La Sayona; The Vengeance Ghost of Venezuela

This ghost is often confused or combined with La Llorona, likely due to the common motif of a mother killing their own child, and the eternal unrest that follows.  There are several versions of the La Sayona origin tale that give her different names and differ slightly in the amount of guilt (or complete lack thereof) in terms of her husband, as there are differences in how she enacts her vengeance.  Among the tales there are several elements that do not change; La Sayona is made to suspect that her husband is sleeping with her mother, La Sayona kills her mother as a result, and with her dying breath, La Sayona's mother curses her to be an executioner; to go out and kill unfaithful men who lust after women who are not their own. 

In many of the tales, La Sayona is a beautiful girl who many chased after, even after she was married and had a son of her own. In the most common tale, it is a jealous man who is caught spying on her as she bathes in a river that starts La Sayona down a path of bloodshed. He says he is there to "warn her" that her husband is sleeping with her mother. In some tales, her husband is already a known womanizer, and she hears him whisper her mother's name, and takes that as her cue that her mother has become one of his lovers. In some, she is only mentioned to murder the mother. In many, she murders all three; husband, son, and mother. In many, she burns down the house with her baby and husband inside, and attacks the mother with a machete.  HBO chose to represent the narrative in more modern terms, making the man from the village over who peeps on her a limo driver, choosing to arm La Sayona with a gun rather than a machete, and allowing the duplicity to be revealed to her before she kills the man who fed her the lie as well, and inevitably kills herself.

Her curse, given to her in many narratives because "a mother is sacred" and she has violated that by murdering her own,  manifests itself by having her appear to men who are unfaithful. She'll often manifest on the side of the road and tempt cheating men to pick her up and make a pass at her, beautiful until she has them trapped and reveals her ghostly visage--sometimes bones, sometimes animalistic fangs and claws--and tears them apart. Sometimes it is enough for La Sayona to hear a workman just discussing sex with his workmates to attract her attention, and she will appear to him later that night before turning into a monster. Sometimes she allows the men to go to bed with her before she rips off their genitalia. Sometimes, she leaves them mostly intact but with a sexual disease that leaves a wart or a mark that will identify them as a cheater.

It's interesting that while the origin narrative primarily frames La Sayona as the one at fault for violating her role as mother and daughter, its men who she is cursed to haunt. Taking vengeance becomes both the cause of the punishment and the punishment itself, rather than an act of empowerment or justice.