“Bueno, ahora, I am not going to tell you flimsy, second-hand tales written down in educational pamphlets. You can obtain those any day from the Chamber of Commerce and the Arizona Historical Whatsoever, consulting their hours and fees first, of course! I have my pride. Recite the trite? Never! Tell you the same old stories so that you might question whether anyone living has truly experienced any of these horrors? No, this is not my way. I will not be like the local storyteller, who does he think he is anyway, singing in bad Spanish with his guitars, stealing the stories which I would tell and turning everything into howling coyotes and beautiful senoritas. They go gaga over the wishing shrine and attend mass in jeans! Disdain is all they receive from Yours Truly, your tour guide tonight, Delia Pantoja.
“Yes, doubting listener, you will say these are interesting old stories about the wishing shrine but where are the testimonials of a direct witness? Who is there who can tell you first hand of a tale that they were part of? The answer is me! Yes, you are very lucky that I am here tonight to tell you what happened only a few months ago in early May. I now have something to add to my tour. I could almost thank those witches. Yes, I’m a celebrity now. You have seen me on ‘About Arizona’ and in the article in the paper about local tour celebrities. That was a very informative article.
“Celebrity is a burden and many people are jealous of my successes but I keep pushing for the truth of La Tiradita. I live for La Tiradita and its great stories. It is my tour and I have now an addition to my stories that I had wanted for years. ‘Why could I not witness something strange to tell,’ I asked myself for many years? You may think these stories are only of the past, the centuries of long ago, when men rode horses and ladies wore big dresses. I know what you’re thinking: history is snoring. But I am living proof that strange things are happening here at La Tiradita even now in the twenty-first century. Is there anything that I as your guide to this great monument can tell you from my own experience? No, you think not?
“Ah, ha! Wake up and smell the big fat chorizo burrito. You are so wrong. I shall bare my soul to you and tell what has happened to me as a person in this wishing shrine. The strange thing that happened to me will astound you, I know, but not as much as it astounded me when it happened. Little me, I said, why am I being challenged with this incident? I was stunned.
“This story that happened to me is not one of the happy miracles. But I think the stories are like people. They have different personalities and some of the stories are not happy ones to repeat. They have sadness in them and are difficult to tell without making the listener think that the shrine is a bad place, a place of evil. But this is far is from the truth.
“And I must confess it’s difficult to be a chosen person with a place like this as the center of your being. You face many challenges from the family and friends who are jealous and feel that they are being left out. Of course, you have to expect normal people to be jealous and wish that they could be part of what you are experiencing. Few are chosen. I was a privileged person in this matter and I know it.
“This is the story of my own strange adventure in La Tiradita.
“One especially hot May evening, La Tiradita was nearly deserted of people. Except me. I was doing what I usually do which is to clean the shrine of candy wrappers and plastic bottles. All the rubbish of people comes in with the wind. My back was to the entrance for a while. I was ready to tell people about what is here, but no one was coming to visit.
“Then three very, very powerful and frightening witches, college girl witches, some of the most evil of all the witches in the world, visited the shrine planning on fulfilling their disgusting desires. These three powerful young witches were in their twenties and were beautiful. On that fateful night they made their way past the shrine, past that door where you came in now, looking here and there at the same things you are looking at. Blood red was the color of their evil eyes. They acted confused and drunk, like they were on drugs, but that was only their way of putting me at ease, though I was not fooled. Peering this way and that. Hmmm. Hmmm. They acted as though they had never seen anything like the shrine before. They acted innocent and uninformed. Which was a lie, of course, because every witch knows all about this place and I recognized them immediately as witches of the highest order. I knew who they were and what they were. There was no mistaking those awful beings. They could not trick me. I could tell who they were and anyone who might have told you differently does not know what they talking about. Their modern clothes did not hide the ugly interiors of their hearts and the way they thought about the world was seen in the aura surrounding them. They had very evil essences around them. You can believe me on this.
