El Silbón

The lost soul you don’t want to have contact with.

Welcome to our first installment of Terror Thursdays, I’ll be your Ghoulish host with the most, that will be your guide for the day. Today is going to be the start of my favorite intro into the favorite season of the year; horror and spooky season. Where the veil of our world is the thinnest and, the world of the dead is more freely accessible and seen to those who believe. 

Let’s get started, shall we?

Introduction

The story always begins with a son take the life of his father, but the versions are always different depending on the region of Central and South America you travel to. Legendary to the region of Los Llanos, this terrifying creature is always described as a lost soul, when he is far more than just that. 

Many inhabitants always say that they have seen him, primarily in the summer months; the times when the savannah burns in the harsh drought and the trees rustle with the hot winds when the night falls over the valley.

It is beneath these trees you can find him, whistling his song in the musical notes that follow a specific order: C, D, E, F, G, A, B. Rising to the tone of F and then lowering to the tone of B. However, it is said, when the whistling is close; there is no imminent danger. However, it is only when you hear it further away from you but the whistling sounds just oh so distant, you are in danger. He is near. 

When it is your time and he comes for you, you will hear it anywhere and, at any time 

The Legend

As it has been said, the legend always starts out with a murder taking place; a son committing the sin against his father. 

In one version, legends has it, the young man’s father had been out for several hours, several hours without a word or a message sent of being in need of any sort of assistance. So, the young man goes out to find his father in the forest. When he does, it is neither deer that has been caught, nor anything the young man wanted and what his father said he would come back with. 

It is unknown just what exactly the young man’s father was doing but, this very deed sent him flying into a rage; enough to slay his father. 

In another version, as it goes and the most popular of them all; he catches his father; on his return home abusing his young, beautiful wife. All rage and no words, the man slays his father right before his wife’s eyes, and coaxes her into silence. But, he cannot return to his mother empty handed, having lost their meal in his rage, he instead decides to— You guessed it– give his father’s meat to his mother. 

Finding the meat tough, his mother starts to suspect something is amiss. She asks her son, and turns up with no answers. Sooner, rather than later she finds out this is the entrails of her husband; calls her brother, his uncle to settle the situation in her grief. Unable to deal with the betrayal.

In his anger, justified or not, the man’s uncle ties him to a tree and whips him for his indiscretion; applying chili to the wound so that it may never heal when he is released. 

Though, the catch to this is, the young man can never return home. wild, starving dogs were set upon him.

“You forever carry your father’s bones as your burden. And never shall you rest.” Said the uncle, tossing the dying man a sack that clattered to the ground; this holding the remains of his father. 

The sack he carries now, all those eons later. 

It is mainly on rainy and humid days that his spirit wanders, hungry for death and revenge: eager to punish drunkards, womanizers and sometimes innocent victims who are in the wrong place at the right time. 

Sometimes he is the size of a man, thin and wearing a straw hat and goes after the drunkards, most of them all; they reminding him of his father, his family of all. 

Sometimes he is a giant of six meters who wanders high on the treetops, creaking and emitting his chilling whistle. Inside his sack are the remains of his father, and the victims he has taken over the many summers he wanders. 

Some nights, can be heard ontop of houses on certain nights dropping his sack to the floor and counting the bones, one by one. If one hears it, nothing will happen. If one doesn’t hear it though, by sunrise one member of the family will never wake up again.

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My! My! He’s almost as scary as El Cucuy! 

Well that’s the end of our tale this week! Tune again next week and remember, the further he is, the closer he is getting to you.

Extra: audio from youtube, by a random user: listen at your own discretion.

Sweet days and Ghoulish haunts.

See you next week. 

(: