Episode 99: Out For Blood

This is the story of the one.

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a lot of ways, it's just a gourd.

Every year, during the Halloween season, millions of people go out and buy their own, and then they bring it home and carve it.

This gourd might be over 200 years old, but the artwork carved into its surface would feel right at home in any pumpkin carving competition.

Except, this centuries-old gourd has something special inside it.

Human blood.

In fact, legend says that it once contained the blood of the beheaded French ruler, King Louis XVI.

Apparently, someone wanted to remember that fateful execution day so badly that they soaked their handkerchief in his blood and then drained it into this hollow fruit.

In 2013, scientists put folklore to the test and took a sample from inside the gourd.

It was blood alright, and when it was compared to a sample taken from the mummified head of King Louis XVI, they had a match.

Maybe that original collector had a morbid fascination with death.

Or perhaps they heard the king's final words and took them literally.

I hope that my blood, Louis had said, may cement the good fortune of the French.

Blood is a magical thing.

From the medical standpoint, it's the life force that flows through our veins, and without it, we're nothing more than an empty shell.

But it's also a symbol of power and life and the most valuable thing a person can give up.

Our dreams are deserving of our blood, sweat, and tears.

We shed blood for great causes.

Our freedoms were paid for in blood.

Thankfully, most of us have no problem keeping our blood safely behind bars, so to speak.

Except for those unfortunate accidents that end in spilt blood, we do a pretty good job of keeping our most precious cargo right where it belongs.

But there's always the specter of fear, lurking in the shadows.

Because if it's precious and valuable, there's always the risk it might be stolen.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this

is Lore.

The Isle of Man is a magical little island in the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Ireland.

It's only about 220 square miles in size, but what it lacks for in surface area, it more than makes up for in folklore, and specifically, stories about fairies.

There's the Ferry Bridge, of course, located over the southern river known as the Santon Bern.

According to legend, anyone who crossed the bridge without greeting the little folk, as they were known, would suffer bad luck.

Some would even leave a coin on the bridge just to make sure their message was heard.

But it's another tale on the island that caught my attention.

It was once the tradition to leave bowls of water out at night for fairies in order to keep them from sneaking inside to drink human blood.

If a careless farmer neglected to put out the water, some of these bloodthirsty fairies were said to use the blood to bake a blood cake, which they would then hide inside the house.

Once the homeowner found and ate the cake, they would be free from the curse.

And stories of blood-drinking creatures aren't unique to the Isle of Man.

In Japan, there are stories of the Hanya, typically described as a beautiful young woman who is possessed by a demonic spirit.

Under the power of the demon, the woman is transformed into a monstrous creature who wanders the land in search of blood.

The Hanya is said to prefer drinking the blood of infants, but if the legends about them are any indication, the only real requirement is that they be alive and available.

In Germany, legends speak of an evil creature known as the Elp.

It is a being that seems to prefer young women, especially those who are pregnant.

According to the stories, if a mother-to-be does something unforgivable, such as eating the wrong foods, the elp will come to punish her.

But this isn't where I tell you that the elp will beat her, like Belsnickel, another German creature.

No, the Alp is more invasive.

It has the power to turn itself into a cloud of mist and then enter its victim's mouth.

Once inside, the Alp will act like a sickness, giving the person nightmares and seizures.

Oh, and it likes blood, often choosing to feed through the nipple.

Even in ancient times, stories of bloodthirsty beings were common.

In Mesopotamian mythology, we can find stories of Lamashtu, a female demon who, like the Alp, pursued pregnant women.

Legend tells us that she loved to gnaw on the bones of her victims and then drink their blood.

The Vitalis of India has a different target in mind though.

These creatures prefer to wander graveyards, looking for the recently buried to feast upon.

While many of the other creatures I've mentioned seemed attracted to the living, the Vitalis are drawn to the dead, sometimes even taking possession of a human or animal corpse.

If destruction seemed to have spread in a community, one of the first assumptions was that a Vitalis was at work.

Probably the worst of the bunch that I've encountered in my research would be the nalopsi, a creature from the folklore of the Slovakia region of Europe.

They are described as walking corpses who wander the countryside looking for victims.

Their long black hair, red eyes, and sharp teeth are all clues that set them apart from any other traveler you might encounter.

It's said that the nalopsi can kill a person with nothing more than its gaze, but their most preferred method is to crush a victim in a powerful embrace before drinking their blood.

They love to torture their prey, and other stories tell of how those who survive go on to be carriers of a deadly disease.

And while it's tempting to fall in love with a creature that just wants to hug you to death, don't be fooled.

Once your bones are broken, you'll mean about as much to endolopsy as a brown bagged lunch.

Without the plastic baggies and chips, I guess.

