Supernatural the book of monsters, demons, spirits and ghouls

The Woman In White, part 1

This one appears in all of the world, and keeps coming. We've taken care of maybe a dozen of them since we were kids. The basic story goes like this:
A young woman, in a despairing fury over her treatment at the hands of her husband, murders her children. Or she kills them because they prevent her from marrying the man of her dreams. In either case, she then dies and becomes a spirit. The most famous version is probably the Mexican one:
Long ago, the story goes, a beautiful indian princess, Dona Luisa de Loveros, fell in love with a handsome Mexican nobleman named Don Nuno de Montesclaros. The princess loved the nobleman deeply and had two children by him, but Montesclaros refused to marry her. When he finally deserted her and married another woman, Dona Luisa went mad with rage and stabbed her two children. Authorities found her wandering the street, sobbing, her clothes covered in blood. They charged her with infanticide and sent her to the gallows. Ever since, it is said, the ghost of La Llorona ("the crying woman") walks the country at night with her bloody dress, crying out for her murdered children. If she finds any child, she's likely to carry it away with her to the nether regions, where her own spirit dwells.

Even this is a newer version of a much older story, maybe all the way back to when the conquistadores were doing their thing along the Rio Grande-which just goes to show you how long these kinds of spirits have been around. There's another version from a little closer to home, recorded outside Dallas. In this one, known as the Ghost of White Rock Lake, La Llorona comes together with a famous urban legend, the vanishing hitchhiker. In this one, a driver (almost always at night) picks up a hitchhiker, who then either disappears as the car passes a graveyard or gives an address that turns out to be a long-abandoned house. Our father had some pretty definite ideas about the vanishing hitchhiker:
Always dangerous because it prays on one of the best human qualities, the impulse to help those in need. The problem with the vanishing hitchhiker is that it never stays vanished. It leaves a token sometimes, which leads the person who offered the ride to try to find it again. Usually that search leads straight to a graveyard, and there's one less Good Samaritan in the world. Some spirits know they can't approach directly, and some just love the game of taking advantage of the better side of human nature.