The Hakkōda Mountains
Mountains in northern Honshū where, in January 1902, an army unit was almost wiped out on a training march: of two hundred and ten men, eleven survived. A blizzard of exceptional force caught them and some froze standing up. It remains the worst disaster in the history of mountain travel. The place is called one of the bleakest in Japan, and accounts of meeting soldiers on the trail are unremarkable here.
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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