Puente La Llorosa

In the hill town of Aibonito, in Puerto Rico's central tobacco country, a small bridge in barrio Asomante carries a name that is itself a legend: the Bridge of the Weeping Woman. The fullest telling comes from local compilations such as Dulce Maria Fuentes's Arcoiris de leyendas. A young domestic worker named Blasinia Albey — spellings vary across retellings — walked miles between her parents' house and her town job carrying her infant son. One rain-swollen evening she sat to rest on the bridge wall and set the baby beside her; he slipped into the flooded current and was carried away. Mad with grief, she returned to the bridge every night at midnight to weep for him until she herself died.

The story has a second act. Her lover Lorenzano, long gone from the barrio, returned to find the whole family dead. Crossing the bridge at night he heard an infant crying beneath it, climbed down, and softened a piece of bread for the child — until the baby looked up at him with an enormous mouth full of fangs. In a popular variant the rescuer is a drunk passing at midnight. Either way, the weeping infant under the bridge is no child at all.