I was reading a book "Weird Arizona" by Wesley Treat and came upon the story of "La Llorona" the weeping lady. There are several versions of the story, of a lady who murders her children, in one case to gain a lover who then leaves her because of what she has done. In the Kingman story, the mother has two children but is jealous of them because of her husband's attention to the children (the children are his as well). She throws the children off a cliff. Her husband he knows of her jealousy does not accept that it is an accident and leaves her. She then follows her children hurling herself off the cliff. She is said to roam the canyon, moaning, between midnight and 3 a.m. People claim to have seen her, a woman with no face, or a woman with the head of a horse. She is also said to be looking for bones as she was denied entrance by Saint Peter until she brings the bones of her children.
The more common story is that a miner family lived in the canyon. They were poor and food was hard to come by, and prospecting was not working. The lived in a wooden shack in the heart of the canyon. The husband would leave hoping to find food, or success prospecting and to come back with supplies. He would be gone for weeks at a time. However eventually he left and never returned. The family slowly started to starve. The children would cry for food, and their cries would echo across the canyon. Eventually the mother could not take it any more and killed the children then hacked them up, and threw their remains in a river (wash more likely). She became more distressed herself and stayed on the bank crying until she died of starvation. Talk of a river makes you think that the murder happened in monsoon season, or August.
