Your True Tales
November 2008 - Page 23
Watch Out for the Ojo
by Rose C.
When my mother was a teenager, she was traveling with her older sister and her sister's infant son by train from Mexico City northward toward San Diego. This was back in the late 1950s and train travel in Mexico was still very rough. The train made its first stop to allow passenger to rest and cool off by a nearby stream.
My mother, her sister and the baby got off, too. They had a picnic lunch and placed the baby in shallow water to cool him off. Both of them noticed a strange woman staring at the child from the opposite side of the stream. But she wasn't just looking, she was staring intently and only at the child. When they returned to the train, they noticed the woman left in another direction and was not a passenger.
As the day progressed, the baby started getting very ill and his right eye began to swell. He quickly got worse, with fever and terrible diarrhea, and his eye swelled to the point that it looked like a hard boiled egg. By the time they arrived at the next stop, they took the baby to a nearby doctor, but he was already dead. With a heavy heart and with the help of the townspeople, the two woman buried the infant, and continued their journey northward.
They blamed the incident on an old superstition call ojo, which means "eye" in Spanish. There is a belief that a person (not only witches) can cause harm by simply staring at someone with dark intentions, and they don't always do it on purpose. But the first sign of ojo is fever, then diarrhea, then the right eye swells. As a girl growing up, anytime my mother caught me staring at someone, she'd say, "Stop staring! You'll give him ojo!"
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