El Silbón

Venezuela
the Venezuelan Llanos: the two earliest sources I have read, of 1952 and 1953, place him in certain districts of the states of Portuguesa and Barinas; later texts attest him in Apure and Guárico and in the Colombian Llanos Orientales (Casanare, Arauca, Meta)

El Silbón — the whistling spectre of the Venezuelan Llanos, who carries in a sack the bones of the parents he killed

Variants and names

El Silbón means «the whistler», from silbar with the augmentative suffix -ón. Spanish lexicography documents the word long before the llanero figure, and with another referent: in nineteenth-century zoology manuals and dictionaries silbón is the name of the wigeon, the duck Anas penelope, «así llamado por el silbido agudo que produce» (Laureano Pérez Arcas, Elementos de zoología, 1861; Marcial Valladares, Diccionario gallego-castellano, 1884; Diccionario enciclopédico hispano-americano, 1887 and 1896; Emilio Ribera Gómez, Elementos de historia natural, 1890: all seen in preview on Google Books). The homonym is not to be confused with the figure of the llano.

He has documented synonyms. Juan Correa's lexicon Venezuela en el corazón (2009), citing Ramón Boscán Ávila, Los bongueros del Canaguá (Caracas 1973, p. 15), records «Sinónimos: el Silbón, Sin-fin (Llanos de Barinas)»; Finfín also circulates online. On the Colombian side he is also called El Silbador.

He must be kept distinct from the other figures of the llano, which the sources list beside him and do not conflate with him: La Sayona, La Llorona, El Gritón (José del Real Montilla, Así es Barinas, 1974, p. 38), La Madremonte, El Judío Errante (Silvia Aponte, El pescador de tradiciones, 1990, p. 42). The Spanish Wikipedia also files him under «Leyendas de Costa Rica»: that is a category error, not a datum.

What is told

The earliest printed description I have been able to read is of 1952: he is «the terror of the llano», he killed his parents and carries their bones in a sack; he has lost the phalanx of his little finger and seeks it for ever; he announces himself with a sharp whistle; he is so tall that he touches the electric light wires, which make a slight noise at the contact; he wears short trousers and a cogollo straw hat. He appeared to a man riding a donkey in the shape of an ordinary person and asked him for a lift. He is «the damned soul of a parricide who wanders by night whistling, in the manner of one calling someone». A text of 1953 gives him as a popular legend in certain districts of Portuguesa and Barinas, and says that his whistle «is heard at great distances». The sack of bones as a thing met on the road, which kills on the spot whoever finds it, appears in a book of 1954.

The version canonical today — the deer's asaduras demanded of the father, the entrails cooked, the ají in the wounds, the dogs set on him by his grandfather, the scale do re mi fa sol la si, the six metres of height, the counting of the bones in front of the house — is in none of those texts. The rule by which a whistle heard far off means he is near I found in a Colombian tale of 1980.

What it was forthe author’s reading

The best documented functional datum I found concerns not morality but social life: a volume of the series Estudios regionales: sistemas ambientales venezolanos (1988) writes that the llanero holds no gatherings or dances at home for fear of El Silbón, and that El Silbón «does not tolerate laughter». Here fear does not correct vices: it suspends the parties. Popular sources instead have him strike the drunks and the womanisers who roam at night, and name three defences within everyone's reach: a dog, a whip, a chilli.

The tale belongs to the repertory of the cuenteros of the llano: Daniel Mato, who interviewed them in the 1980s, names El Silbón and La Sayona among the stories told. The formula «legend of social control» circulates widely online and in popular writing, but I have not found it argued in a study I was able to open.

Where it is attested

The earliest dated printed attestation I found is Santos Erminy Arismendi, Huellas folklóricas: tradiciones, leyendas, brujería y supersticiones, Caracas, Editorial Oceánida, 1952, 287 pp., entry «EL SILBON» at p. 223: I read the text of the page in snippet preview on Google Books, reassembling it through several phrase searches, and did not handle the volume. One Google Books record gives 1950 as the year; Open Library and the main record give 1952. Next come the Venezuelan school magazine Tricolor (Ministerio de Educación), vol. 5, 1953, with the localisation in Portuguesa and Barinas; then Aurelio Martínez Mutis, Biografía de Elena Mutis, 1954, p. 233, with the bolsa de huesos. I found nothing earlier than 1952 in Google Books, and I could not consult the Venezuelan folklore journals of the 1940s and 1950s.

Later corroborations, all seen in snippet preview: José del Real Montilla, Así es Barinas, 1974; José Antonio León Rey, El pueblo relata, 1980, p. 188, a Colombian tale with the whistle that «sounded very far off»; Cuentos apureños: antología, 1984; Daniel Mato, El arte de narrar y la noción de literatura oral, Caracas 1990, p. 80; Mercedes Franco, Diccionario de fantasmas, misterios y leyendas de Venezuela, 2001. The Enzyklopädie des Märchens names him in its article on Venezuela (p. 68) and refers to Luis Arturo Domínguez, Documentos para el estudio del folklore literario de Venezuela, Caracas 1976. Margarita Safar, Sinópsis de los informes de viajes, 1947-1975 (2005), p. 42, lists «silbón» among the material gathered on a mission of the Venezuelan folklore service from the informant Zoraida de Betancourt: it is the best archival lead, but from the snippet I could not establish the year of the mission.

Caution

Grade B. The dated first attestation exists and I have read it, but in preview snippets: I opened none of the texts I cite in full, I did not establish who collected the tale in 1952 or from whom, and the earlier period remains unexplored because the Venezuelan folklore journals of those years were not accessible to me. Above all, there is no scholarly literature to cite: on SciELO the word yields a single result, and it is the duck; on Dialnet none of the three results concerns the figure; on OpenAlex there are two SSRN preprints of 2025 and little else. No dictionary of folklore, no monograph, no peer-reviewed study.

What does not hold. The «pre-Columbian» or «indigenous» origin has no source, and the 1952 text contradicts it on its own: the trait that identifies him is that he is tall enough to touch the electric light wires. The Spanish Wikipedia gives the mid-nineteenth century as the «first report»: its notes point to popular sites and archived blogs, not to any nineteenth-century text, and I found none. The dogs' names do not hold: «perro Tureco» and «perros del Diablo» I saw only on Wikipedia, on Scribd and on blogs, never in a book; «Cuatro Ojos» yields not a single result anywhere. Nor does the notion that the current version is the old one hold: in 1952 the dead man killed his parents, not his father alone, and seeks for ever the lost phalanx of his little finger — a detail now vanished — and there are no dogs, no ají, no musical scale, no inverted rule of the whistle. In other versions the victim is his brother. Of any link with the wind or with the mal de ojo I found no trace in any printed source.

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.