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In this article:
- Like La Llorona of Mexico, La Tulevieja is cursed to roam along riverbanks in search of her lost, dead children.
- Unlike La Llorona, who was a scorned woman, La Tulevieja was a partier who abandoned her baby in order to hide the evidence of her extramarital affairs.
- In some versions, she kidnaps children (sometimes as revenge for the bratty children who mocked her when she was alive). In others, she devours lecherous or drunken men.
Panama is probably most well known in the West for the world-famous Panama Canal, a man-made waterway that has granted passage from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean to over one million vessels since it opened in 1914.
However, Panama is also home to a ton of stunning natural waterways that weave through the country’s rugged terrain. Costa Rica, Panama’s neighbor to the northwest, also boasts many beautiful rivers, streams, and lakes that are a ton of fun to explore.
But if you find yourself in either of these parts of the world and see a strange figure walking along the banks of those stunning rivers at night, you may be in danger of meeting La Tulevieja.
The first time that I heard about La Tulevieja was when the film Diablo Rojo PTY came out in 2019. This was the first-ever horror film produced in Panama and it features many of the legends that the people in the country, specifically those living in the sylvan province of Chiriqui, believe in.
One such legend featured in the film was that of La Tulevieja, who is portrayed in the movie as a 10-foot-tall monstrosity with wings and exposed breasts (one of which gets shot by a police officer).
Since then, I have been fascinated by the story of La Tulevieja outside of the cinematic realm. I began asking many of my Panamanian friends about it and it seems that there are many folks out there that swear the legends are true.
Like many other legends, the story of La Tulevieja was probably used to scare children into obeying certain rules. It may have been used to dissuade them from going off into the woods at night or from partying and promiscuity.
Comparisons to La Llorona
If you’re familiar with the Mexican legend of La Llorona (which you may be from the 2019 film The Curse of La Llorona), then you will immediately draw comparisons between that legend and the legend of La Tulevieja.
Essentially, La Llorona was a woman who had two children with an adulterous man. Catching the man in the midst of an affair, she went into a blind fit of rage and drowned her children. Thus, she was cursed to roam the rivers of Mexico and remain in purgatory until she found her children.
Many versions of the legend of Tulevieja are very similar to the story of La Llorona. La Tulevieja is also cursed to roam rivers in search for her lost or dead child. However, the reason that she’s cursed is often different.
Too Much Partying
In one version of the story, La Tulevieja was once a beautiful woman who always wore a tule hat and had a penchant for partying. One night, La Tulevieja had a one-night stand with a man she would never see again and, eventually, became pregnant.
Not wanting those in her village to find out about her extramarital sex, she fled to the woods and gave birth next to a river. Unwilling to bring the baby back into the village, she left it on her tule hat next to the river to starve to death.
Soon after, she began to regret her decision and decided to return to the river. When she arrived, the baby was gone and only her tule hat remained. So upset with herself, La Tulevieja committed suicide by flinging herself into the river.
La Tulevieja’s woes didn’t end there. As punishment for her transgression against the child and for living a sinful life, God would not let her soul rest.
Instead, she was cursed to wander the rivers, her breasts swollen and full of milk, her face stained with tears, and her cries of sorrow audible from miles away, until she finds her baby.
Believers in the myth fear that La Tulevieja could mistake their own children for hers and decide to kidnap them. To prevent this, Panamanian and Costa Rican children are told not to walk around rivers at night.
Punishing Playboys
In another version of the legend, La Tulevieja is not out to kidnap small children but to punish men who lead lecherous lifestyles. The backstory of La Tulevieja is pretty much the same in this story — but her motivation is very different.
In this version, La Tulevieja also has exposed breasts, which she uses to lure adulterous or drunken men. She invites the men to caress her bare breasts as they dance. What they don’t know is that there is a hidden anthill between them.
As La Tulevieja dances with the man, a group of leafcutter ants (also known as Sompopo ants) will come out of the anthill and anesthetize the man.
Only once the man is anesthetized will he see the Tulevieja’s true form: a hideous beast with razor-sharp claws, a hideous face full of holes, bat wings, and inverted legs like a bird of prey. She then grasps her victim with her claws and flies him to another part of the woods to devour him.
The Ngäbe-Buglé and Tepesa
In the tradition of the Ngäbe-Buglé, the largest of Panama’s indigenous groups, the woman is known as Tepesa.
The legend ties into the history of the Ngäbe-Buglé and takes place right around the time that the Spanish arrived in Panama. It also hints at the resentment that the Ngäbe-Buglé people felt towards the Spanish conquistadors at that time.
In this version of the story, Tepesa was a beautiful Ngäbe-Buglé woman who was impregnated by a Spaniard who’d fallen in love with her. Not wanting her tribe to know of her relations with a Spaniard, Tepesa drowned her newborn son in a river.
As punishment, God cursed her to walk the rivers, crying and searching for a son she will never find.
The legend also says that Tepesa can regain her original form during a full moon and bathe in the waters of the river, finally getting a moment’s peace from her torturous existence. However, at the slightest noise, she will turn back into a monster and continue her search.
The Poor Old Woman
In another version of the legend, La Tulevieja is the ghost of an old woman that’s out for revenge against bratty children.
As the story goes, she was once an old woman who would always wear a tule hat to cover her deformed face. Apparently, she had a cold gaze, always dressed in black, and was most often seen carrying firewood.
As she carried her firewood from place to place, the children who lived in her village would cruelly mock her deformities.
One day, one of the children who was mocking her stole her tule hat and threw it in a river. The woman chased after her hat, fell into the river, and drowned. As revenge for leading her to her death, the ghost of La Tulevieja roams around the rivers from village to village searching for children to devour. The moral of this version of the legend: be nice to your elders.
GOO JOB