THE CHILLING CHANGELLING CHUPACABRA

Hello!

Today we’ll investigate a mystery as gruesome as it is creepy. Hair-raising stories claim that a vampire beast stalks the shadows—stealthy, silent, and thirsty for blood. According to these tales, the chupacabra—or “goatsucker”— is rarely seen. It strikes farms in the night, feasting on blood from goats, sheep, chickens, and other helpless prey. These stories first terrified people in Puerto Rico, then spread to many other places. Some claim it is an unknown animal. Others say it is an alien predator or secret experiment gone wrong. What is the truth behind this modern vampire legend?

Let’s find out!

Bloodthirsty Rumors

We’ll begin our story with a warning. The trail of the chupacabra is a dark path indeed. We must bravely face monster claims, horror movies, and the grim realities of death.

The chupacabra legend began with the mysterious deaths of farm animals. On numerous mornings in 1995, in various places across the U.S. island terrority of Puerto Rico, farmers woke up to shocking sights. They stared in horror at the remains of farm animals killed during the night. Farmers and neighbors struggled to explain what happened. These animal deaths seemed… strange. Unnatural. In many cases, the animals were not eaten. Instead, witnesses said that the animals appeared to be drained of blood. Terrified people began to whisper a word from ancient folklore: vampire! It may sound weird for modern people to be scared of vampires. And yet, similar rumors have spread many times in many places throughout history. Often they start when people or animals sicken or die for no obvious reason. Unexplained deaths make people feel afraid. “Why is this happening?” survivors ask. “Could we be the next victims? How can we keep ourselves safe?”

JUNIOR SKEPTIC No. 72 (2019)

If people are unable to find a natural cause or enemy to fight, they may leap to the conclusion that some hidden supernatural threat is to blame. “Witches are harming people with black magic!” rumors may claim, or “Vampires are attacking in the night!”

The Power of Blood

Weakened spirits scramble to drink sheep’s blood in the ancient Greek saga the Odyssey. (Image courtesy rijksmuseum, Netherlands

Modern fictional Dracula-type vampire stories have been told for two hundred years. These were inspired by vampire folklore that goes back centuries more. But the blood-drinking idea is much older still. Long before the vampire legend was born, ancient stories spoke of other blood-drinking monsters, demons, and spirits. Vampirelike stories are probably as old as language itself.

For thousands of years, people have known that there is a connection between having blood and being alive. “There is great vitality …in the blood,” said the ancient Roman writer Pliny the Elder. When creatures lose their blood, “it carries the life with it,” Pliny explained.

People in Pliny’s time did not know that blood carries the oxygen and nutrients that our muscles and organs need to function. Instead, many guessed that blood must be filled with some sort of mysterious, mystical life force. Ancient people therefore imagined that drinking blood might allow one creature to absorb life energy from another. After all, leeches and biting insects remain alive by sucking blood for their food. Some falsely believed that drinking a strong person’s blood could restore a sick person to health.

“Epileptic patients are in the habit of drinking the blood even of gladiators,” Pliny said. They thought blood was a “cure for their disease” because it was “teeming with life.” When a gladiator was stabbed, these patients would gruesomely “apply their mouth to the wound, to draw forth his very life”—much as fictional vampires do in modern movies. (Pliny was disgusted by this horrifying spectacle.) It was even imagined that drinking blood could partially restore life to the dead. In one story from Greek mythology, the hero Odysseus confronts a horde of ghosts. The spirits are screaming, mindless, insane beings until Odysseus offers them sheep’s blood to drink. The blood gives the ghosts enough life energy to remember things and to speak. “Any ghost that you let taste of the blood will talk with you like a reasonable being,” one spirit explains after drinking. In this story, the power of blood is useful and good. Odysseus provides sheep’s blood as a gift. This gift recharges the spirits enough to become helpful and even to feel love.

Vampires

But if blood can be gifted, it can also be stolen. Centuries later, medieval legends spoke of dead bodies brought partly back to life. When people in a village sickened and died, some blamed the sickness on zombie-like undead “revenants.” These walking dead supposedly left their graves at night to terrorize the living, spreading disease wherever they went. Over hundreds of years, revenant legends slowly combined with ancient ideas about the power of blood. A new kind of monster was imagined: the bloodthirsty vampire!

One rare early example was told in England almost nine hundred years ago. According to this supposedly true story, a rather nasty man died from a fall, only to return as a wandering corpse. The “air became foul and tainted” as this rotten, “corrupting body wandered abroad, so that a terrible plague broke out,” killing many people in the village. Eventually two brave young men dug up the grave of the suspected revenant. They “dealt the corpse a sharp blow with the keen edge of a spade, and immediately there gushed out such a stream of warm red gore that they realized this bloodsucker had battened upon the blood of many poor folk.” The men then burned the corpse to ashes on a huge bonfire. The plague ended. The village was saved! As centuries went by, bloodsucking vampire claims evolved and became more common. One case was investigated by German-speaking authorities around three hundred years ago. A man named Arnold Paole died in an accident. Soon afterward, several people in his village sickened and died. Rumors claimed that Paole had risen from the dead as a vampire. Community leaders opened Paole’s grave and drove a stake through his body. They also beheaded him. Then they burned the body just for good measure. They weren’t taking any chances! By this time, folklore claimed that a vampire’s victims could also become vampires. To be safe, the townspeople also dug up and destroyed the bodies of everyone else who died during the panic.