La Llorona, the Weeping Woman

A woman in white who walks beside water weeping for children she drowned herself. The story is known throughout Latin America, but in Mexico City it is fixed to the canals of Xochimilco — the last remains of the lake system Tenochtitlan stood on. The earliest written versions date from the colonial period and braid two layers together: a Spanish tale of an abandoned woman, and pre-Hispanic accounts of a weeping female voice heard before the conquerors came.

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Myasnoy Bor

The Myasnoy Bor tract in the Novgorod Region, grimly known as the "Valley of Death," is a dense, swampy forest that became the site of one of the most harrowing tragedies of the Great Patriotic War. In 1942, during an attempt to break the Siege of Leningrad, brutal fighting unfolded here, claiming the lives of tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers.