October 24, 2025 • 23 mins
A three-year-old disappeared near a swollen river during torrential rains in Honduras. When he came back the next day with a head wound, his family had a disturbing explanation for why his clothes were bone dry.
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WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2025, Weird Darkness.
#WeirdDarkness #ElDuende #HondurasMysterу #MissingChild #SupernaturalDisappearance #LatinAmericanFolklore #CryptidLegend #ParanormalEncounter #UnexplainedMystery #TrueParanormal
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
I'm Darren Marler, and this is weird dark news. The
rain had been hammering southern Honduras for days, not just
regular tropical rain, but the kind that turns roads into
rivers and makes you wonder if the ground itself might
just give up and slide away. Rivers swelled way past
their normal banks, eating up yards and pathways. Families sat
(00:34):
watching the water creep closer, doing the mental math about
when they might need to leave. By mid October twenty
twenty five, thirteen people were already dead from the storms.
Six of them were children swept away by currents or
buried when hillsides collapsed. October fifteenth, twenty twenty five, started
out like any other morning. In Opinion number one the
(00:56):
community in Concepcion de Maria Joloteca Department, three year old
Christian Bismar Espino Carales was standing at his grandfather's house
while his parents went to work standard arrangement for a
lot of families in rural Honduras. Around nine o'clock in
the morning, the boy was playing in the yard. Then
he wasn't. The Tiscagouga River runs near the property. On
(01:17):
a good day, It's just a river. After days of
these rains, it had turned into something else, entirely churning, loud,
pulling at everything near its banks. The family's minds went
straight to the worst possibility. They got on the phone immediately,
fire department, police rescue teams, neighbors dropped what they were
doing and joined the search. Everyone assumed the same thing,
(01:39):
without saying it out loud. The river had him. Rescuers
spent hours working their way along the river banks, pushing
into the mountainous terrain nearby. The rain just kept coming down.
Daylight faded, night fell, They kept searching. Still no sign
of Christian, a three year old out there alone in
that weather, possibly in that river. The implications were grim.
(02:03):
Thursday morning, October sixteenth, the searchers found him alive in
a mountainous area not far from the river. He had
a nasty head wound, but he was conscious, aware of
what was happening around him. His vital signs were stable.
The emergency responders got him to the General Hospital in
Chotateka as fast as they could. Relief swept through the family.
(02:25):
Their boy was alive, Against all odds, against everything that
should have happened, he had survived. Then someone noticed something strange.
His clothes were completely dry. This child had been missing
over nights during continuous rainfall, torrential soak you in seconds
kind of rain, the kind that had already killed a
(02:47):
dozen people, including other children, the kind that turns mountains
into waterfalls, and this three year old's clothes were dry.
There was another detail, though this one's harder to confirm
from the report. When they found Christian, he wasn't wearing underwear,
but when he disappeared he was fully dressed. His outer
(03:07):
clothes were still on him, just the underwear missing. His father,
at Alberto Espino, focused on the gratitude part. He called
it a miracle, thanked God. His son was alive. Christian
was hurt. That head wound did look serious, but he
was stable and getting medical attention. The rest of the
family looked at those dry clothes and reached a completely
(03:29):
different conclusion. A relative sat down with the local media
outlet Cholivision Canal twenty seven and laid it out plainly.
El duende took him, not maybe, or we think or
it's possible. The family believes this is what happened. The
relative explained that their community is known locally famous for
(03:50):
being a place where evil things happen, supernatural things. They're
not the first family to lose someone this way. A
girl disappeared once and came back years later, same kind
of situation. The boy's grandmother backed this up in her
own interview with local press. She said they had done
what you're supposed to do in these situations. They asked
(04:10):
the spirit to bring the child back. They promised to
give El Duende whatever it wanted, and according to the
traditional beliefs in that region, El Duende has specific requests,
usually a red handkerchief and a red shirt. That's the price.
The family certainty wasn't based on superstition or hysteria. From
(04:30):
their perspective, they had hard evidence. First, the mysteriously dry
clothing after a full night of rain. Second, the long
history of similar disappearances in their specific area. They weren't
guessing they were reporting, but they knew based on their
lived experience in that place. To them, saying El Duende
(04:51):
did this wasn't supernatural speculation. It was just identifying the cause,
the same way someone else might say the river did this,
or a slide did this. If you're not from Central America,
El Duende might sound like some quirky local legend. It's not.
In rural Honduras, El Duende is as real as the river,
(05:12):
as present as the rain. Ask any one in these communities,
and they'll tell you about El Duende the same way
they'd tell you about the weather, or the crops or
the road conditions. The creature shows up consistently in descriptions,
though details vary. A small humanoid being, usually somewhere between
one and three feet tall, often dressed surprisingly well, elegant clothing,
(05:34):
sometimes colorful, sometimes green, almost always wearing a large hat.
Some versions say the hat has a wide brim, others
say it's tall and pointed. The fancy clothes are a
recurring theme. This isn't some wild forest creature. Eldwende dresses
better than most people. The name itself tells you something
about how deeply embedded this is in the culture. Duende
(05:58):
comes from the Spanish phrase dueno de casa, owner of
the house. When Spanish colonizers started pushing into the Americas
back in the sixteenth century, they brought their own stories
about household spirits, goblins, little people who lived alongside humans.
Those European legends crashed into the indigenous beliefs that were
(06:19):
already here, stories about nature, spirits about entities that protected
or haunted specific places. The two mythologies merged and evolved,
creating what they now call El Duende. The legend spread
across Latin America, but it took on specific characteristics in
each region. In Honduras, particularly in the heavily mountainous regions,
(06:41):
Elduende lives in caves makes sense given the landscape. There's
a lot of mountainous terrain in Honduras, a lot of
hidden spaces, a lot of areas where you genuinely could
wander for days without seeing another person. Certain regions have
developed reputations as Elduende territory. Not in a vague oh,
there are stories about that area way, but in a
(07:02):
everyone knows that if you go there you might encounter
El Duende kind of way. Parents warn their children specifically
about wandering near certain forests or rivers, not as a
bedtime story, as an actual safety warning. The creature shows
up in newspapers, radio programs tell Eldwende stories. People discuss
it in everyday conversation the way people in other places
(07:24):
might discuss wildlife or weather patterns. There's even a section
in some Honduran newspapers dedicated to these kinds of encounters.
For rural Hondurans, el Duende isn't folklore. It's not a
metaphor or a cautionary tale or a cultural artifact. It's
an actual entity that exists in their world, right alongside
everything else. The creature's behavior follows patterns, though those patterns
(07:50):
vary somewhat by region and by individual account, some consistent
themes emerge when you look at enough stories. Eldwende shows
a particular fascination with two groups, children and young women.
With children, the stories describe something almost playful at first.
El Duende lures them into the forest, sometimes to play,
sometimes just to keep them. The children might come back
(08:13):
after a few hours or a few days, or years
or never. There's no reliable pattern to when or whether
el Dwende returns a child. With young women, the escalation
is more methodical, more like a campaign. First, you hear music,
guitar music specifically. It's described as beautiful, soft, but somehow present.
(08:37):
You can hear it clearly, but you can't pinpoint where
it's coming from. If you're a young woman and you
start hearing this mysterious guitar music. That's eel Duende noticing you.
That's the first sign. Then, if you continue your normal life,
especially if you talk to men, if you have relationships,
if you don't isolate yourself, small objects start getting thrown
(09:00):
at you, rocks, twigs, little things. This is Elduende expressing jealousy.
The creature wants you to stop interacting with other people,
stop talking to men, pay attention only to Elduende. If
the woman continues living her life and interacting with people normally,
Elduende escalates to home invasion, not physically breaking in something weirder.
(09:23):
The nighttime attacks follow a consistent script across different families
and different regions. It starts with noise on the roof,
rocks raining down, or sand for hours at a stretch,
just constant pounding from above. Meanwhile, inside the house, objects
start moving on their own, Things break without anyone touching them,
(09:44):
Lights flicker on and off, and the family's resources get contaminated.
Food has wood chips in it suddenly, or leaves or
animal bones. Water sources turn foul. The chaos continues night
after nights until the family either gives up their daughter
lets Elduende take her or manages to drive the creature
away through prayer and religious intervention. Families in this region
(10:07):
have developed countermeasures over generations of dealing with this. Display
an image of Saint Patrick in your home, based on
legends that the Irish saint drove similar creatures out of
Ireland centuries ago. Carry a four leaf clover on your
person for protection. If el Duende actually appears to you
and offers wealth or gifts, don't accept them directly. Instead,
(10:29):
ask for something impossible. The traditional request is bring me
a basket full of water from the river. El Duende
can't fill a basket with water. The water just pours
out through the weaving. Unable to complete the impossible task.
Frustrated and defeated, El Duende leaves and doesn't come back
to bother you again. These aren't random folk remedies someone
(10:51):
made up recently. These are strategies that have been refined
and passed down through families, tested against actual experiences, kept
because people believe they work. Meanwhile, the investigators working Christian's
case were building their own explanation from a completely different framework.
Their preliminary assessment. The boy got swept partially into the
(11:13):
river current during those initial moments. When he vanished, the
water pulled him some distance, maybe not far, maybe quite
a ways, and then either the current changed or he
grabbed onto something, or the water pushed him onto the
bank and he managed to get himself out. A three
year old pulling himself out of a swollen river during
a tropical storm sounds impossible, but survival sometimes involves luck
(11:36):
and circumstances that shouldn't work but do. The head wound
fits this theory. Fast moving water carries debris, rocks, branches,
all kinds of objects get pulled along in a flood current.
Getting struck by something hard while being swept along would
produce exactly the kind of injury Christian had. The dry
clothing presented more of a challenge to explain, but not
(11:58):
an insurmountable one. The mountainous terrain near the Tiscagua River
has natural shelters, caves, rock overhangs, spaces where someone could
be protected from direct rainfall. If the child ended up
in one of those spaces, either by chance or by
instinctively seeking shelter, he could have dried out over the
course of the night. Human body heat in an enclosed
(12:20):
area actually dries wet clothing faster than expected, not immediately,
but over several hours, especially if the rain isn't hitting
you directly. The missing underwear remains harder to explain through
natural causes. The water does strange things to clothing. In
drowning cases and flood recoveries, investigators sometimes find bodies with
(12:40):
partial clothing, some items stripped away by the current, others
still in place. The physics of fast moving water interacting
with different fabrics at different parts of the body can
produce seemingly random results. If Christian was partially submerged at
some point, it's possible the current tour off his underwear
while his outer clothes stayed on. Unlikely, maybe, but not impossible.
(13:05):
The truly remarkable part of the case, from an investigative standpoint,
isn't any mystery about dry clothes or missing underwear. It's
that the child survived at all. Three year olds don't
survive being swept into swollen rivers during major storms. These
statistics from those same October storms proved this point. Multiple
(13:25):
children died in similar circumstances across Honduras during that same period.
By all reasonable expectations, Christian should have been another casualty.
The supernatural explanation for Christian's disappearance didn't emerge in a vacuum.
It came in the middle of a genuine emergency. By
October fifteenth, when Christian vanished, Honduras was dealing with a
(13:47):
full scale weather crisis. The Permanent Contingencies Commission, the government
body that handles disasters, had issued red alerts for multiple municipalities.
Red alert means immediate danger evacuate level threat. In Sholteka, specifically,
both the Tiscagua River and the ghost Quaran River were
threatening to overflow their banks entirely and swamp everything nearby.
(14:10):
At least twenty four thousand people were affected across the country,
nearly two thousand homes damaged to some degree, seventy one
houses completely destroyed, not damaged, destroyed, eighty three entire communities
cut off from the outside world when rivers washed out
the roads and bridges, when landslides covered the only paths
in or out. Of the thirteen deaths by that point,
(14:34):
twelve came from drowning, and children kept dying at a
disproportionate rate. The day after our rescuers found Christian alive,
they pulled the body of nine year old you Hear
Rodriguez Sierra from the Rio Grande de Jesus de a
Tora up in the Etubuca department. He'd been swept away
days earlier. Unlike Christian, you Hear didn't make it. Emergency
(14:55):
responders and government officials spent those weeks pleading with people
not to try a cross, tossing rivers or streams, even
ones that looked calm. The warrings mostly went unheated, but
not because people were being reckless. Rural Hondurans often have
no choice. Your home is on the other side of
the water, your fields, or on the other side. The
(15:15):
neighboring community is across that stream. You either cross or
you're isolated. When your economic survival depends on getting to work,
or getting to your crops, or maintaining connections with the
outside world, you cross. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't.
In this context, with children dying, with families being destroyed
(15:38):
by these storms, with everyone living under constant threat, finding
any child alive after going missing near a river qualified
as genuinely extraordinary. The natural relief at Christian's survival mixed
with the need to explain how it happened. If you're
an investigator with the fire department or the police, you
see a remarkably lucky child who survived hydrological forces that
(16:02):
killed others. If you're the family living in a place
where El Duende is as real as anything else, you
see the work of a specific entity that took your
child and after proper appeals, gave him back. Both explanations
fit within their respective frameworks. After the media coverage started spreading,
someone reached a question that's darkly funny but also kind
(16:25):
of profound. If everyone believes El Duende took the boy,
should the creature be held financially responsible for the hospital bills.
The family explicitly stated in their media interviews that they
needed economic assistance to cover Christian's medical care. In theory,
Honduras has free public healthcare. In practice, for poor rural families,
(16:46):
it's more complicated. Hospital stays still require money. Medications cost money,
medical supplies cost money. Food while you're staying at the
hospital costs money. Transportation to and from the hospital costs money.
All those expenses add up fast. The family made public
appeals for donations because they knew the costs would bury them.
