The Chupacabra was thought to be a creature standing about one metre high with long back legs and shorter front ones. It hopped about like a kangaroo or dinosaur. Some reports alleged that when disturbed or frightened, it emitted a screeching noise, and also began to hiss. In addition, it left a revolting smell behind it, as of sulphur. Furthermore, its eyes glowed red in the dark, and could cause the onlooker to succumb to waves of nausea.
As well as being likened to a bear and a reptile, the Chupacabra was sometimes compared to a dog. In this description, it was a hairless wolf-like animal with deep eye sockets, large fangs, and claws. The characteristic spine of quills running down its back was also evident.
Bloodsucking vampire
In March 1995, eight sheep in Puerto Rico were found to have died. Each one of them reportedly had three puncture wounds near the neck and had been entirely drained of blood. Subsequently, near the town of Canovanas, around 150 farm animals met a similar fate. No one knew the reason why until an eyewitness named Madelyne Tolentino reported that she had seen a peculiar animal lurking in the street where she lived, watching her as she hung out her washing to dry. She and her husband tried to capture it, but it beat a hasty retreat. Another eyewitness, Michael Negron, also claimed to have seen the beast hopping about in the dirt outside his house. ‘It was about three or four feet tall, with skin like that of a dinosaur,’ he reported. ‘It had eyes the size of hens’ eggs, long fangs, and multicoloured spikes down its head and back’. Convinced that these reports were true, the mayor of the town, Jose Soto Rivera, mounted a hunt for the animal, but it was never found.
El Vampiro de Moca
Two decades before, in the town of Moca, there had been similar killings of livestock. These had been attributed to a vampire, named ‘El Vampiro de Moca’. There had also been rumours that the livestock killed were victims of a satanic cult. Each of the animals had been bled dry, through small incisions in the neck and chest area.
Not surprisingly, the new spate of killings near Canovanas renewed anxiety that there was an evil, vampire-like creature stalking the area, and that it was merely a matter of time before human victims, especially small children, would be targeted. As similar animal deaths began to be reported in other Latin American countries – including Honduras, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Peru, Argentina, Panama, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Mexico – panic began to mount.
The Elmendorf Beast
The next development to cause a stir was in July 2004, when a rancher named Devin McAnally in Elmendorf, Texas, shot an animal that he saw attacking his livestock.
This time, the dead body of a supposed chupacabra was available for inspection, and the media rushed to cover the story. The corpse did indeed look grotesque. It was that of an emaciated, hairless dog with leathery blue-grey skin, long ears, and large pointed teeth. There were also small scales on the skin. The corpse was promptly dubbed the Elmendorf Beast and taken to the laboratory for tests. Various speculative theories then emerged as to its provenance.
One scientific opinion claimed that this was a Mexican Hairless Dog, a breed that is naturally devoid of hair, and that the unfortunate animal had undergone profound changes in appearance as a result of malnourishment, sickness, and possibly congenital abnormalities sustained at birth. Others suspected that it was a hybrid animal, possibly a cross between a wolf and a coyote. There was also a theory that the dog was suffering from severe sarcoptic mange, which would have caused all its hair to fall out. There were even suggestions that the animal might have been created in a laboratory, as part of a government medical research programme, and that the animal had somehow escaped into the wild.
In order to gain a rational explanation of the animal’s appearance, attempts were made to extract DNA from the corpse. The results showed that it was indeed some kind of dog. However, the corpse was too decayed for the tests to reveal more than that. Thus it was that the mystery was never resolved.
Whatever the truth that lay behind the mystery, it must be said that the pictures of the Elmendorf Beast’s corpse showed it to look more like a forlorn mangy coyote than the terrifying predator imagined in stories of the Chupacabra. To further bolster this impression, not long after this incident, two similar corpses were picked up in Texas and discovered to be coyotes suffering from severe cases of mange.
Big fangs
But the Chupacabra panic was not over. A year later, reports began to come in from Central Russia, where dozens of turkeys and sheep had mysteriously been killed overnight. As with the sheep in Latin America, there were bite marks on their necks and chest, and they had been completely drained of blood.
Next, residents in rural areas of Maine in the US began to complain of similar attacks on chickens. In addition, several dogs were reported to have been mauled by a larger creature.
At this point, a clue to the mystery suddenly came up. Back in Texas, a woman named Phylis Canion, who had lost many chickens to the supposed beast over the years, came across three unusual animal corpses near the perimeter of her farm. She photographed the corpses and put one of the heads into her freezer for identification. Experts were called in to view it, but their opinions were divided. The state mammologist, John Young, deemed it to be a grey fox suffering from mange. But biologists who studied the corpse’s DNA determined that it was a coyote. Yet, as many people pointed out, this beast was not like any coyote seen before. It had big fangs, grey-blue skin, and no hair.
In the years that followed there were other sightings from countries all over the world. In the Philippines, one farmer saw a dog-like animal attack his chickens, while once again in Texas, Brandon Riedel, a county deputy, filmed a hairless animal with a long snout loping along the back roads of the area. It had short front legs and long back ones. Once again, the animal was identified as a coyote, although it did seem very different from the rest of the species.
