS FROM THE PAST

No 67. La Phantasma

At the intersection of two dusty Texan Highways is nestled the quiet little town of Falfurrias. Hardly 5,000 souls live there and nobody knows how the town got its name or what it means. Every year, hundreds of Mexicans trek to Falfurrias. They go there to honour Don Pedro Jaramillo, the Mexican curandero, or faith healer, who died 110 years ago. Don Pedro is buried just outside the little town and his shrine is a place of devout pilgrimage. A little further upstate, but still in southern Texas, is the bustling city of San Antonio. Many strange tales linger there. San Antonio is a place of ghosts and of even darker things. Generations of its children have heard about the Donkey Lady, a horribly disfigured woman living somewhere in a shack in northwest San Antonio at the end of a curved road. She can’t speak, but she will scream. Her story was already old in the 1950s, its origin lost in time. 1 One night many years ago an even more frightening thing tried to claw its way into the homes of the Mexican residents of the West Side neighbourhood in San Antonio. Its coming, it was said at the time, was predicted by Don Pedro in a letter he wrote to warn the community. And when it was foiled, the apparition tried again the next year.

The night of Wednesday, 3 May 1905 was an ill-fated one for the Mexican quarter of San Antonio. There was not a door without a hastily painted sign of the cross on it. The Mexican residents of the West Side were in a state of fearful anticipation. The Phantasma was heading their way. It would visit all the Mexican families that same night. The unclean spirit had a terrible fate in store for them once it had entered their homes. The first crosses appeared before dark. “The cross was painted and chalked up on the doors and fences and gates in

Her face was hidden, her head wrapped in the folds of a black mantilla and “two sweet, tired children accompanied her”

the entire Mexican section of the city. The cross was designed in ashes and lime on the walks that led to the door from the streets. It was formed in some places of the holy palms that were reverently carried home from the churches on the Holy Palm Sunday.” 2

La Phantasma – the Apparition – as it was simply called, was a terrible sight to behold. The spectral figure was partly formless cloud, “without substance”. Below the waistline it was nothing more than vapour. From the waist up, she was a woman in black. Her face was hidden, her head tightly wrapped in the folds of a black mantilla. It was said that “two sweet, tired children” accompanied her. Her approach was stealthy and without warning. La Phantasma brought death and ill fortune. Some claimed that they had actually seen the ghost in several sections of the West Side that night. An excited Mexican woman told how she had observed La Phantasma drifting away when it beheld a white cross upon approaching a gateway. That not everybody had seen La Phantasma, the Mexicans argued, was because she was invisible to the people who did not have a protective cross on their doors. 3

A reporter tracked down the possible origin of the story: “It was difficult to find out how the theory of the ghostwoman became prevalent in the Mexican district, but at last one old Mexican woman on Concho Street was induced to tell how she had heard of the coming visitation. Some man

over farther west in the city had received a letter from Don Pedro – the Mexican healer – who used to be in San Antonio, and who has been regarded with superstitious awe ever since he was here. Don Pedro is known by the Mexicans as ‘Pedrito’; it is a term of endearment. Pedrito had written a letter to some Mexican ‘away over there’ – and the direction is indicated by a graceful wave of the hand. The letter said that the Phantasma would be in San Antonio last night – two days before El Cinco de Mayo – and that the ghost woman scattered death in her path. The tidings came from a friend of the Mexicans, and from one in whom they had faith.”

As another Mexican woman explained: “Was it not said in the letter from Pedrito that the Woman In Black would be here tonight? And has the Pedrito not always told the truth? The Phantasma is coming. The Woman In Black will this night pass the street.” 4

Whether or not Don Pedro had actually communicated a warning in a letter is not known, but he was a spiritual beacon and a source of relief for the Mexican communities. He died in 1907, two years after La Phantasma’s reign of terror. Today he is still known and revered as the faith healer of Los Olmos and many flock to his shrine every year. Don Pedro discovered his miraculous healing powers one day when he tried to treat his nose, broken in an accident. On the third day of his self-administered treatment a disembodied voice told him that God had granted him the power to heal. “Pedro Jaramillo believed in himself; he believed that God had selected him for a work, had bestowed a vocation on him. Surely he never wavered in that belief, or he could not have dedicated himself so completely to the work at which he laboured for a full 25 years after coming to Texas from Mexico… All who knew him are agreed that he was a good man, honest and sincere, one who did all that he could to relieve the suffering of his fellow men.” 5