(17:09):
Whether any insurance company would seriously investigate a claim listing
el Duende as the responsible party seems unlikely. More realistically,
the family will rely on community support, whatever charity organizations
are active in the area, and whatever limited public health
resources they can actually access. The hospital in Cholateeka will
treat Christian regardless of whether the family can pay. That's
(17:32):
standard procedure in medical emergencies. But the costs don't disappear
just because the hospital doesn't refuse treatment. The bills still exist.
The burden still falls on his family. The insurance question,
humorous as it sounds, points towards something real. When supernatural
explanations dominate how people understand an event, the practical worldly
(17:54):
concerns don't just evaporate. A goblin isn't going to send
a check, but medical bills still arrive, the hospital still
needs payment, the family still needs money for recovery. The
supernatural and the mundane exists simultaneously, and both create real
consequences that someone has to handle. Skeptics looking at Elduende
(18:16):
stories would point out the legend serves multiple social functions
that have nothing to do with whether the creature actually exists.
The legend reinforces parental control over children's behavior, particularly regarding
dangerous areas. Don't wander into the forest alone, carries more
weight when there is a specific entity that kidnaps children,
(18:36):
compared to vague general warnings about getting lost. It provides
cultural continuity across generations, grandparents telling the same stories to
grandchildren that their own grandparents told them. It maintains indigenous
spiritual traditions that survived centuries of colonial pressure and forced
religious conversion. El Duende represents a continuous threat of belief
(18:59):
that connects back before Spanish arrival. All of those functions
are real, and none of it matters at all the
families and rural Honduras who are absolutely certain they've encountered
the creature. Personal testimonies of Elduende experiences aren't rare or
hard to find. They're common. People describe hearing guitar music
in the forest when there's no visible musician anywhere nearby.
(19:22):
They report rocks hitting their roofs every single night for
weeks until a daughter moves away from the community. Children
return from the wilderness with detailed stories about playing with
a small man wearing elegant clothes and a big hat.
These aren't ancient stories passed down through generations their contemporary
experiences that people report happening to them personally. The line
(19:45):
between cultural belief and psychological phenomenon blurs completely in these accounts.
Mass hysteria could explain some al duende encounters. Misidentification of
wild life could explain others. Howler monkeys and spider monkeys
behave in ways that might look supernatural from a distance
or in low light. Trauma induced false memories might explain
(20:06):
some of the more dramatic disappearances and return stories. All
of those are plausible psychological and sociological explanations, or there
could be actual unknown creatures in those forests that we
haven't documented. If you're inclined toward cryptozoology, toward the possibility
that some animals have avoided scientific classification, elduende could be
(20:28):
a real biological entity that just hasn't been properly studied,
or supernatural entities exist in ways that modern science hasn't
figured out how to quantify or measure. The tools of
empirical investigation might not be suited to detecting certain types
of phenomena. The one thing that can't be disputed, regardless
of which explanation. You prefer. Children do disappear in rural Honduras.
(20:52):
Some of those children return, many don't. Whether you explain
those disappearances through hydrology or topography and tragic accidents, or
through goblins and magic and supernatural intervention, the underlying danger
is identical. The outcome a missing child is the same,
The grief is the same, the fear is the same.
(21:14):
The last reports available show Christian Bismar Espinokerales recovering from
his head wound in the hospital. His family remained grateful
for his survival while continuing to maintain their belief about
what actually happened to him. The local media covered the
story extensively. Both the rescue itself and the supernatural explanation
got equal attention. In most reports, This wasn't treated as
(21:36):
family has weird belief versus here are the real facts.
Both narratives ran side by side equally. The case added
another chapter to the oral history of El Duende encounters
in southern Honduras. For people who already believed in Eldwende,
this confirmed everything they knew. For people who were uncertain,
(21:57):
it provided new evidence to consider researching the legend. It
became another documented incident. To add to the record, the
Discagua River continues flowing through Chilateca, still swollen from all
that rain. Other three year old's play in other yards,
near other rivers. Their families watch them, call them back
when they wander too far, warn them about the water,
(22:20):
about the dangers of wandering, about staying close to home,
about eldwende. Whether the creature is real or not, whether
it's a biological entity, a supernatural being, a cultural construct
or a psychological phenomenon, the warnings serve the same essential purpose.
Come back home before dark, don't go into the forest alone.
(22:43):
Stay where the adults can see you. In a place
where children genuinely do disappear, where rivers genuinely do kill,
where the landscape itself presents real dangers. Those warnings matter.
