“I’m thirsty” my mother said, “go down to the kitchen and get me a glass of water.”

I didn’t like the idea, in fact it scared the shit out of me, the kitchen was dark and had huge windows which framed even darker, unknown regions of the night. I was seven years old, our kitchen, a lovely place during the day, turned into a pit of hell at night for me, complete with lurking monsters, murderers, La Sayona, La Llorona and other terrible folkloric creatures that my mother had sadistically and indelibly cemented into my young, impressionable brain.

“I’m scared,” I said, I don’t want to go down to the kitchen.

“It’s OK,” said my mother, “I’ll sing you all the time so you don’t get scared.

“OK…” I answered very uncertainly, eager to please my mum.

As I got up from the bed where my mum, my sister and I were lying to undertake this perilous mission my mother added “But you can’t turn on any lights.”

“What?” I asked appalled, “Why not???”

“You just can’t.” She said. She might have given some dodgy excuse but I can’t remember what it was, the point was I couldn’t turn on any lights, which terrified me.

“Then I’m not going.” I said.

“It’s OK,” she said again, “I’ll sing all the time you are down there and you’ll know I’m here and won’t be afraid, now go!”

So, fool that I was, I went.

It was a very, very long way for me young brain. The stairs were the interminable, twisty steps into the bowels of hell. It didn’t help that they were old, wooden stairs which had cultivated the perfect scary creak through decades of use and abuse, every step was agony. I started off very slowly, my mother singing some tuneless melody which sounded like two cats fighting.

“Don’t stop singing!” I yelled, trying to keep the fear at bay and barely managing it. The stairs had their own cadence and tune and you could tell when you got to the bottom of the steps by the different creaks they made. I made it all the way to the bottom, almost hyperventilating, having a hard time breathing and getting oxygen to my fevered brain. My mother was still making the cat noises she calls singing so I gathered what little courage I had left and crossed the first threshold, this was the space between the stairs and the kitchen entrance, which was actually the front door of the house. I had to negotiate a huge, ugly wooden cabinet filled with glasses and cups with a bunch of ornaments on top, to me this looked exactly like a huge coffin housing the skeletal and half-dead remains of little boys and pets. But I steeled myself and passed that threshold at a run.

I was at the kitchen entrance, I still had a long way to go to negotiate finding a glass in the darkness, pouring some water in it and making it all the way back upstairs, this was a crucial point in the expedition.

All of a sudden my mother stopped singing, everything went quiet… I froze. What had happened? Had something got her? Was she even still alive?

“Mum!” I yelled, “Why are you not singing?”

Silence. Oppressive, black, creepy, awful silence.

“Mum?”

And then I heard the most horrible noise I’ve heard in my life, a sort of low, painful moan of suffering coming from all over the house, a terrible noise of rage, pain and hopelessness all suffused into one terrible sound in crescendo and growing panic, the kind of sound you would expect a raging, murdering ghost to make.

I lost my shit. I just screamed and rushed back up to the bedroom, running past the front door and the scary shadows it threw onto the large coffin, up the creaky stairs as fast as my little feet could take me, crying now in panic and completely terrified I burst into my mother’s bedroom only to realise that the awful pitiless sound was actually coming from my mother, it stopped abruptly and was replaced with another horrible sound that only added to my misery, that of my mother laughing with delight at my terror. Of course this just added another layer to my suffering: humiliation.

My mother did this on numerous occasions, she loved to torture us with scary stories or contrived situations like this one. Her favourites were stories of mothers who either killed their children or went crazy and haunted other children and people in retribution and vengeance for having lost theirs.

One such story is La Llorona or The Wailer or Crying Woman, a terrible, vengeful ghost of a woman who drowned her children in a fit of rage after she learned of her husband having an affair. Anyone who hears her will suffer either death or misfortune and if that person has children then their children will mysteriously die of a waning sickness or drown or be taken away from them.

If you’re a kid and you don’t behave and disobey your parents, La Llorona will come take you with her, possibly to drown you.

My mother loved telling that story, it was one of her favourites, not the least for the terror it engendered on my sister and I.

Another was La Sayona, this one from Venezuelan folklore, was a beautiful woman who appeared to men at night in desolate roads asking for a ride. After getting in the car, while the man drove on he would inevitably want to look again at this beautiful woman, only to see that her face had turned into an ugly skull with horrible teeth, the sight would shock the driver so much that he would veer off the road, crash and die.

The legend has it that this was an actual woman known for her exceeding beauty in the town she lived in, she was happily married and had a loving husband baby daughter. One day some douchebag saw her bathing in the river, fell in love with her and started stalking her. When she told said douchebag to bugger off and leave her the hell alone, the bastard, in a fit of jealous rage, told her that he was there to warn her that her husband was having an affair and, as if that weren’t bad enough, it was her own mother he was banging! Of course the Sayona would not put up with this, she was, after all, the most beautiful woman around. She went crazy, went back home only to find her husband asleep in their bedroom with the baby on his stomach, she locked them inside, set fire to the house and stood outside hearing their screams as they burnt to death. She then grabbed her husband handy machete and went in search of her mother, when she found her, the Sayona attacked her mum with the machete slashing her in the stomach and disembowelling her. As her mother lay there dying she cursed her daughter telling her that she’d never had any affair with her husband and that from now on she would be doomed to travel the land as a wretch avenging all women by killing their unfaithful husbands. Thus was born La Sayona.

These and other similar stories, where the ones my mum told my sister and I, always at night and usually when we were camping in desolate places without another living should around for miles and miles.

This was normal for me growing up. It wasn’t until many years later when I had kids of my own that I started thinking about this and about how, as a parent, one could act that way. Try as I might, I couldn’t understand it. I would do anything for my kids, I would die for them, I would suffer unspeakable torture to spare them, I would do anything in my power to make sure they were safe and felt safe and not be afraid. How does a mother willingly scare and traumatise her children? I still cannot understand it.