La Candileja

The clatter comes first, a sound like a shelf of crockery going over in an empty kitchen, and it comes from a road where nobody is carrying anything. Then the light. It hangs at about the height of a lamp in a walking man’s fist, swinging the way a lamp swings, except that it is coming up the road faster than a man walks. Close to, it is not one light. It is three, burning in company, and out of them something reaches: thin red arms the colour of iron just pulled from the coals, curling and drawing back as the whole burning thing comes on.

That is the Candileja. In the Colombian countryside she is not a mystery to be solved. Anybody who meets her already knows what she has come for.

Javier Ocampo López, who spent a career sorting the folk myths of Colombia region by region, places her in the Tolima Grande, in the towns strung along the middle and lower Magdalena, and in the old Cauca. She belongs to the smaller class of figures he files under the crossings and the streams and the caves rather than to the great forest powers like the Madremonte and the Patasola. Smaller, not gentler. Out on the eastern plains a burning thing of the same description goes under a different name, the Bolefuego, the fireball, and the two names have run together for long enough that the same story now gets told under both.

What she was, before the fire, was somebody’s grandmother. She had two grandsons in her house and no capacity whatever for telling them no. They were rude in front of her and wild around her and she let all of it pass, because the alternative was a scene and she could not stand a scene. The game the boys liked best was the one where she was the horse. She went down onto the floor and let them saddle her and both climb on, and she carried them the length of the house while they rode her like the tamest animal in the district, and their delight in it was, as far as she was concerned, the whole point of the exercise.

Then she died, and it went badly. Saint Peter met her and had nothing at all to say about the sins she might reasonably have expected to answer for. What he held against her was the softness. She had had the raising of two boys and had raised nothing, and he sent her back into the world she had turned them loose in to work the debt off as fire. Three flames: one for her body, one for each grandson.

The story earned its keep. In crowded households the grandparents and great-grandparents told it and retold it at children who were pushing their luck, which leaves the legend in an odd position. It is a ghost story in which the ghost is the woman telling it, and the warning lands on both ends of the room at once.

Not every telling condemns an old woman. In Paratebueno, on the Cundinamarca edge of the plains, they say she was young, beautiful and kind, and that her husband, a drinker and a chaser of women, left her for a girl half her age. What broke her was not the leaving. It was the humiliation, and she went looking for a cure in places that do not sell cures cheaply. The change came on slowly. Her look sharpened until it burned, a darkness settled around her carrying a smell of sulphur and smoke, and the neighbours who had liked her began calling her the Candileja before she was any such thing. At the full moon she went up in flame and floated out over the fields. The ones who got close enough to hear her say the fire whispers, and that the whispering is women, and that the women are crying.

The plains version is blunter. A woman burned alive inside her own house with her two children, and the three lights are simply the three of them, still alight.

The name itself is a domestic little word. In Spanish a candileja is the inner cup of an oil lamp, the small reservoir that holds the oil for one wick or for several. None of the tellings stops to explain how a kitchen fitting came to name a thing that runs people down in the dark, though a lamp built to carry more than one flame is a suggestive object to have lent its name to a spirit that always arrives in threes.

Her hunting list is the point of her. Drunks walking home in the small hours. Husbands and wives on their way somewhere they have not admitted to. Fathers who will not father, the weak and the fearful ones letting a household run itself into the ground the way she once did. Ordinary travellers out later than they should be get the fright thrown in without having earned it. She is fast, she is loud, and she comes from behind, and the light she throws is bright enough to put a man’s face on display at the precise moment he would rather not be looked at. In the Paratebueno telling that is very nearly the whole of her method. She never has to touch anybody. She only has to light them up.

Her limits are the limits of the road. She belongs to the dark and to the open ground between houses, and a closed door seems to end the business. The stranger limit is the one the plains tellings insist on, and it inverts everything a frightened country Catholic would reach for on a bad road at night. Do not pray. Prayer will not turn her. Prayer brings her, because what draws her in is precisely the reverence a person offers up to a soul in torment, and she is a soul in torment, and it has done her no good whatever. On the question of what actually sends her away the tellings are far less confident than they are on what calls her in, which is an answer of a sort. Killing her is not available; she is dead already. And nobody anywhere tells the version in which she finishes the sentence and is let go.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is La Candileja?

La Candileja is a figure from Colombian folklore, a condemned soul that travels the night roads as three burning flames with red tendrils reaching out of them like arms. She is recorded in the Tolima Grande, along the middle and lower Magdalena and in the old Cauca, and on the eastern plains the same burning figure is called La Bolefuego.

Why does La Candileja chase people?

La Candileja pursues drunkards, unfaithful spouses, and fathers and grandparents who will not discipline the children in their care. In the best known telling she was condemned for that last failing herself, so she hunts the sin that damned her. Travellers simply out too late are frightened as well, whether or not they have done anything.

Why does La Candileja appear as three flames?

In the most widely told version La Candileja burns as three flames because she was an indulgent grandmother sent back into the world with one flame for her own body and one for each of the two grandsons she failed to raise. A separate version, attached to the name Bolefuego, holds that the three lights are a woman and her two children who burned to death together in their house.

How do you protect yourself from La Candileja?

Do not pray at her. The plains tellings are clear that prayer attracts La Candileja rather than driving her off, which reverses the usual instinct for meeting a soul in torment on a dark road. The same tellings are much vaguer about what does send her away, and getting behind a closed door is the one measure they agree on.

Where does the legend of La Candileja come from?

La Candileja comes from Colombian rural oral tradition, and Javier Ocampo López records her among the folk myths of the Tolima Grande, the Magdalena valley and the Cauca. The story was told as a discipline lesson in large households, repeated by grandparents at children who were misbehaving.

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Mohan, Patasola, Madremonte, Madre Agua, La Mojana, Hombre Caiman, La Tunda, La Llorona, La Sayona, La Siguanaba, Cadejo, Charro Negro, Boi-tatá, Headless Mule, Will-o’-the-Wisp