El Chupacabra

September 26th, 2007 | webmaster | Beast of Bladenboro

By Kelly Baldwin

While flipping channels the other night, I came across a documentary type program that featured a mythical creature called el Chupacabra. It caught my attention right away because it described a creature that moved about at night and apparently sucked the blood out of its victim! I thought, “Aha, a parallel to the Beast of Bladenboro!”

The program even had a caricature of a formidable looking creature riding atop a hapless goat; its long fangs sunk deep into the goat’s neck. All this was supposed to be somewhere in South America. I thought about it again today and decided to see if I could find anything about it on the internet.

There is a lot of information about it on the internet! I learned that the name in Spanish for “goat sucker”. Chupa apparently means “to suck” and cabra means goat. A common thread among the several web sites I visited is that these creatures stand erect, on two legs, and have a sort of lizard-like appearance with spines along their back and a long tail. Various reports described them as being anywhere from three to six feet tall. One web site suggested that they also resemble a Panther. Animals commonly attacked included goats, sheep, dogs and even some birds. There were lots of links that supposedly would take you to stories of actual details of attacks by these animals. No one, however, was willing to say that any humans had been attacked.

Puerto Rico seemed to be the most likely place to see one, however, South and Central America were frequently mentioned, as was Texas.

The various accounts all seemed to agree that the victim was drained of all its blood and in some cases even of its internal organs! Entry was made by small punctures to the neck and there would never be any blood left around the carcass.

Everything about this mythical creature mirrored our Beast of Bladenboro, with the exception of its being on two legs, whereas ours was on four.

Perhaps now, we have the answer to what happened to our beast. Maybe it was Chupacabra and was frightened away by all those professional hunters; migrated first to Texas, then on to Central and South America!

The general time frame for first sightings of El Chupacabra was in the 1970’s and 1980’s. If you have more interest, just type Chupacabra into your search engine and you will be surprised at what pops up! Hey! If the word gets out, maybe one or two of them will show up when we have our first Beast Fest! After all, “Birds of a feather, flock together…”