STORY-TELLING NIGHT

There was also one night of story-telling. One of the program workers told a story from the village, then the students could tell others that they knew.

• Feliciano Ablanedo's story, local legend, went like this:
                                                                                                                                                      This is a real story about a man who lived in Umbralejo 50 years ago. He died in 1943 or 1944. This man, Feliciano Ablanedo was native from an Asturian village. He emigrated to Umbralejo with his sister and his mother, who died after a while. Nobody knew why he chose a village hidden in a pine forest in the mountain range of Ayllón. This was strange.
  Feliciano was a rich man. He was the richest man in the village and he had the biggest and the most luxurious house.
  
  He met a woman when he was 45 years and the woman was 30. For the time, those were very late ages for marriage, but the priest married them.
  
  On the wedding day, Feliciano died of pneumonia. However, the wedding was celebrated because three witnesses, who  were family of the bride, signed for  it,despite Feliciano´s unexpected illness and death,  the bride could marry with the deceased person (this happens in weddings by proxy).
  
  The strangest is that Feliciano left  all his fortune to his wife and after the wedding she left the village  unexpectedly. Since then,  it is said that Feliciano  has been spotted roam ing around the village.
  
  He isn’t an evil ghost; he only enjoys  turning on and turning  off  the lights and opening and closing the  doors.
  
  About Feliciano’s wife  who  was called Carmela, no papers about her family and her surname were found in the official files of the village.
  
  Many questions are still unsolved: Why  did Feliciano leave  all his fortune to his wife before passing away? Why  did Carmela leave  the village after Feliciano´s burial ? Who were exactly the three witnesses who, despite  Feliciano´s death, signed for the bride? . And finally, what happened to Feliciano´s sister and Carmela´s sister-in-law?. Her  strange disappearance a few days after the wedding and burial  remains unsolved, as well.
  

• Jordan's story, went like this: 

           In some parts of Alaska you can still see remnants of the days when the land was owned by Russia,   such as old churches and graveyards. In one such place a company wanted to construct some new buildings in the town center, and to do so they wanted to buy the old church so that they could demolish it. The church was sold, but on the condition that the graves from the old cementery must be moved to a new location. the company agreed, the church was sold, and workers began moving the old headstones. This was an interesting town because it had a long history of ghosts. Sometimes, in the old districts of town, people would see two blurry white figures fighting; one always had a knife.
             After a short time, people began going missing. Their cars were still at their homes, their clothes in their closets. They were all men, and they all disappeared in the same old area of town. One night a teenager was driving in that same area when she saw a woman standing on the side of the road dressed all in white, with a knife in her hand. However, when she got closer, the woman had disappeared.
              The people of the town began to panic and gossip. Everyone was discussing the disappearances, since there was not much crime in the village. One day, in a café, an old man heard part of a conversation and recalled another series of crimes that had occurred when he was a small child. The townspeople looked in the old records and found the story. Many decades earlier, a miner had gone mad and murdered his children. When his wife came home and saw what he had done, she grabbed a knife and stabbed him to death. Then, out of grief, she turned the knife on herself. It was the worst crime that had ever happened in the town.
                Also in the records, the people read that the family had been buried in the old cementery, the same one currently being moved to a different location. The mayor decided to stop the project and ordered that graves be returned to their original locations and the headstones replaced. Once this was done, the disappearances stopped. A few weeks later, another person saw the two white figures fighting on the road again.
                   In the end, the theory was that the ghost of the woman had continued to get revenge on her husband in death, by killing him over and over. When his grave was moved, she couldn't find him, and so began killing other men in his place. When his  grave was replaced, she could once again find his ghost and begin the cycle again.
                                                                                                                                                

María Cabrerizo Gil.

Miriam Carmena del Viso.