I know it's not the best metaphor in the world, but work with me here, okay?

Folklore, it seems, is packed with tales of beings with a craving for a mouthful of blood.

Some like it hot, while others prefer sipping from the recently deceased.

But all of them share the same bloodlust that seems to span continents and cultures.

The monsters that lurk in the shadows of our stories all seem to want the same thing.

Thankfully, they're just stories.

No one needs to worry about an allopsy stumbling into their town looking for a snack.

We can rest easy knowing legends can't kill us in our sleep.

There are some who disagree, though.

They believe that we should all be very afraid and that enough of the world around us is still mysterious enough to hide some very dangerous threats.

The proof, they say, is in the tales that still persist to this day.

Tales of real people encountering real creatures and the destruction that has been witnessed by so many.

But if we believe the stories, we're forced to come face to face with a frightening idea.

Some monsters just might be real.

Taken one at a time, the details almost seem believable.

Together though, they paint a more bizarre picture.

And it all started in February of 1975.

That was the month that a number of farm animals in the small Puerto Rican town of Mocha were discovered dead.

15 cows, 3 goats, 2 geese, and a pig to be precise.

And each of the animals had a few details in common.

All of them had small puncture wounds on their bodies, and all of them had been entirely drained of blood.

By March, more reports would follow.

One farmer woke up on March 23rd to discover one of his pigs had been killed.

The enclosure for his pigs hadn't been forced open though, and there were no signs of a struggle.

All he knew was that one of his pigs was missing an ear and a hole had been pierced in the side of its head.

As more and more reports of dead animals flooded in, The press began to put the pieces together, noting the similarities between each body.

All All of them had been drained of their blood, and all of them had small entry wounds, as if something had stabbed them with a large needle or a tooth.

As a result, they began to refer to the undiscovered killer as the vampire of Mocha.

During this growing panic, one man had a strange encounter that seemed to offer the hint of answers to their questions.

Juan Muniz claimed that while he was outside one day, a large bird-like creature attacked him.

According to him, this bird was so large that it actually tried to pick him up and carry him away, but he managed to fight it off and run for safety.

And what's interesting about his description is that around the same time, on the eastern side of the island, someone else had reported a similar encounter.

A woman who lived near the El Yunke rainforest claimed that one of her dogs had been killed, its bones all mysteriously removed from its body.

And this happened during a period of time when a number of local farmers were reporting the murder of dozens dozens of livestock.

It was just a few weeks after discovering that her dog had been attacked that this woman witnessed something almost impossible to believe.

A creature she described as four to five feet tall, walking on its back legs and with bright red eyes.

As she approached it, she claimed it unfurled a pair of large bat-like wings and then flew off into the distance.

Shortly after those two sightings, things appeared to go quiet across Puerto Rico for two decades.

When the excitement began again, it was a mixture of old and new details.

Perhaps that hinted at an entirely different creature, or maybe whatever it was simply adapted.

I'll let you make up your own mind about that.

But regardless of what you decide, the stories are chilling.

It began as it had before, with reports of dead livestock.

It's important to remember that this wasn't a case of theft or even predatory kills.

The animals never left their farms, and they weren't slaughtered and half-eaten.

All of them showed almost no sign of violence at all, except for a small puncture wound and the complete absence of blood, that is.

This time, the reports were coming in from the towns of Orokovice and Morovice, which are situated in the middle of the island.

Between March and August of 1995, Over 150 dead animals were all reported with similar details.

And it was during August that the first sighting of the creature responsible was reported.

A young woman named Madeline Tolentino was napping on a hot summer day when her mother gently shook her awake, a finger over her lips to keep her quiet.

Madeline's mother pointed to the window, and the two women carefully moved closer and peered outside.

And that's when they saw it.

Later, they both described it as about four feet tall and standing upright on thin back legs.

They claimed that the creature's eyes were large and that it had a line of short spikes down the center of its back.

She and her mother watched it for a few minutes before it wandered out of their yard and across the street, disappearing into the tall grass of a vacant lot.

That encounter would be the first of many across Puerto Rico through the late 1990s.

In 1996, a construction worker named Luis Guadalupe claimed to see the creature about 20 miles east of the city of San Juan.

He described it as a monster with a long, pointy tongue and skin that seemed gray.

Another construction worker made a similar report a short time later.

He claimed that he had raised animals all of his life and had never had them attacked before.

But five of his sheep had been killed.

And the injuries were consistent with other reports.

And as the months went by, more and more dead animals were discovered across Puerto Rico.

In November of 1997, more than 30 pigs were found dead from puncture wounds in the neck.

There was no sign of violence or wild animal attacks, just the same method of killing.

And all of the bodies had that same eerie condition.

Every drop of blood was gone.

