Mami Wata is venerated throughout Africa and the African diaspora as a being of great spiritual power who is associated with health, wealth, love, and good fortune. She can be beneficent or malevolent — depending on the obedience of her followers. She can shower them with good luck or drown them for insolence. As a water deity, she appears as a mermaid and recruits new followers by abducting them from water.

This story tells the tale of an impoverished miller who seeks a better life for his only daughter. To save the mill, they arrange for her marriage to a wealthy man from out of town. She wants to help her family and do what is right, but something wicked lurks in the woods where the bridegroom lives.

Ifrit are powerful supernatural figures in Islamic faith and folklore. Described as winged creatures made of smoke, they are aligned with the spirits of the dead, and are both evil and magical, and capable of good. They live in complex societies preferring caves underground, and able to change the course of our fate. Like us, they feel passion and pain and joy and suffering. Forged from fire by Allah, they have free will.

In Chinese mythology, Jingwei is a Spirit Guardian, a bird. Transformed after she drowned when playing in the Eastern Sea, she is determined to fill up the sea, so she continuously carries a pebble or twig in her mouth to drop it into the sea.

Nass Shaak Aankáawu (Nobleman at the Head of the Nass River) was hoarding many treasures, including the light. When Yéil (Raven) learned that the man had a daughter who drank from a stream every morning, Yéil turned himself into a hemlock or spruce needle and floated into her cup. She drank him; became pregnant; and Yéil, born in human form, became the love of their lives. Nass Shaak Aankáawu provided every luxury and toy to his precocious grandson. When the child cried for the boxes that held the stars, the moon and the sun, his grandfather could not refuse him. One by one, Yéil T’ukanéiyi (Raven Baby) incessantly cried for and released the stars, the moon and the daylight, much to the dismay of Nass Shaak Aankáawu but much to the benefit of the people and animals of the world. Realizing he was the victim of extreme deceit, Nass Shaak Aankáawu forever marked Yéil by holding him in the smoke of the fireplace, altering his color, turning him from the white spiritual being into the black color he is today.

La Llorona, known as 'the Crying Woman, or the Wailer', is a vengeful ghost in Mexican folklore who is said to roam near bodies of  water mourning her children whom she drowned in a jealous rage after discovering her husband was unfaithful to her. Whoever hears her crying either suffers misfortune or death and their life becomes unsuccessful in every field.

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Her story is connected to specific Aztec mythological creation stories, such as "The Hungry Woman", a wailing woman constantly crying for food, compared to La Llorona's signature nocturnal wailing for her children.