La Sayona

La Sayona is a Venezuelan legend of a woman's spirit who appears to unfaithful men. A Caracas writer in 1882 reported that one set of appearances had been staged with stilts and a skull.

Wikipedia describes La Sayona as a Venezuelan legend of a vengeful female spirit who shows herself only to men having affairs outside marriage. It says her name comes from what she wears, a long white dress like a medieval undergarment. The Caracas site Noticias24 calls her one of the country's most famous legends, a woman no man would want to meet, alone or in company, who usually appears to men who cheat on their partners and go out partying. Ana Cecilia Valdez, writing on the peasants of Barinas in 1992, links her with another wandering soul who cries aloud for the children she killed, and says the Sayona pursues men who stay out late and chase women.

The oldest source cited is an essay dated Caracas, November 1882, printed in Tradiciones populares, a collection compiled by Teófilo Rodríguez in 1885. After retelling a run of appearances, its writer adds, at the risk of annoying the credulous, that people who knew some of those involved had told them how that sayona was made: a pair of stilts, a skull with a lit tallow candle fixed inside it, two shin bones from a corpse, and a few metres of dark cloth. The claim is the essayist's, about those particular scenes.

A Colombian telling from the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango gives her a different beginning. A very beautiful girl named Sarona liked to help the priest with the housework of the parish house. One day she finished cleaning the sacristy and the church too soon, and with nothing left to do she fixed her eyes on the priest's vestments hanging on a rack. A wicked idea came to her, and she decided to play a trick on the priest.