BOOKS
RE VI EW By David Steinberg
“C
reepy” might be a legitimate one-word description for the photograph on the cover of Corrales author Benjamin Radford’s new book Mysterious New Mexico. Spiders are crawling over the hair, face and clothes of an ashen woman, her mouth open, iris and pupils whited out. The woman is holding a healthy, quiet baby. Who is this woman and what does she have to do with the book? The same photograph by Joshua Hoffine, titled “Swarm,” appears at the front of the book’s chapter on “La Llorona: Wailing Witches Haunting the Ditches.” One must assume the gray lady (is she dead or alive?) represents the mournful, infamous La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, the source of many legends in New Mexico, Mexico and even Europe. “I especially enjoyed La Llorona chapter. It gave me a chance to dig deeper into folklore and legends,” Radford told Local iQ. And dig he does. Radford unearthed a La Llorona tale from mid-16th century Mexico in which she is crying to repent her collaboration with conquistador Hernán Cortés. In New Mexico, stories of La Llorona often have her wailing for her drowned children, a warning to youngsters to stay clear of irrigation ditches. But she’s tough to pin down. “It’s like trying to grab a ghost or wrangle a wraith,” he writes tongue-in-cheek. And Mysterious New Mexico extends far beyond La Llorona. The opening chapter of the book is about the haunted KiMo Theatre in Downtown Albuquerque. The last chapter is about Santa Fe’s haunted La Posada hotel. In separate chapters, Radford relates three “miracles” that are part of New Mexico lore. One is the curative powers of the trucked-in dirt at the Chimayo chapel. Another is the miraculous construction of the staircase of the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe. The circular staircase makes “two complete turns from the floor to the choir loft — without a single nail or even a center pole for support.” The third “miracle” is the power of Ojo Caliente’s healing waters. Radford writes that it’s the only hot springs in the world with four different mineral waters (lithium, iron, soda and arsenic.) One chapter stands apart from the others: the unsolved murders of women whose bodies were found over a large area of the West Mesa. The murders are attributed to a serial killer. “In some ways that chapter is sort of an outlier. It’s a much more recent mystery. But still a mystery. They’ve never caught the person or people. So in many ways, it’s scarier,” Radford said. “Unlike La Llorona or Thunderbirds (legendary monstrous birds), this monster actually did kill people. So I was trying to make sure the chapter wasn’t exploitative.” Radford is deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine and the author of Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore.
Mysterious New Mexico: Miracles, Magic, and Monsters in the Land of Enchantment By Benjamin Radford University of New Mexico Press
$24.95, 312 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0826354501
Benjamin Radford will sign and talk about Mysterious New Mexico on 7p, Thu., Aug. 14 at Bookworks; 1-3p, Sat., Aug. 16 at Treasure House Books & Gifts and 6:30p, Thu., Aug. 21 at the Corrales Library.
LOCAL iQ | ALBUQUERQUE’S INTELLIGENT ALTERNATIVE | AUGUST 7-20, 2014
11