But don't be fooled into thinking that these killings were all the work of a local animal that had simply managed to stay out of sight.

No, there was something unnatural about it all.

that suggested something less normal than a hungry predator looking for a snack among the local livestock.

They hinted at something more crafty than a wolf or a dog or a large bird.

The killer, it seemed, was intelligent.

When Melvin Rosado went outside first thing on the morning of January 26, 1998, he found three of his cats dead in the yard.

He lived in the village of La Paguerda on the southwestern corner of the island.

Despite being 80 miles away from the most recent reports, it seemed that the legends of the northeast had finally come to visit.

All three of the cats had been surgically killed.

A long, clean incision had cut open the skin of their backs, moving in a straight line from neck to tail.

No puncture wounds could be found, but there was no sign of blood on any of the bodies.

It was something that surely would have woken the dogs, but Melvin didn't recall any barking during the night.

Even more unusual was the fact that his cats had all been safe inside a gated area of the yard, just like the chickens that another local farmer kept on his property.

That man woke to the sounds of a disturbance, but chose to go back to sleep.

In the morning, he realized just how much of a mistake he'd made.

Every single chicken in his enclosure had been killed and left on the ground.

Each of them, as you might be assuming at this point in the story, had puncture wounds.

Each had been drained of blood.

But this farmer also noted something else that was just as unbelievable.

The door to his chicken coop hadn't been knocked in or broken through.

No, it had been opened, just like any human would have done.

by lifting the mechanical latch.

Whatever the killer was, it was something more skilled than a wild animal, more dexterous than any fox or dog could have been.

In a lot of ways, it almost seemed human, a realization that doesn't help to make the details any less creepy, I know.

Word was spreading fast.

Something deadly was killing livestock all over the island of Puerto Rico each night, and it was beginning to capture the imaginations of people everywhere.

Although the creature never limited itself to one particular type of animal, the press began to refer to it as the goatsucker, or chupacabra, and the chupacabra had everyone on edge.

One man even volunteered to hunt it down.

Jose Soto was the mayor of Candovanas, although everyone there simply called him Kimo.

After offering to take up the hunt and track down the creature, folks started to think of him as a bit of an adventurer.

They called him Kimo Jones in an homage to Harrison Ford's legendary film role Indiana Jones.

But if Kimo Jones had any success in his mission, I can't find any records of it.

Later in 1998, a wealthy farmer by the name of Dominic went outside one morning only to discover four of his own animals slaughtered in the same way.

Dominic's livestock, though, had been peacocks, and they were his pride and joy.

Four of the birds had been completely drained of their blood.

and had small puncture marks in their necks.

Fearing for his remaining peacocks, Dominic decided to camp out overnight and keep watch over them from inside their enclosure.

He set up a chair, brought along a flashlight, and sat down in the dark to wait.

A little after midnight, he found what he was looking for.

Something large had begun to try and unlatch the gate to the enclosure.

He could hear it working at the mechanism, struggling to pull it open, and as he listened, he reached slowly for his flashlight.

When he was ready, he pressed the button, blasting the gate with a wide beam of light.

And then, he froze.

Standing there on its hind legs was a creature roughly four feet tall, with big eyes that glowed back red.

When the light turned on, the creature dropped to all four legs and then bolted off into the darkness.

But as it did, Dominic noticed one other odd detail.

The creature, whatever it might have been, had a row of short spikes running down the middle of its back.

The creature was spotted a few more times by Dominic, prowling around his property at night, but after a couple of weeks it vanished and never came back.

Others witnessed it in other parts of Puerto Rico though, but as the months and years went by, fewer and fewer people encountered it, or the results of its nighttime feeding sessions.

In the years since, countless people have speculated about the true nature of the chupacabra.

Some think that because it had once been spotted near the Arecibo Observatory, it was connected to UFO activity.

Others believe it was nothing more than a dog or coyote suffering from mange or some other disease.

The most entertaining theory that I've read is that an exotic rhesus monkey had somehow been set loose on the island and it was doing its best to survive.

But while that might explain the creature's ability to turn locks and open gates, It certainly skips over the most horrifying details that all of the stories share in common, namely namely the puncture marks and the complete lack of blood.

In the end, we'll never know, as frustrating as that might be.

But what we can be certain of is just how powerful the mythology around the chupacabra has become.

Whether it's nothing more than a common animal that's been obscured by disease and darkness, or a new creature that science has yet to document and study.

We can be certain of one very solid truth.

If the creature is real and still among us,

it's out for blood.

We are creatures of flesh and blood.

And while the world around us only sees the flesh, our faces and limbs and all of that outward expression of our physical being, that blood is never far from the surface, literally and figuratively.

Just like the countless generations that came before us, we guard our blood as if our lives depend on it.

