Every Town - Is The Chupacabra Real? Probably Not, But it's A Great Story

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

They’ve been seen all throughout Puerto Rico, Latin America and the Southwestern United States. It’s a well known beast that many of us have heard stories about and even seen pictures of an yet it remains an elusive mystery…and it’s called the Chupacabra. 💥 Watch On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/scarymysteries🎧 Our Other Podcast: https://scarymysteries.buzzsprout.com💥 Exclusive Podcasts: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1235579/subscribe 💀 Follow Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries 💀 Follow Our Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg👁 Follow Our TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald💥 Follow Our Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial🗣 Business Inquiries: [e-mail] Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you love true crime, grab your favorite mug and pour yourself a dose of creepy true crime every single morning with a morning cup of murder. This short daily show is the perfect podcast to incorporate into your morning routine because in less than 15 minutes, you'll hear about a true crime that took place on a day's date in history. Each day's dark history lesson will kickstart your morning with intriguing tales of murder, abduction, serial killers, cults, and everything in between.

With over 20 million downloads, Morning Cup of Murder has something for every true crime lover. One listener describes the show as a small package with a powerful punch of crime. Another writes that the show is an absolute delight in the morning. Support yourself a piping hot cup of murder every single morning with Morning Cup of Murder. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every town has a dark side. They've been seen all throughout Puerto Rico, Latin America, and the southwestern United States. It's a well-known beast that many of us have heard stories about and even seen pictures of,

yet it remains an elusive mystery. It's called the chupacabra. This creature, hunts at night, is known to prey on wildlife and livestock. Farmers and citizens come out in the morning to find their pets. or many of their animals dead except something's off. Because unlike any animal that we know about in existence, this one bites its prey just like a vampire and then sucks out all their blood. I'm Andy Fitzgerald.

Thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode of Everytown. A lot's been said about the Chupacabra. Every now and then, stories of its sightings or killings will pop up in the news. So today we're going to dive deep into the last. legend of this crypted creature to find out whether or not it could in fact actually exist, or is this some sort of strange figment of our collective, overactive imaginations? So let's head down to Puerto Rico, where it all started, to kick off the creepy truth about the chupacabra.

An espagnol, the word chupa means suck, and chabras means goats. So then the literal translation of the word chupacabra is goat sucker. The birthplace of this creature, or at least the inception of its existence, really dates back to 1975 when in the small town of Moka in Puerto Rico. A series of livestock killings were attributed to something that no one could explain. A farmer found some of his goats have been killed in a very strange way as they appeared to have small circular incisions. mostly around the neck, but sometimes along the body, and they had died just from that. Their flesh had not been eaten in any way, and so it didn't seem like it could be any regular predatory animal looking for a meal. As a result, it was then believed that the dead animals

have been sucked dry of their own blood, and quickly, the cause was being named the vampire of mocha. Whether or not it was a man or beast who was responsible was anyone's guess. Many said that people had to have been responsible because no animal just sucks the blood for food. Mothers believed that killings were attributed to some kind of satanic cult who likely drained the animals in order to use the blood and some rituals. The investigations led nowhere, but the fact remained. And whether it was people doing this or some strange creature, well either option is equally terrifying. A short while later, more killings would be reported for, from all around the island of Puerto Rico,

with the animals being dispatched in a similar way, and then, just as quickly as they started, the killing stop. It then became a story of folklore amongst the varying communities across the island. Any child growing up would hear these stories of the strange killings, whether from a relative or friend,

each town or person adding their own spin to who and what was behind it. Theories were, of course, the satanic cult. Others thought aliens, but many figured it was a creature that lay in the forest somewhere out there roaming its way from town to town. That's how it stayed for a couple of decades. Just that creepy thing that happened a few years back. That is, until it started happening again. And this time, people actually saw it.

Now, because the legend of the Chubicabra is so prevalent, Many people think that its true origin story dates back further than it does. So for comparison, the legend of the Bigfoot goes back almost a thousand years. The Native Americans drawing petroglyphs on a rock depicting the Bigfoot, which they called the hairy man. The Loch Ness Monster's earliest report was written back in the 7th century in life of St. Columba by Adamnan. In the text, he writes of an Irish monk who swam in the river net,

before witnesses say he was pulled under by some sort of water beast. When an investigation was done, people went to search for whatever this creature was. That's when they saw the huge beast themselves that we now call the Loch Ness monster swimming through the Wanners. And the Jersey Devil, which has similar characteristics to the Chupacabra, has its origins starting in the early 1700s. There was a huge rash of sightings of the devil back in 1909. when hundreds claimed of being attacked, or at least witnessing, a flying bipedal beast with hooves.

