When the mist rises from the lake around Tenochtitlan and rolls into the city, Tlacanexquimilli comes with it. The name means something like “human-appearance bundle” and it’s depicted as a sort of funereal body-bag in the Florentine Codex (left), but later in the colonial period some Spanish illustrator apparently depicted it as this equally-amazing Xtro-looking monkey chicken body horror (right). (Mistranslation? Colonialist propaganda? Bored artist? Normal evolution of the folklore? I don’t know! I have no context!)

Anyway. Tlacanexquimilli is an omen of disaster associated with the god Tezcatlipoca, and its cries in the mist sound like someone dying of sickness (so, some uncanny parallels to the Nuckelavee, from Scotland), but the thing I love most is that when soldiers are sent to convince it to go away, it tries to give them increasing numbers of cactus spines. The soldiers keep dismissing its gifts as “useless”, and eventually it leaves because its offer of friendship was rebuffed.

I’m sure cactus spines probably meant something in the original folklore because they appear in other ghost stories as well, but all I can think of is this -

Tlacanexquimilli: Oh there you are human! Hello! I found this cool leaf and I want you to have it!!

Soldier: …what am I supposed to do with this?

Milli: Oh, um, do you want more? What if I gave you my five coolest leaves?

Soldier: Uhhhh, no thanks.

Milli: Are… are they not cool enough?? Please, I’ll give you every leaf I have! You can pick your favourites!! Have as many as you want!!

Soldier: Okay, look, you’re making weird noises and distressing everyone who lives here. We don’t want your leaves and we don’t want you in our city.

Filip Forman, the helminthologist and antiquarian, did all his best work here at the family home, until the day his subjects escaped. The infestation was destroyed, but Forman, they say, walks the halls to this day, guarding his library and his shame.

Unquestionably, this bleak mansion is haunted. The last visitor saw and fled the dead before they could touch him with their fraying hands. The visitor before that claimed she saw nothing, but died of despair exactly one year later to the day.

——

I understood that reference :D Giovanni Piranesi did a series of etchings in the 1700s titled Le Carceri d’Invenzione (“Imaginary Prisons”). He’s sometimes considered a precursor to M. C. Escher, as some of the Prisons contain similarly perspective-defying architecture, but I believe it isn’t clear how deliberate this was on Piranesi’s part. In any case, the whole series have a wonderful sense of morbid grandeur to them and I highly recommend them - I feel a sense of gothic vastness to them the reminds me of The Pit and the Pendulum and other stories inspired by the Inquisition.