Because they do.

So anytime there is a threat to that precious cargo, we instinctively feel fear.

Whether it's the recent rise in diseases spread by mosquitoes and ticks, or something as simple as using a knife in the kitchen, it's amazing how quickly people become very cautious about keeping theirs safe.

And I think that speaks to the power of the mythology around the chupacabra, a mysterious creature that prowls through the night looking for one simple thing, the blood of its victims.

If the vampire represents the graceful and aristocratic blood drinker in modern popular culture, then the chupacabra is its wild, violent antithesis.

Because of that, the stories of the chupacabra haven't stayed in Puerto Rico.

Sightings of bloodthirsty animals that fit the same description have been reported in Chile, Mexico, the American state of Maine, and even overseas in Russia and the Philippines.

I think it's safe to assume that wherever people fear the loss of their blood, the chupacabra is there, in some form or another.

But we still don't have to look far far and wide to find stories that play on that old fear.

In recent months, reports have been coming in about a new wave of animal killings.

In the area around the Puerto Rican municipality of Barceloneta, people have been reporting dead animals.

This new generation has taken to calling the killer by a new name, gargola.

The gargoyle.

Understandably, people have panicked.

The loss of their livestock represents a loss of livelihood, but also hints at a deeper risk.

What if the creature responsible moved up the food chain?

What if people were next?

To that end, a number of hunters and police have set up nighttime hunts to try and track the killer down.

But it's the descriptions of the dead animals that have left people wondering the most if it's not something new at all, just a reappearance of an older legend.

Most of the animals, according to the stories, have been found with small puncture wounds in their necks and their bodies completely drained of blood.

The old adage remains as true as it ever was:

the more things change,

the more they stay the same.

The jupacabra has quickly embedded itself in the cultural landscape in a way that few monsters of folklore ever have.

And I hope today's exploration of its origins and roots have left you with a better understanding of just why that is.

But I've managed to track down more stories about a similar creature.

And if you'll stick around through the sponsor break, I'll tell you all about them.

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The human mind has an insatiable thirst for answers.

It was the driving force behind the exploration of the new world back in the late 16th century, and is at the core of every scientific revolution in history.

When confronted with mysteries, humans hunt for the answers.

I think it goes without saying that these chupacabra stories have left many people with a hunger for the truth, and a lot of theories have been offered up over the years.

Some suspect the involvement of UFOs, claiming that many chupacabra attacks coincided with UFO activity.

As I mentioned earlier, the proximity of the Arecibo Observatory, which was the world's largest radio radar telescope of the 1990s, was certainly intriguing.

Others believe that a creature so bizarre could only be the result of human interference.

And so they've suggested that genetic manipulation by various world powers has created a monster straight out of our darkest nightmares.

They whisper about facilities in the Chilean desert and a collaboration between NASA and other governments.

But the theories haven't stopped the stories.

Reports from central Mexico in 1996 and Brazil in 1999 suggest that if the killings were connected to a particular creature, that creature was on the move.

The Brazil sightings were particularly eerie in their details too, because they sound almost exactly like the events in Puerto Rico a year before.

According to the reports, a farmer in Sorocaba, Brazil found nine of his pigs dead inside their locked enclosure.

Each of them had been punctured by something small, and their blood had been completely drained.

In the Chilean city of Calama, farmers there experienced their own wave of mysterious animal deaths.

In April of 2000, as many as 300 farm animals were found killed in a similar manner.

Farmers reported hearing what they called terrible sounds the night of the killings, and unusual paw prints were found in some locations.

Prints that did not match any known animal.

A farmer in Mexico heard his dogs howling one night in October of 2001, and when he went outside the following morning, he found over 30 of his sheep dead on the ground.

I bet you can guess what was wrong with the bodies too.

And if you said puncture wounds and no blood, you win a gold star.

The last major attack I can find in Mexico took place in March of 2008.

A farmer stepped outside to find eight of his hens, along with one turkey, had all been drained of their blood.

Outraged and afraid, the farmer gathered his friends together for a chupacabra hunt, hoping to rid their territory once and for all of the bloodthirsty beast.

Nothing was ever found.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Marcette Crockett and music by Chad Lawson.

I make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured.

Just like lore, both are explorations of dark history, with Cabinet of Curiosities focused on small little tales of curious things, while Unobscured is a 12-episode season that dives deep into a single topic.

I write and narrate both of them and would love for you to check them out.

Lore exists outside this podcast too.

There is a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime TV show just arrived on October 19th.

Check it all out if you want a bit more lore in your life.

And you can always learn about everything going on over in one central place.

theworldoflore.com slash now.

And if you're a social media sort of person, you can follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

And when you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always,

thanks for listening.

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