Chupacabra

The chupacabra (Spanish: "goat-sucker", from "chupar=to suck" and "cabra=goat") is a legendary creature in the folklore of parts of the Americas, with its first purported sightings reported in Puerto Rico. The name comes from the animal's reported habit of attacking and drinking the blood of livestock, especially goats.

Physical descriptions of the creature vary. It is purportedly a heavy creature, the size of a small bear, with a row of spines reaching from the neck to the base of the tail.

Eyewitness sightings have been claimed as early as 1995 in Puerto Rico, and have since been reported as far north as Maine, and as far south as Chile, and even being spotted outside the Americas in countries like Russia and the Philippines, but many of the reports have been disregarded as uncorroborated or lacking evidence. The fact that most reports throughout the different regions tend to come specifically from people of Hispanic cultural background, argues that the phenomenon is purely folkloric. Sightings in northern Mexico and the southern United States have been verified as canids afflicted by mange. According to biologists and wildlife management officials, the chupacabra is an urban legend.

Chupacabra in The House of Daniel

Chupacabras were ferocious beasts from Mexico, which had migrated northward into the United States. They sucked the blood from their prey in swift order, and were known to kill both livestock and humans. In El Paso, Texas in 1934, Jack Spivey saw a man who had been killed by a chupacabra. A hunting posse required three barrels of double-aught buckshot, and an unknown number of revolver rounds, to kill the strong predator. Spivey found chupacabras to be more terrifying than werewolves or vampires.