Interestingly, its common description is of looking like it has the body of a kangaroo, which is also how the chupacabra has been described, which we'll get into more in a moment. But the chupacabra is different from all these other older and perhaps more well-known cryptids, and that it only officially got its name back in 1995, after an attack which killed 8,000, sheep and got people talking about the vampire of mocha again. In fact, it was a comedian named Silvio Perez who had a radio show in Puerto Rico when the news broke and he commented on the attacks, almost in a joking way that it was a chupacabra. After that, the name stuck. But the reality was that back in 1995, the entire island was up in arms about these sheep being killed,

and you can understand why. Almost everyone there, it's spend their lives, or at least a good chunk of it, hearing the tales about livestock, having their blood sucked down to them. And now, it was happening right before their eyes in real time, and so they wanted answers. Historically, the people of Puerto Rico have always had a little bit of an issue with the fact that America gets to claim them as a territory. They want to be independent and are certainly geographically not really close to the U.S. So they feel a bit exploited, and there is an anti-U.S. center. among many of the people who live there.

Now, the U.S. has a military outpost on the island called Fort Buchanan. They have other buildings, and so there were talks on the island about some top-secret scientific experiments that the government was doing, specifically in the L. Yunquay rainforest, where perhaps they created some sort of animal or crossbreed that caught out of hand and now was wreaking havoc on the locals. That idea caught on even more with many people there when an eyewitness got so close to this chupacabra they could smell the foul odor emanating from the creature. It was March of 1995 when those eight murdered sheep were found one early morning.

Just like back in 1975 they hadn't been eaten and they weren't sick. So it appeared as if the severely bloodthirsty beast was now somehow back, When inspecting the sheep, they all had puncture wounds on their chest and had reportedly, although not proven, been drained of their blood. Things may have calmed down if this was the only attack, but instead the exact opposite happened. Over the next several months, over 150 farm animals and pets met similar fates as the sheep. Chickens, cats, dogs, goats, rabbits, all of them were left strown around forest floors and farms, but no blood left in their bodies.

And by August of that year, a woman who was in her home and Kenavanas. It was in her bedroom one night getting ready for bed when she heard something outside. She made her way to the window, and that's when she witnessed something she had never seen before. This creature was moving slowly, perhaps stalking prey. Like the Jersey devil, this too looked like a kangaroo of some sort. It was bipedal, but as it crept along, would occasionally crouch down on all floors as if bending. over to smell the grass to catch a scent. As she moved in to get a closer look, with a window open to crack, she said she could smell the thing, and it reeked like rotting eggs. And this thing

had black eyes and reptilian-like skin with spines moving down the entirety of its back, and its head down to the tail. Then over the next several days, others in the area said they too had seen it, and corroborated her description, although some accounts varied. There were those who said it walked on all fours and not two. And people who said there was a tale when others said there wasn't. But it was always nighttime when they saw it, so it could be hard to see all the details depending. Back in 95, the public's use of the internet was just getting started, and soon the word spread all over the world about the chupacabra,

who was on the loose in Puerto Rico sucking animals' blood, blogs and an AOL chat rooms. For a time, all people talked to. about was the chupacabra, and soon the mainstream media was dipping their toes into the stories as well. Of course, the more the news spread, the more sightings would pop up. It didn't take long before there were reports throughout Latin America that had people coming forward either with their own eyewitness accounts or, at the very least, their animals having been killed with the strange puncture wounds. By 2000, the news had really spread up into the

United States, and people mainly in Texas, but really all across the southwestern U.S. had their stories to tell. In February of 2014 in Victoria County in South Texas, Doug Orte and his family were at their home when they heard a chilling howl coming from outside. His grandson ran outside to see a creature with burnt-looking skin about the size of a coyote with no hair, scaly skin, and large teeth, and so he shot it. Two months later in April, Bubba Parma, from Radcliffe, Texas, was taken care of his property when he came upon something that terrified him and his wife, Jackie. It was a small, hairless, four-legged animal screaming and wailing in pain that looked like it had been abandoned by its mother. It didn't think much of it and wrapped it in a towel and brought

it home, whereupon a closer inspection, realized they were looking at a baby Chupacombra. They had recently heard the story from out in Victoria County. In 2019, there was national news out of Houston. When someone caught an unusual creature in a photo, which many were saying was none other than the elusive mythical creature. And very recently, in October of 2022, headlines everywhere read, Zoo captures Chupacabra creature in Amarillo, Texas, and local officials want answers.

