Campfire Ghost Stories

by Jo-Anne Christensen

Stories Told by Firelight

The Weeping Woman

Long ago, there was a woman who was abandoned by her husband and left to raise three small children on her own. The family was poor and times were hard; often they were hungry and cold. The woman was lonely and longed for companionship. When certain man showed interest in courting her, she did all she could to attract him.

Unfortunatey, he was only interested in the woman. Since the three children were not his own, he did not particularly want them about, and he definitely balked at the expense of feeding so many mouths. The woman knew this and assumed it to be the problem when her suitor's attention began to wither.

If I am left alone with the children again, we will all four starve, she reasoned. But I have been given a chance to save myself. With this horrible, ill-conceived logic, she gathered her children and set out for the river.

It was a cold, rainy night and an icy wind howled around the huddled foursome. The children begged their mother to be allowed to return to the fireside, where it was warm and dry. She refused, saying that there was a bit of important business to attend to first.

The business was murder. The woman took her small children to the highest cliff that rose above the river and threw them, one by one, into the churning, cold water. When she was finished, she wept, but quickly consoled herself with the knowledge that she would at least keep her man, and that she could always have more children.

She soon discovered, however, that her lover's decreasing interest had less to do with the children than it did with her. As the weeks passed, he stayed away more often and complained more frequently about little things that the woman did. Then, one day, he simply did not come to see her. The woman had been abandoned by yet another man.

It was then that the woman truly felt regret for her actions. Day and night, she wept for her dead children. Often, she walked by the riverside while she mourned, torturing herself with thoughts of how their poor little bodies had been swept away by the current. One dark evening, in the midst of a violent thunderstorm, she came to a conclusion.

"I must find my babies, or I will never have peace!" she cried. Then, struggling against the wind and rain, the woman climbed to teh high cliff where she had killed her children. With one final, forlorn cry, she threw herself headlong into the raging river.

It should have been the end of her. But it was not.

Many people who lived near the river began to tell tales of a sorrowful figure, clad in a flowing, black dress, who skimmed smoothly over the rocky ground near their homes on stormy nights. It was terrible thing to hear her lament, they said. But there were others who claimed that there was something even more terrible abut her.

"She steals children," they said solemnly. And they told horrifying stories of little ones who had been playing by the water's edge when the griecing black spirit appraoched them. Once coaxed into her spectral arms, those youngsters had been forever lost to their own loving parents. If their lifeless bodies ever were found, it was in the weed-choked water near the riverbank, where the wraith ahd discarded them.

It had been more than a hundred years now. Still, this phantom has found no peace, for she has yet to find her murdered children. She may be doomed to search forever, which is why everyone must beware. For when her own children are not in sight, it seems that any child will do. The woman once comforted herself with the thought that she could always have more children, now it seems she means to have yours.

So, don't let your little sons and daughters wander near the water, and warn them of the dangers that lurk in the wildest, stormy nights. Keep your children indoors, close and safe, and teach them to never appraoch a certain pitiful figure who cries woefully into the wind. If you fail to do this, they may someday vanish within the black embrace of the eternally weeping woman.