The name you give the threat doesn't change the fact
that the threat exists. If you'd like to read this
(23:04):
story for yourself or share the article with a friend,
you can read it on the Weird Darkness website. I've
placed a link to it in the episode description, and
you can find more stories of the paranormal, true crime, strange,
and more, including numerous stories that never make it to
the podcast at Weirddarkness dot com, slash News
I'm Darren Marler, and this is weird dark news. The
rain had been hammering southern Honduras for days, not just
regular tropical rain, but the kind that turns roads into
rivers and makes you wonder if the ground itself might
just give up and slide away. Rivers swelled way past
their normal banks, eating up yards and pathways. Families sat
(00:34):
watching the water creep closer, doing the mental math about
when they might need to leave. By mid October twenty
twenty five, thirteen people were already dead from the storms.
Six of them were children swept away by currents or
buried when hillsides collapsed. October fifteenth, twenty twenty five, started
out like any other morning. In Opinion number one the
(00:56):
community in Concepcion de Maria Joloteca Department, three year old
Christian Bismar Espino Carales was standing at his grandfather's house
while his parents went to work standard arrangement for a
lot of families in rural Honduras. Around nine o'clock in
the morning, the boy was playing in the yard. Then
he wasn't. The Tiscagouga River runs near the property. On
(01:17):
a good day, It's just a river. After days of
these rains, it had turned into something else, entirely churning, loud,
pulling at everything near its banks. The family's minds went
straight to the worst possibility. They got on the phone immediately,
fire department, police rescue teams, neighbors dropped what they were
doing and joined the search. Everyone assumed the same thing,
(01:39):
without saying it out loud. The river had him. Rescuers
spent hours working their way along the river banks, pushing
into the mountainous terrain nearby. The rain just kept coming down.
Daylight faded, night fell, They kept searching. Still no sign
of Christian, a three year old out there alone in
that weather, possibly in that river. The implications were grim.
(02:03):
Thursday morning, October sixteenth, the searchers found him alive in
a mountainous area not far from the river. He had
a nasty head wound, but he was conscious, aware of
what was happening around him. His vital signs were stable.
The emergency responders got him to the General Hospital in
Chotateka as fast as they could. Relief swept through the family.
(02:25):
Their boy was alive, Against all odds, against everything that
should have happened, he had survived. Then someone noticed something strange.
His clothes were completely dry. This child had been missing
over nights during continuous rainfall, torrential soak you in seconds
kind of rain, the kind that had already killed a
(02:47):
dozen people, including other children, the kind that turns mountains
into waterfalls, and this three year old's clothes were dry.
There was another detail, though this one's harder to confirm
from the report. When they found Christian, he wasn't wearing underwear,
but when he disappeared he was fully dressed. His outer
(03:07):
clothes were still on him, just the underwear missing. His father,
at Alberto Espino, focused on the gratitude part. He called
it a miracle, thanked God. His son was alive. Christian
was hurt. That head wound did look serious, but he
was stable and getting medical attention. The rest of the
family looked at those dry clothes and reached a completely
(03:29):
different conclusion. A relative sat down with the local media
outlet Cholivision Canal twenty seven and laid it out plainly.
El duende took him, not maybe, or we think or
it's possible. The family believes this is what happened. The
relative explained that their community is known locally famous for
(03:50):
being a place where evil things happen, supernatural things. They're
not the first family to lose someone this way. A
girl disappeared once and came back years later, same kind
of situation. The boy's grandmother backed this up in her
own interview with local press. She said they had done
what you're supposed to do in these situations. They asked
(04:10):
the spirit to bring the child back. They promised to
give El Duende whatever it wanted, and according to the
traditional beliefs in that region, El Duende has specific requests,
usually a red handkerchief and a red shirt. That's the price.
The family certainty wasn't based on superstition or hysteria. From
(04:30):
their perspective, they had hard evidence. First, the mysteriously dry
clothing after a full night of rain. Second, the long
history of similar disappearances in their specific area. They weren't
guessing they were reporting, but they knew based on their
lived experience in that place. To them, saying El Duende
(04:51):
did this wasn't supernatural speculation. It was just identifying the cause,
the same way someone else might say the river did this,
or a slide did this. If you're not from Central America,
El Duende might sound like some quirky local legend. It's not.
In rural Honduras, El Duende is as real as the river,
(05:12):
as present as the rain. Ask any one in these communities,
and they'll tell you about El Duende the same way
they'd tell you about the weather, or the crops or
the road conditions. The creature shows up consistently in descriptions,
though details vary. A small humanoid being, usually somewhere between
one and three feet tall, often dressed surprisingly well, elegant clothing,
(05:34):
sometimes colorful, sometimes green, almost always wearing a large hat.
