La Sayona

La Sayona

Region of origin: Venezuela

A vengeful spirit, la Sayona is said to attack men who have been or are considering being unfaithful to their wives. Her story has numerous variations, but many state that she was told her husband had been cheating on her with her own mother (in most versions, this was a lie told by another man trying to break up the marriage), and in a blinding rage she set her house on fire with the husband and their child sleeping inside before going after the mother with a machete. As the mother died, she cursed the woman to forever atone as a guardian of women whose husbands committed or were tempted by adultery. She would appear on the side of the road or near the edges of forests to the men who had been marked and seduce them, leading them away before revealing animal-like or skeletal features and either violently dismembering their genitals or afflicting them with telltale rashes and boils, or in some cases the men were simply never seen again. She is considered a more violent counterpart to la Llorona, the weeping woman.