How Texas became a hotbed for chupacabra sightings
A mysterious figure was seen lurking outside Amarillo Zoo at 1:25 a.m. on Saturday, May 2, captured by security footage. Black and white footage shows a dog-like creature with long arms standing upright like a human in grass along the perimeter fence.
As the city searches for an answer, some think it might be the mythical chupacabra.
“Was it a person with a strange hat who likes to walk at night?” the city asked. “A large coyote on its hind legs? A chupacabra? It is a mystery – for Amarillo to help solve.”
Texas offers plenty of tales about strange monsters and sightings of unexplained phenomena. The chupacabra, also known as the “goat sucker,” is one of those urban legends that has been circulating for decades. Many Texans have reported seeing the tall hairless creature with gray scaly skin, a hog head, vicious teeth, spikes and claws feeding on goats and other livestock by sucking the blood out and leaving the carcass. That gave Texas its title as a “chupacabra factory,” per the Texas Observer, one of the states most associated with the vampire.
The chupacabra myth started in the summer of 1995, after a wave of livestock killings rocked rural Puerto Rico. Then, the Texas sightings began. On May 2, 1996, a 6-year-old goat in Rio Grande Valley was found dead with three puncture wounds in its neck, “telltale marks of the chupacabra.” Years later, in 2004, a Bexar County man said he shot and killed a chupacabra lurking on his property.
A carcass of a creature resembling a chupacabra was discovered in a ranch outside the small town of Cuero, Texas and tested in a lab in 2007. Biologists at Texas State University-San Marcos concluded the animal was actually a coyote.
“The DNA sequence is a virtually identical match to DNA from the coyote (Canis latrans),” said biologist Mike Forstner in a news release at the time. “This is probably the answer a lot of folks thought might be the outcome. I, myself, really thought it was a domestic dog, but the Cuero chupacabra is a Texas coyote.”
But, that still left one question unanswered: Why did this coyote not look like a coyote?
According to Texas A&M, the chupacabra sightings could be wild animals (mostly coyotes and raccoons) with severe cases of mange or scabies—a disease caused by mite infestation. Mites burrowing into the animal’s skin to lay their eggs cause skin irritation and alopecia, which could explain the hair loss, scaly gray skin, and raised ridge in the animal’s back. The sickness could also explain why the animal feeds on easy prey like goats and other small livestock.
Since then, the myth about the bloodsucking chupacabra has been alive and well.
A Blanco taxidermist sparked chupacabra rumors in 2009, finding a dead 30-pound, mostly hairless coyote-like creature that had been killing chickens. In June 2010, two mysterious, coyote-like creatures that were thought to be chupacabras were spotted within a week of each other in a 10-mile stretch of North Texas. In 2014, a couple said it found the legendary animal eating corn on their property in Ratcliffe, but it was later identified as a raccoon. In the same year, a South Texas man said he shot and killed a chupacabra on his property after hearing it howl for a year. A man in 2019 claimed he spotted the creature along Houston’s westside corridor. And in 2020, a San Antonio man was patrolling his ranch one night when he came across a creature he had never seen before stalking his herd, and believed it to be a chupacabra.
The latest chupacabra sightings show the lore of the chupacabra isn’t going away anytime soon.
This story was originally published June 10, 2022 at 4:31 PM.