Some versions say the hat has a wide brim, others
say it's tall and pointed. The fancy clothes are a
recurring theme. This isn't some wild forest creature. Eldwende dresses
better than most people. The name itself tells you something
about how deeply embedded this is in the culture. Duende
(05:58):
comes from the Spanish phrase dueno de casa, owner of
the house. When Spanish colonizers started pushing into the Americas
back in the sixteenth century, they brought their own stories
about household spirits, goblins, little people who lived alongside humans.
Those European legends crashed into the indigenous beliefs that were
(06:19):
already here, stories about nature, spirits about entities that protected
or haunted specific places. The two mythologies merged and evolved,
creating what they now call El Duende. The legend spread
across Latin America, but it took on specific characteristics in
each region. In Honduras, particularly in the heavily mountainous regions,
(06:41):
Elduende lives in caves makes sense given the landscape. There's
a lot of mountainous terrain in Honduras, a lot of
hidden spaces, a lot of areas where you genuinely could
wander for days without seeing another person. Certain regions have
developed reputations as Elduende territory. Not in a vague oh,
there are stories about that area way, but in a
(07:02):
everyone knows that if you go there you might encounter
El Duende kind of way. Parents warn their children specifically
about wandering near certain forests or rivers, not as a
bedtime story, as an actual safety warning. The creature shows
up in newspapers, radio programs tell Eldwende stories. People discuss
it in everyday conversation the way people in other places
(07:24):
might discuss wildlife or weather patterns. There's even a section
in some Honduran newspapers dedicated to these kinds of encounters.
For rural Hondurans, el Duende isn't folklore. It's not a
metaphor or a cautionary tale or a cultural artifact. It's
an actual entity that exists in their world, right alongside
everything else. The creature's behavior follows patterns, though those patterns
(07:50):
vary somewhat by region and by individual account, some consistent
themes emerge when you look at enough stories. Eldwende shows
a particular fascination with two groups, children and young women.
With children, the stories describe something almost playful at first.
El Duende lures them into the forest, sometimes to play,
sometimes just to keep them. The children might come back
(08:13):
after a few hours or a few days, or years
or never. There's no reliable pattern to when or whether
el Dwende returns a child. With young women, the escalation
is more methodical, more like a campaign. First, you hear music,
guitar music specifically. It's described as beautiful, soft, but somehow present.
(08:37):
You can hear it clearly, but you can't pinpoint where
it's coming from. If you're a young woman and you
start hearing this mysterious guitar music. That's eel Duende noticing you.
That's the first sign. Then, if you continue your normal life,
especially if you talk to men, if you have relationships,
if you don't isolate yourself, small objects start getting thrown
(09:00):
at you, rocks, twigs, little things. This is Elduende expressing jealousy.
The creature wants you to stop interacting with other people,
stop talking to men, pay attention only to Elduende. If
the woman continues living her life and interacting with people normally,
Elduende escalates to home invasion, not physically breaking in something weirder.
(09:23):
The nighttime attacks follow a consistent script across different families
and different regions. It starts with noise on the roof,
rocks raining down, or sand for hours at a stretch,
just constant pounding from above. Meanwhile, inside the house, objects
start moving on their own, Things break without anyone touching them,
(09:44):
Lights flicker on and off, and the family's resources get contaminated.
Food has wood chips in it suddenly, or leaves or
animal bones. Water sources turn foul. The chaos continues night
after nights until the family either gives up their daughter
lets Elduende take her or manages to drive the creature
away through prayer and religious intervention. Families in this region
(10:07):
have developed countermeasures over generations of dealing with this. Display
an image of Saint Patrick in your home, based on
legends that the Irish saint drove similar creatures out of
Ireland centuries ago. Carry a four leaf clover on your
person for protection. If el Duende actually appears to you
and offers wealth or gifts, don't accept them directly. Instead,
(10:29):
ask for something impossible. The traditional request is bring me
a basket full of water from the river. El Duende
can't fill a basket with water. The water just pours
out through the weaving. Unable to complete the impossible task.
Frustrated and defeated, El Duende leaves and doesn't come back
to bother you again. These aren't random folk remedies someone
(10:51):
made up recently. These are strategies that have been refined
and passed down through families, tested against actual experiences, kept
because people believe they work. Meanwhile, the investigators working Christian's
case were building their own explanation from a completely different framework.
Their preliminary assessment. The boy got swept partially into the
(11:13):
river current during those initial moments. When he vanished, the
water pulled him some distance, maybe not far, maybe quite
a ways, and then either the current changed or he
grabbed onto something, or the water pushed him onto the
bank and he managed to get himself out. A three
year old pulling himself out of a swollen river during
a tropical storm sounds impossible, but survival sometimes involves luck
(11:36):
and circumstances that shouldn't work but do. The head wound
fits this theory. Fast moving water carries debris, rocks, branches,
all kinds of objects get pulled along in a flood current.