Today, the legend of the Chupacabra continues. Sightings are often reported, the creature being said to resemble many different animals, including rats, bats, kangaroos, and of course, hairless dogs. In some cases, there have been reports of the creature looking like a dinosaur.
The legend lives on
Not only this, there are also some theories that the Chupacabra may be a pet who has escaped from a race of aliens. Such creatures are known to UFO enthusiasts as ‘Anomolous Biological Entities’ or ABEs. It is argued that they have been created by alien beings who have developed ways of linking the genetic data of different organisms, creating hybrid creatures that may belong to extraterrestrial environments.
Not surprisingly, such theories are in general viewed with some scepticism. However, the persistent attacks on livestock, in which the animals are bitten at the chest and neck, and completely drained of blood, have to date still not been explained in a persuasive fashion. These continue to occur in different parts of the world, much to the consternation of farmers and rural dwellers in these areas.
Thus, until somebody comes up with a rational explanation for these mystifying attacks, the legend of the Chupacabra will continue to live on as one of the most intriguing urban myths of our time.
Psychology & Anthropology
On of the most ancient forms of female vampire is the Cihuateteo, a legendary figure from Aztec mythology. The Aztecs created a great and lasting empire from their heartland in Mexico up until the sixteenth century, when the area was colonized by the Spanish. Their spiritual, religious and artistic culture was highly developed and complex, and they worshipped a huge pantheon of gods, many of them conceived as extremely violent and hostile to human beings. As in many primitive cultures, these all-powerful gods needed to be propitiated, and sacrifices – including the sacrifice of human children – were made to them at different times of year to ensure their peaceful coexistence with the mortal world.
Among these deities was the Cihuateteo (also known as the Civateteo or Cihuateotl). She was the spirit of a woman who had died in childbirth. The Aztecs believe
d that giving birth to a child was a type of battle, in which the woman became a warrior. When a woman died in this way, she would be honoured as a fallen martyr, and worshipped accordingly.
Sexual misdeeds
However, the Cihuateteo’s spirit was not a benign presence in the world, and in the afterlife, a victim of childbirth would go on to haunt the living. In particular, she would come out when the sun set in the west, and wait at crossroads in the darkness of night to attack her victims. She was known for her ability to seduce any man so that he left his wife and family and became her sexual slave. In addition, she was thought to steal young children away from their mothers, and cause whole families and communities to succumb to sickness and disease. In particular, if individuals suffered epileptic fits, or showed signs of mental illness, this would often be put down to the malign influence of the Cihuateteo.
The Cihuateteo was much feared throughout the region, and was thought to become particularly dangerous at certain times of year, when she would leave her home in the sky and come down to the human world to cause misery and chaos. In some Aztec belief systems, the Cihuateteo was thought to be an emissary from Mictlan, the lowest level of the underworld, where the dead lived. In others, she was believed to be the handmaiden of the goddess Tlazolteotl. Tlazolteotl was a deity believed to have a dual role: on the one hand, she presided over the world of filth, vice, and adultery, and on the other, she had the power to purify individuals from their sins and heal the ills, including disease and family strife, caused by their sexual misdeeds.
Altar of skeletons
We can see images of the Cihuateteo today in various sculptures that date from the Mesoamerican civilization. In some cases, she is represented as having the face of a skeleton. Sometimes, her head is decorated with a garland of skeletons, and she may have a necklace of human hands. She is also depicted on some occasions as having talons like a bird of prey instead of hands. Her mouth may be open, so as to suck the blood of young infants from them, or she may show rows of sharp teeth, with which to tear apart the blood of her victims. Often, she sits on an altar of human skeletons, as befits her position as emissary from the home of the dead.
It is fascinating to note the way in which similar images occur in the folklore of different regions, and at different periods in history, across the world. For example, in the legend of the Cihuateteo, we find many links with the mythology of the European vampire: for example, the idea of the revenant or ghost who has suffered in life, and who comes back to wreak revenge on the living. And there are other points of similarity in this ancient Aztec story: for instance, the idea of bloodsucking and flesh eating; of sexual seduction, to the point where the victims forget or deny their family ties; of the spreading of communicable diseases, often fatal ones; and of the revenant inhabiting the souls of the living, so that they become mad and lose their reason entirely. In addition, we find particular details that each civilization has in common, such as the idea that evil spirits haunt crossroads. These are ideas that appear to occur in mythologies across the world, regardless of cultural and religious divides.
Carl Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’
This similarity between the various folkloric cultures of the world was observed by the psychiatrist Carl Jung, a contemporary of Freud’s. He built a theory around it, which he termed ‘the collective unconscious’. According to this idea, all humanity shares ‘a reservoir of the experiences of our species’ that is expressed in folklore, and in the archetypal figures within it, such as, in this instance, the bereaved mother. Just as Freud argued that each and every one of us has an unconscious (that is, a part of the mind that we are not fully aware of, and that drives our behaviour) Jung believed that the human race also shares a communal unconscious, which fuels the creation of folk tales, religion, and art. Freud himself did not share this belief in a collective unconscious, and the two psychoanalysts fell out over this and many other issues.