The image they grabbed from CCTV, which shows something very strange walking on two legs behind a fence at one of the enclosures went viral. Really, there are many images of purported chupacabras all over. And, for good reason. They're pretty terrifying. One popular one is that of the Montauk monster, which no one knows what that creature actually is, which is interesting. To this day, it could be a raccoon, a sea turtle, a roland. a dog, a sheep, depending on who you ask. But regardless, it looks like a hairless beast of some sort,

bloated and with sharp teeth that washed ashore on the sands of Montauk, New York. Interestingly, just how the Puerto Rican say that the U.S. government was doing experiments on their land with animals, while a few miles from Montauk is a tiny lamb mass called Plum Island. If you're a civilian and you try to get close to this spot, it'll be chased away by guards because there is a government facility here that not many people can access. There's a long history to the island. It's become well believed that here there's a top secret animal testing facility and said to be where Lyme disease was created among others,

and is where the Montauk monster came from before it was either dumped or escaped and washed ashore and where the pictures of it were taken. Or at least that's what the story is. But ultimately, how do we know if the Chupacabra is real or not? And that's the million-dollar question. Well, we don't really have concrete answers, but we're pretty close, thanks to the help of a writer named Benjamin Radford, who followed the story of the Chupacabra cases from the start

and decided he was going to get answers one way or another. Now, Benjamin was admittedly skeptical, as I think most people are, but if this creature was out there, then he wanted to find it. And if it wasn't, well, then he'd find that too. He ended up taking five years to research all the cases where he spoke with witnesses, traveled through farmlands in Puerto Rico and the southern United States in the forests of South America, on a quest to unveil the enigmatic existence of the Chupacabra.

Down in Texas, all those sightings and photos could be the beast, if that's what you want to believe. But the truth is, there's a much simpler answer. answer at play. According to Radford, it's a skin disease that's fairly common in dogs and likewise coyotes called sarcoptic mange. Mange are microscopic mites that burrow into the animal's skin and it's highly contagious, affecting mostly wild canids like dogs, wolves, coyotes, and even foxes. It causes the animals to have very itchy skin which they bite and claw at. Eventually they start to lose their hair because all the scratchy,

they develop tough skin and scabs that can look scaly. So the kid who shot the chupacabra down in South Texas, well, that turned out to be a coyote with Mange. And Bubba Parma and his wife brought in a small dog. That also had Mange, so that wasn't a Chupacabra either. The picture from Houston was also believed by many to be a coyote with Mange. And the photo from the Amarillo Zoo turned out to be a hoax. Whether the photo is real or not is up for debate.

The zoo hasn't spoken up about it because they've enjoyed all the skeptical debates as it's brought in an influx of customers. So much so, they're planning a chupacabra hunting expedition open to the public for a small fee, of course. The picture may be of a real animal at the zoo, and it just looks strange, so they posted it online with a chupacabra title, and it took off, as people discussed, its authenticity. The Chubacabra gets people to click, ultimately. That's why there's still headlines from time to time when people know it's not the actual creature. In regards to the dead animals, well, it's never been proven that all the blood was sucked out. That was more an assumption because typically when an animal attacks another,

it either viciously hurts it in a fight to defend itself, or it's killing it to eat it. That's general knowledge, but what is in general knowledge is that according to the BBC, see it's not uncommon for a dog to bite another animal and then leave it to die without any other injuries or intention to consume it. They may see it as a threat or competition and take it out or try and injure it. The animal may bleed out over the course of a long time and so there's no gruesome scene where they pass. When a canine has mange, it also becomes weak, so it makes sense that it would want to kill other animals in the area with the least amount of effort in order to help pare down competition for food.

Some of the sightings are harder to explain, like the ones from 95 where Madeline Tolentino saw the creature outside her window. But Radford seemed to think there could be a more rational explanation. See, that year the film Species came out, and some of it had actually been filmed in Puerto Rico. In it, an alien human hybrid looks very similar to what Madeline described, and she had also recently seen the movie right before her sighting. According to Radford, he said, it's all there. She sees the movie, and then later she sees something she mistakes for a monster.

So ultimately, with the internet just catching on back then, and people felt like they were breaking news for the first time around the world before being told by the actual news outlets. It wasn't intoxicating and fun idea until the idea of Chupacabra took off. as if now we can all talk and we can figure it out ourselves and find the secret truths of cryptids and everything else if we use our hive mind. It's because of this, the idea that chupacabra still persists to this day, because it's fun and it's exciting and strange. You clicked on this episode because you wanted to know the truth about the chubicabra for all those reasons. Well, there may be some strange creature out there sucking animal blood that we haven't caught yet, chances are there's a logical explanation. And that is that it's more fun to believe.

So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown. I hope you enjoyed it. Go check out this episode in video form over on our YouTube channel called Scary Mysteries. And for more podcasts from us, check out the Scary Mysteries podcast. Thanks for tuning in today. And please do come back next week for another episode filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories. Because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.