The Three Brujas

Among the stately granite tombstones in a quaint historical cemetery are three unmarked concrete graves. Local legend says that these graves hold the remains of three witches (or brujas) who inflicted some kind of horrible evil on the community, although it seems that no one living can remember exactly what that was.

Whatever they did must have been bad though, because supposedly the graves are covered in concrete in order to seal off the spirits from the physical realm, thereby protecting the town from whatever, or whomever, is buried below.

Whether you believe in magic or not, the legend has led curious Taoseños to research the origins of the story. While other inhabitants of Kit Carson Cemetery in Taos, New Mexico, are noted by name and plot, the only reference to the mysterious concrete graves lists their occupants vaguely as “Three Taos Women.”

While the infamous 1692 witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, are better-known, New Mexico had its own trials between 1756 and 1766. Historians agree that witchcraft in the region generally referred to pagan or mystical beliefs outside the Catholic Church. Colonial Spain had brought Catholicism here in the centuries prior. Wanting to quell native religious practices, the Church labeled any native religious practices witchcraft and punished practitioners, often brutally.

Any factual evidence linking these three graves in Taos to such a history has been lost to time, if it ever existed at all. Still, the legend endures.