However, work in these fascinating fields continued, and soon particular images and figures from ancient folklore began to be discussed in the world of psychiatry. In the early part of the twentieth century, the figure of the vampire became the subject of an interesting correspondence between Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and his British biographer and follower, Ernest Jones.
The psychology of vampirism
Freud had argued, though not in any great depth, that belief in ‘hostile demons’ has a psychological cause: namely, that when a beloved person dies, negative feelings towards them are repressed, and that these feelings come back to haunt the living – whether family, friends, or lovers – in dreams. Ernest Jones took up this theme in a groundbreaking essay on the vampire, published in German in 1912. He argued that the image of the vampire was a ‘projection’ – an embodiment of the living person’s ambivalent feelings, both of hatred and love, towards the dead person. It is for this reason that the vampire is said to return to visit the home of its nearest relatives.
In addition, Jones maintained that the vampire ‘belief complex’, as he termed it, was a form of regression to an early infant state. This state he described as ‘an infantile sadistic-masochistic phase of development’ in which the young child expresses anger towards his parents, especially his mother, by biting. He argued that when the child grows up and the parent dies, he or she may begin to feel unconsciously guilty about these early hostile feelings (and others accrued along the way), and may therefore begin to ‘project’ these feelings onto the dead parent, imagining that the parent will come back in a hostile guise to wreak revenge.
In addition, he maintained that the mixture of emotions conjured up by the folkloric image of the vampire is expressed by the ‘sucking’ aspect of the child’s experience, which symbolizes love, and nurturing; and that furthermore, there is a ‘biting’ aspect, which represents hatred, or at any rate some kind of destructive, violent impulse.
Oral fixation: sucking and biting
This argument may perhaps seem tortuous, but in later studies on the psychology of sexuality, psychoanalysts such as Karl Abraham and Melanie Klein took up the theme of Jones’ early paper on the vampire. In their descriptions of infant development, they discussed the way that, once the baby’s teeth come through, it begins to find pleasure not just from sucking at its mother’s breast, but from biting it as well. (It is often, at this stage, when the biting becomes excessive, that the mother will understandably decide to wean the baby.) Depending on how successfully the baby and mother negotiate these important developmental stages, the infant will mature normally, or become fixated, to a lesser or greater degree, at the oral stage. This kind of fixation leads to various types of unhealthily rigid personality traits, mental imbalance, or, in the worst case, severe psychological illness.
Thus, according to this psychological reading, the vampire stands as a represen-tation of humanity’s fixation on the primitive oral stage of development, in which pleasure is received by sucking, biting, chewing, and so on. Our interest in, and excitement about, vampires, is to do with this early memory of infancy, and may also be an attempt to overcome the ambiguities occasioned by such powerful, contradictory emotions.
Whether or not we accept this explanation, it does seem likely that the figure of the vampire embodies some of our darkest fears and desires: firstly, our anxieties about our possible hostile feelings to those who have gone before us, especially parents and family relatives; and secondly, our primitive urge to return to the oral stage, in which sucking and biting are a childish source of pleasure.
The Aswang
These intellectual adventures into the primitive world of ancient folklore, pointing out recurring cross-cultural images, were exciting developments in several fields, from psychology to anthropology. While psychoanalysts studied the meaning of folkloric figures in terms of individual psychology, cultural anthropologists began to see links between the myths and legends of many different cultures around the world. And none appeared to recur more frequently than the fi
gure of the bloodsucking revenant or vampire.
Today, many of these myths and legends continue to persist, particularly in parts of the world where folklore still plays a major part in people’s lives. In the Philippines today, the female figure of the Aswang, a shapeshifting vampire, continues to be feared. This mythical creature is an old woman who takes the form of an animal at night – sometimes a bat, sometimes a creature with a long nose – and hunts down victims to eat. The Aswang is able to suck a foetus out of its mother’s womb, steal a baby from its cradle, and take it home to eat. The Aswang is said to be particularly partial to hearts and livers. In some cases, the Aswang may replace its victim with a phoney baby or child, which will become ill and die. By day, the Aswang can be recognized by its bloodshot eyes, which are caused by having to stay up all night, searching for victims.
As in so many cultures, this female demon is blamed for causing all sorts of ills, particularly miscarriage and early death in infants. It is known across the Philippines by several different names, including the ‘tik-tik’ and ‘wak wak’. Other related revenant figures from the region include the Manananggal, a bat-like witch who is able to split its body in half, and which devours human beings. Interestingly, both the Aswang and the Manananggal are said to dislike garlic. There are also thought to be particular ways of telling whether a person is an Aswang or Manananggal, such as by bending over and looking at it with the head between the legs, or by seeing a reflection of oneself in their eyes. In addition, there are said to be specific ways of warding off such creatures, for example throwing salt at them, which burns their skin. Significantly, the Manananggal, like the European vampire, is believed to hate sunlight and to be afraid of silver weapons. Whether this idea was introduced from Europe, or whether Europeans took it over from the East, remains a mystery.
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