“I noticed right away that each lady was carrying some pails or some tubs like a lady would do her underwear laundry in. Pails with handles. What was in those big pails, I wondered? I wondered that the instant I saw them. Bueno, I walked out the gate and approached them and introduced myself. They asked what the shrine was and which way was the river and I talked to them in a friendly fashion so as to not tip them off to my knowing all about them and what they were up to, which was no good. I drew them in toward the shrine and told them the same stories I’m telling you tonight. I made the stories really interesting as I always do. But they weren’t interested in my stories! They said they wanted to put down their pails for a minute. I told my stories, but slyly looked at those pails that they had left on the ground for a minute! Imagine the horror I felt, the horror that struck me to my very bones, when I saw the things inside the pails wiggling strangely.
“What were in the pails the witches were carrying? The pails held poor defenseless wiggling newborn ninos.
“Imagine. I peered very closely and saw the squirming babes with my own eyes. How were they keeping those babies quiet? I think they put them under a spell so they would make no noise while they were being carried down to the river. But no spell known on the face of the earth by any witch could keep a baby from wiggling.
“And you will not believe the strangeness of what I will tell you now. They were babies when I first looked in the pails, but when I looked again, they had turned into toads!
“Whose poor children had they been? It is not possible to know. I pity them for the way they were treated. To be turned into toads, what a fate. Who did they offend in their brief life?
“All I know is that these babies were turned into toads by undergraduate witches. Undergraduates are the most evil beings in the world. They are all witches and warlocks! You will find out how corrupt they are if you ever interview them. There is no depravity that they have not tried. They are not good like the nice girls and boys who marry young and carry on the faith and family the way they should. No, these depraved people think that thinking is better than having a family! It’s a sickness, I tell you. And female undergraduates are the worst. They consort with the devil on a regular basis. Their drinking is obscene. Their drug use is horrid. I often give them tours here and they think this place is amusing. Amusing.
“How lucky I was that I did not interfere unknowingly in their evil plot. I could have done something clumsy without thinking, something which would have irritated the witches and I wouldn’t have even known what I had done. I did not know how close I was to death; I’m sure they would not have hesitated to kill me at a moment’s notice when I had performed something that irritated them. And you can take my word when I tell you that they were horrible witches, not to be trusted farther than you can see on a dusty night.
“Could I have stopped what happened? Oh no, I think not, even with my faith and my fear of the Devil. There was no way I could have stopped what happened to those babies. I have had this told to me many times from the greatest of good witches in Arizona. What could I have done? I am not a witch and cannot stop spells that are cast by evil ladies like those. Even a great good witch might not have been able to stop them.
“Perhaps the babies were their own children, though I do not believe they were. No, those were the unwitting stooges of their wo
rks and were no relations of the witches. Perhaps, they were the children of some poor women who crossed the witches, a neighbor who had looked at them crossly or stopped one of their evil plots without even being aware of what was happening. You can run afoul of a witch so easily.
“I looked through the newspaper for unsolved cases that I could pin on the witches. Several ladies helped me in this. We searched for clues of babies born near that date. Unfortunately, I discovered nothing. Maybe these babies were the children who kept the witches from men the witches wished to possess? This often happens because the presence of a child makes it hard for the witch to possess the soul of the male and therefore she must be rid of the blockage, which is the baby. Only those witches could tell us what they really were doing when they took those children into the shrine. I wish I could quiz them now. I would not be afraid, believe me. I would like to know the truth. Of course, they were even too powerful for me and I would be no match for them.
“Never mind. The fact is they wished only to be rid of the troublesome little babies, but without the bad vibrations associated with a violent death. You see, the violent death of a small child can disturb even the powers of a very powerful witch. Maybe that was the reason why they could not simply suffocate them. Or leave them in the desert to die. Those methods would have been more direct and this puzzled me until I consulted with a great witch of Arizona who told me killing the babies directly would have reduced the undergraduate witches’ powers.
“And what became of those toads? I knew you would be curious about their fate. I can certainly tell you. When they realized I had seen the toads, the three witches took off toward the river. I never saw any of them again.
“But I know what they did! I saw the babies with my own eyes, and I saw them when they were toads, too! I saw it all. Believe me. I am your witness.
THE END
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