EL CHUPACABRA

An evil creature with large fangs and a thirst for blood is said to plague the nights of Puerto Rico…

It started in 1995, when Puerto Rico was ravaged by a series of strange incidents. These events would start a wave of mass hysteria in what has become known as the legend of the goatsucker, or El Chupacabra. According to www.paranormalhaze.com, The Chupacabra is in the top-ten of most famous monsters. After fifteen years of haunting, sightings and Chupacabra related events have been reported as far away as Moscow.


The Legend of The Chupacabra

In March of 1995, eight sheep were discovered dead in the Barrio Campo Rico neighborhood of Canóvanas, Puerto Rico, completely drained of blood. With only three puncture wounds on each animal, local farmers were mystified, but disregarded the attack.  In the months that followed, the animal attacks intensified. By August, as many as 150 animals had been killed and drained of blood. But, the perpetrator had yet to be caught. Around 4 o’clock in the afternoon in early August, 1995, Madelyne Tolentino was helping her mother move in to the family home in Canóvanas. She looked out of the front window of her home and saw a demonic creature lurking in the bush. “Eyes like fathomless pools of murky mercilessness that went right the way up to the hairline…Four feet tall, walked upright like a human but had only three fingers/toes at the end of each extremity…No ears or nose, but a spiky back.”(Burchill, 14) Madelyne Tolentino soon realized the strange beast she saw must be the blood-sucking monster that the farmers had been reporting. This was the first eye-witness account of the goat sucker. Reported attacks and sightings spread like wild fire, and the legend of El Chupacabra was born.

          “The Chupacabra is a Puerto Rican legend that started up in the 90s. I remember being younger and seeing news reports on Univision of “EL CHUPACABRA ATACA PUERTO RICO!” (The Chupacabra attacks Puerto Rico).  One particular news story I remember, was watching people on TV running towards the camera to get away from a fire off in the distance.  The story was that the Chupacabra supposedly started the fire after it had attacked some animals and had been seen by people. They described a reptile like creature that was fast and had spikes down its back. The creature was very ugly. A farmer that was interviewed claimed it was a demon sent to terrorize their farms… I don't remember this being the first time I heard about the monster because it was always something my siblings and I would joke about. My dad grew up in Puerto Rico and living in Tulsa there was only one television channel (Univision) that gave the news of Latin America. We watched it religiously. There would be stories of The Chupacabra from time to time. The stories were always farmers saying their goats or cows had been attacked and sucked dry of all their blood. There was no blood spilled around the animals and there always seemed to be bite marks on the animals too. The only logical explanation to them seemed to be an evil creature hungry for blood! These were mostly lower-class farmers, so they usually weren't educated and seemed like crazy old men or possibly drunks trying to complain about their animals dying. “

     “When the animals started showing up dead it was also thought to be a Satanic Ritual or cruel pranks until more accounts started showing up around the island. There were never any bedtime stories about it besides El Vampiro de Moca (The vampire of Moca, a town in Puerto Rico). The stories were close to the same accounts of the Chupacabra but occurred back in the 1970s. If I mentioned the Chupacabra to my family from Puerto Rico or Panama they would laugh and think I was just a silly little kid believing in made up stories.”

The media in Central-America jumped on the Chupacabra stories. Spreading the legend like wildfire. “Among the monsters said to roam the world's desolate deserts and dense jungles, perhaps none is more feared than the blood-thirsty Chupacabra. For some people it's a joke. To many people it's a very real creature… and for the past fifteen years, The Chupacabra’s origin has remained shrouded in mystery”, says Benjamin Radford, senior editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. In his book “Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore,” Benjamin Bradford describes his theory about the origin of The Chupacabra.


The accepted image of the goatsucker bears strikingly similar characteristics to another beast, an Alien Monster called Sil from the Science Fiction movie Species. The movie was released in theaters on July 7th, 1995, just one month prior to Madelyne Tolentino’s encounter with the Chupacabra. Species, opens with a scene set in none-other than Puerto Rico's Arecibo Radio Observatory.  Tolentino, who admits to seeing the film weeks before her “encounter” with the beast, remains that she really did see the monster on that August afternoon.  

 

Weather or not Madelyn Tolentino’s account is true or not, the phenomenon of the Chupacabra will stay alive. People who believe the Chupacabra legend is real,  may not realize they are "participating in a very ancient and socially important ritual in which communal space is defined and in which the boundaries of civilization are constructed.”(Dendle 190) A sense of adventurism surrounds the legend of the goatsucker, a primordial instinct of hunting. Bradford says that many people have focused their lives around finding the Chupacabra. “The Frontier” of our world, in terms of geography, has nearly been destroyed. But humans have a need to discover, and a need to dwell on the unknown. It’s a trait that separates man from beast.

“In an age when evolutionary scientists have all but robbed Judeo-Christians of their account of creation, genetic engineering appears to threaten the sanctity and individuality of human life, and medical authorities continuously make the general populace feel guilty about those very hallmarks of an affluent leisure-society that it treasures most (high- fat and high-sugar diet, recreational use of tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceuticals, and inactivity), it is natural that an undercurrent of resistance to beliefs imposed from above by an academic elite should flourish.”(Dendle 200)

 

With the exploring of new frontiers and the appearance of new legends conceives two things: enthusiasm and fear. For the believers of the Chupacabra, they are personally countering institutional academic beliefs. It is empowering, the goat herder being onto something that professors at leading universities do not know about. When groups of questioners converge, a counter culture emerges. The culture surrounding the Chupacabra legend is rich. Movies, video games, toys, books and tourist destinations have emerged, as well as jokes, rejection, and mass hysteria. “The perceived danger needs only to be plausible in order to gain acceptance within a particular group and generate anxiety”(Bartholomew 304) Legend of the Chupacabra will continue to scare and empower the farmers of Puerto Rico. If anything, it’s something to talk about.

 

 

Works Cited

 

  1. "urban, adj. and legend, n. and myth, n.". OED Online. September 2011. Oxford University Press. 17 November 2011 <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/220386?redirectedFrom=urban%20legend>
  2. "10 Famous Monster Pictures and Their Story - Paranormal Haze." Paranormal Haze - Paranormal Stories. Web. 15 Nov. 2011. <http://www.paranormalhaze.com/10-famous-monster-pictures-and-their-story/>.
  3. Burchill, Julie. "Say Goodbye to the Enlightenment. We Are Living in the Age of Goatsuckers." The Indepedent [London] 27 Jan. 2011, First ed., News sec.: 14-15. Print.
  4. Radford, Benjamin. Tracking the Chupacabra: the Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2011. Print.
  5. Dendle, Peter. "Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds." Folklore 117.2 (2006): 190-206. Print.
  6. Bartholomew, Robert E. and Wessely, Simon. "Protean nature of mass sociogenic illness: From possessed nuns to chemical and biological terrorism fears", British Journal of Psychiatry, Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2002
  7. Victoria, Joy, “Texas' Blood-Sucking Monster” ABC News-Vallarta Living: Art Talk, March 2006
  8. Species. Dir. Roger Donaldson. Perf. Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen, Alfred Molina, Forest Whitaker, Marg Helgenberger, and Natasha Henstridge. Metro-goldwyn-mayer. Film.
  9. Martin, Jorge. "El Chupacabra." Cartoon. The Scam Man. 30 Mar. 2011. Web. 16 Nov. 2011. <http://thescamman.com/?p=783>.