Getting struck by something hard while being swept along would
produce exactly the kind of injury Christian had. The dry
clothing presented more of a challenge to explain, but not
(11:58):
an insurmountable one. The mountainous terrain near the Tiscagua River
has natural shelters, caves, rock overhangs, spaces where someone could
be protected from direct rainfall. If the child ended up
in one of those spaces, either by chance or by
instinctively seeking shelter, he could have dried out over the
course of the night. Human body heat in an enclosed
(12:20):
area actually dries wet clothing faster than expected, not immediately,
but over several hours, especially if the rain isn't hitting
you directly. The missing underwear remains harder to explain through
natural causes. The water does strange things to clothing. In
drowning cases and flood recoveries, investigators sometimes find bodies with
(12:40):
partial clothing, some items stripped away by the current, others
still in place. The physics of fast moving water interacting
with different fabrics at different parts of the body can
produce seemingly random results. If Christian was partially submerged at
some point, it's possible the current tour off his underwear
while his outer clothes stayed on. Unlikely, maybe, but not impossible.
(13:05):
The truly remarkable part of the case, from an investigative standpoint,
isn't any mystery about dry clothes or missing underwear. It's
that the child survived at all. Three year olds don't
survive being swept into swollen rivers during major storms. These
statistics from those same October storms proved this point. Multiple
(13:25):
children died in similar circumstances across Honduras during that same period.
By all reasonable expectations, Christian should have been another casualty.
The supernatural explanation for Christian's disappearance didn't emerge in a vacuum.
It came in the middle of a genuine emergency. By
October fifteenth, when Christian vanished, Honduras was dealing with a
(13:47):
full scale weather crisis. The Permanent Contingencies Commission, the government
body that handles disasters, had issued red alerts for multiple municipalities.
Red alert means immediate danger evacuate level threat. In Sholteka, specifically,
both the Tiscagua River and the ghost Quaran River were
threatening to overflow their banks entirely and swamp everything nearby.
(14:10):
At least twenty four thousand people were affected across the country,
nearly two thousand homes damaged to some degree, seventy one
houses completely destroyed, not damaged, destroyed, eighty three entire communities
cut off from the outside world when rivers washed out
the roads and bridges, when landslides covered the only paths
in or out. Of the thirteen deaths by that point,
(14:34):
twelve came from drowning, and children kept dying at a
disproportionate rate. The day after our rescuers found Christian alive,
they pulled the body of nine year old you Hear
Rodriguez Sierra from the Rio Grande de Jesus de a
Tora up in the Etubuca department. He'd been swept away
days earlier. Unlike Christian, you Hear didn't make it. Emergency
(14:55):
responders and government officials spent those weeks pleading with people
not to try a cross, tossing rivers or streams, even
ones that looked calm. The warrings mostly went unheated, but
not because people were being reckless. Rural Hondurans often have
no choice. Your home is on the other side of
the water, your fields, or on the other side. The
(15:15):
neighboring community is across that stream. You either cross or
you're isolated. When your economic survival depends on getting to work,
or getting to your crops, or maintaining connections with the
outside world, you cross. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't.
In this context, with children dying, with families being destroyed
(15:38):
by these storms, with everyone living under constant threat, finding
any child alive after going missing near a river qualified
as genuinely extraordinary. The natural relief at Christian's survival mixed
with the need to explain how it happened. If you're
an investigator with the fire department or the police, you
see a remarkably lucky child who survived hydrological forces that
(16:02):
killed others. If you're the family living in a place
where El Duende is as real as anything else, you
see the work of a specific entity that took your
child and after proper appeals, gave him back. Both explanations
fit within their respective frameworks. After the media coverage started spreading,
someone reached a question that's darkly funny but also kind
(16:25):
of profound. If everyone believes El Duende took the boy,
should the creature be held financially responsible for the hospital bills.
The family explicitly stated in their media interviews that they
needed economic assistance to cover Christian's medical care. In theory,
Honduras has free public healthcare. In practice, for poor rural families,
(16:46):
it's more complicated. Hospital stays still require money. Medications cost money,
medical supplies cost money. Food while you're staying at the
hospital costs money. Transportation to and from the hospital costs money.
All those expenses add up fast. The family made public
appeals for donations because they knew the costs would bury them.
