El Coco

El Coco, or Coco, is the shapeshifting bogeyman figure of Iberian folklore, believed to have originated in Galicia and Portugal before spreading across Spain and, through colonization, throughout Latin America, where it remains one of the most widely told childhood scare-tales in the Spanish-speaking world. He is rarely given a fixed shape, usually just a shadowy, formless figure or a monster hiding in dark corners, closets, or under beds, coming to snatch away children who refuse to sleep or misbehave. In 1799, Francisco de Goya immortalized the threat in his print "Que viene el Coco" ("Here comes the bogeyman"), plate three of Los Caprichos, showing a hooded figure looming over a mother clutching her frightened children, proof of how deeply the phrase was already woven into everyday Spanish parenting by the late 18th century. Because his form is deliberately vague, every region and even every family imagines El Coco differently, which folklorists take as evidence he functions purely as a pedagogical device for enforcing bedtime and obedience, not as a creature anyone genuinely expected to encounter, unlike lake monsters tied to a specific landscape.