El Cadejo

El Cadejo is a spectral dog of Central American and Chiapas folklore that appears to people out late at night, to frighten them, keep them company or do them harm.

The Real Academia Española's dictionary records cadejo as a word used in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua for a fantastic animal of popular mythology, said to appear to certain people to scare them or carry them away. The scholar Donghoon Lee, in an article in Sincronía on Miguel Ángel Asturias's Leyenda del Cadejo, calls it a legendary animal known across rural Central America and in its towns and cities too, a mythical dog that goes with, or hurts, those who roam late at night.

In Chiapas, El Universal reported in 2020, Zoque families waiting for the return of the faithful departed tell of the Cadejo as a hellish dog. It meets people out late on country roads and in dark corners of the city. The paper describes a huge black dog with flaming eyes that drives people off, squares up to street dogs and tumbles them over, then vanishes.

Spanish-language Wikipedia says the word cadejo comes from Spanish, while the creature's roots lie mostly in Maya mythology and in the shamanic traditions of the Nahua peoples of Mesoamerica. Those traditions, it says, tell of shamans and nahuales who take animal form to carry out religious and funeral duties, in rituals using jade, animal skins, feathers and masks. It adds that among Mesoamerican peoples the dog was the companion of the dead on their journey.