(17:09):
Whether any insurance company would seriously investigate a claim listing
el Duende as the responsible party seems unlikely. More realistically,
the family will rely on community support, whatever charity organizations
are active in the area, and whatever limited public health
resources they can actually access. The hospital in Cholateeka will
treat Christian regardless of whether the family can pay. That's
(17:32):
standard procedure in medical emergencies. But the costs don't disappear
just because the hospital doesn't refuse treatment. The bills still exist.
The burden still falls on his family. The insurance question,
humorous as it sounds, points towards something real. When supernatural
explanations dominate how people understand an event, the practical worldly
(17:54):
concerns don't just evaporate. A goblin isn't going to send
a check, but medical bills still arrive, the hospital still
needs payment, the family still needs money for recovery. The
supernatural and the mundane exists simultaneously, and both create real
consequences that someone has to handle. Skeptics looking at Elduende
(18:16):
stories would point out the legend serves multiple social functions
that have nothing to do with whether the creature actually exists.
The legend reinforces parental control over children's behavior, particularly regarding
dangerous areas. Don't wander into the forest alone, carries more
weight when there is a specific entity that kidnaps children,
(18:36):
compared to vague general warnings about getting lost. It provides
cultural continuity across generations, grandparents telling the same stories to
grandchildren that their own grandparents told them. It maintains indigenous
spiritual traditions that survived centuries of colonial pressure and forced
religious conversion. El Duende represents a continuous threat of belief
(18:59):
that connects back before Spanish arrival. All of those functions
are real, and none of it matters at all the
families and rural Honduras who are absolutely certain they've encountered
the creature. Personal testimonies of Elduende experiences aren't rare or
hard to find. They're common. People describe hearing guitar music
in the forest when there's no visible musician anywhere nearby.
(19:22):
They report rocks hitting their roofs every single night for
weeks until a daughter moves away from the community. Children
return from the wilderness with detailed stories about playing with
a small man wearing elegant clothes and a big hat.
These aren't ancient stories passed down through generations their contemporary
experiences that people report happening to them personally. The line
(19:45):
between cultural belief and psychological phenomenon blurs completely in these accounts.
Mass hysteria could explain some al duende encounters. Misidentification of
wild life could explain others. Howler monkeys and spider monkeys
behave in ways that might look supernatural from a distance
or in low light. Trauma induced false memories might explain
(20:06):
some of the more dramatic disappearances and return stories. All
of those are plausible psychological and sociological explanations, or there
could be actual unknown creatures in those forests that we
haven't documented. If you're inclined toward cryptozoology, toward the possibility
that some animals have avoided scientific classification, elduende could be
(20:28):
a real biological entity that just hasn't been properly studied,
or supernatural entities exist in ways that modern science hasn't
figured out how to quantify or measure. The tools of
empirical investigation might not be suited to detecting certain types
of phenomena. The one thing that can't be disputed, regardless
of which explanation. You prefer. Children do disappear in rural Honduras.
(20:52):
Some of those children return, many don't. Whether you explain
those disappearances through hydrology or topography and tragic accidents, or
through goblins and magic and supernatural intervention, the underlying danger
is identical. The outcome a missing child is the same,
The grief is the same, the fear is the same.
(21:14):
The last reports available show Christian Bismar Espinokerales recovering from
his head wound in the hospital. His family remained grateful
for his survival while continuing to maintain their belief about
what actually happened to him. The local media covered the
story extensively. Both the rescue itself and the supernatural explanation
got equal attention. In most reports, This wasn't treated as
(21:36):
family has weird belief versus here are the real facts.
Both narratives ran side by side equally. The case added
another chapter to the oral history of El Duende encounters
in southern Honduras. For people who already believed in Eldwende,
this confirmed everything they knew. For people who were uncertain,
(21:57):
it provided new evidence to consider researching the legend. It
became another documented incident. To add to the record, the
Discagua River continues flowing through Chilateca, still swollen from all
that rain. Other three year old's play in other yards,
near other rivers. Their families watch them, call them back
when they wander too far, warn them about the water,
(22:20):
about the dangers of wandering, about staying close to home,
about eldwende. Whether the creature is real or not, whether
it's a biological entity, a supernatural being, a cultural construct
or a psychological phenomenon, the warnings serve the same essential purpose.
Come back home before dark, don't go into the forest alone.
(22:43):
Stay where the adults can see you. In a place
where children genuinely do disappear, where rivers genuinely do kill,
where the landscape itself presents real dangers. Those warnings matter.
The name you give the threat doesn't change the fact
that the threat exists. If you'd like to read this
(23:04):
story for yourself or share the article with a friend,
you can read it on the Weird Darkness website. I've
placed a link to it in the episode description, and
you can find more stories of the paranormal, true crime, strange,
and more, including numerous stories that never make it to
the podcast at Weirddarkness dot com, slash News
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