We hear no more of the terror of La Phantasma, but the scare left a deep impression. In January the following year the Mexican section of San Antonio was again in “excitement and distress” over a second visitation of the wraith. “The ‘Phantasma’ is a woman in black. None but the Mexican residents across the San Pedro have seen her; but they have, and they say her existence is real. Most of their houses have crosses in many places, and the gates are almost all adorned with crosses marked rudely in chalk. For the ‘Phantasma’ is a horrible thing to have enter the house. Her coming brings death unless she be placated by presents. Last spring the ‘Phantasma’ visited the Mexican settlement of San Antonio. Notice of her coming reached the town a few days before she arrived. On the appointed date the woman, accompanied by a child, stopped in front of a Mexican home in Laredo Street. There was a cross on the door. She passed to the next house and entered, asking for supper. The request was denied and the next day the sick child in the house died. So confident are the Mexicans who have seen the woman in black that such an apparition has appeared that the city police department has accepted their story as true. But the police are not superstitious, and they are now looking for the woman in black – whom they think is not a phantom at all, but a designing person who works upon the credulity of the ignorant Mexicans.” 6

Reading the descriptions of La Phantasma, who kept company with one or two children, invites comparison with another wraithlike entity with similar traits. It is ‘La Llorona’, or the Weeping Woman, known for centuries throughout California, Texas, Arizona, Mexico and other parts of Latin America. La Llorona is forever searching for her two children, which she herself had drowned. “As is generally known, Señor, many bad things are met with by night in the streets of the City; but this Wailing Woman, La Llorona, is the very worst of them all… Seeing her walking quietly along the quiet street – at the times when she is not running, and shrieking for her lost children – she seems a respectable person, only odd-looking because of her white petticoat and the white reboso with which her head is covered, and anybody might speak to her. But whoever does speak to her, in that very same moment, dies!” 7 Collecting stories about her in Mexico City, early researcher Thomas Janvier noted over a century ago that stories of la Llorona have been told since the 16th century. Around 1585 Fray Bernardino de Sahagun admonished Mexican converts to Christianity: “Your ancestors also erred in the adoration of a demon whom they represented as a woman, and whom they gave the name Cioacoatl. She appeared clad as a lady of the palace [dressed in white]. She terrified, she frightened, and cried aloud at night.” 8 And before that, in 1550, the Weeping Woman was first heard in Mexico City, especially on moonlit nights, where a wailing figure dressed in white would vanish in a lake. 9

As to her origin, Janvier was convinced that La Llorona was “a direct survival from primitive times… a stray from Aztec mythology; an ancient powerful goddess living on – her power for evil lessened, but still potent – into modern times.” 10 Folklorist Betty Leddy too sees this connection with the ancient Aztec pantheon. Undoubtedly there was an early, pre-Conquest body of feminine spirits that “could have facilitated the growth of La Llorona legend and that may actually be part of it”, she states. 11

The majority of the tales feature La Llorona as a woman in white, but there are quite a few intriguing accounts from around the Austin, Texas, area where La Llorona appears in many different shapes and forms. Two men discovered this one night on their way to their favourite saloon when they noticed that “a very attractive woman was walking just ahead of them. They decided to follow her. The two followed for a long time, but couldn’t catch up with her. When it seemed that they were coming up even with the woman, she suddenly seemed to get about half a block ahead of them. Finally, my brother and his friend decided to turn back, but as a parting gesture they said, ‘Good-by, my dear!’ At the same time that the two said, ‘Good-by my dear!’ the attractive woman whom they had followed turned around. She had the face of a horse, her fingernails were shiny and tin-like, and she gave a long and piercing cry. It was La Llorona.” 12 Aside from descriptions of a woman with a horse’s head, others hold that “she is a woman dressed in black, having long hair, shiny tin-like fingernails and a skeleton’s face. A few believe that she is a vampire that sucks its victim’s blood. The majority insist that she is a woman dressed in white, with long black hair, long fingernails, and the face of a bat.” 13

In this pantheon where ancient Aztec gods have transformed into modern monstrosities, La Phantasma claims her rightful and unique place. Between stories of horribly disfigured donkey ladies living in cul-de-sacs, of horse-headed wraiths accosting drunken stalkers and of wailing women in white or black running through the night shrieking and lamenting and always in search of little ones, La Phantasma occupies a contrasting niche. She does not weep or wail, and she does not search for children although she will bring them certain death. Instead, she threads her way silently through the endless night with what La Llorona is perpetually, frantically searching for but will never get: the company of a few lost little souls.