The evolution of vampirism in South America stems back to the Ice Age and, unlike most other continents, has little that relates to the preternatural or paranormal. It is, in fact, tied closely to vampire bats and the migration of megafauna.
Vampire bats have been closely associated with their vampire namesakes for centuries and have become increasingly common as a result of the vast herds of livestock they feed on in North and South America. The oldest fossil vampire bat dates back around three million years, to the Upper Pliocene Period of Florida, and many fossil species are much larger than their modern relatives. Desmodus draculae is a quarter larger than the extant common vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus, and some fossils are associated with the animals they were presumably feeding on, such as rhino-sized ground sloths found in Brazil complete with bat remains.
This ancient statue of a bat-god hints at the long relationship between the Chupacabra and the early Mesoamericans. (age fotostock / Alamy)
During the last Ice Age, which ended some 12,000 years ago, the formation of massive polar ice caps resulted in a drop in sea levels that led to the formation of numerous land bridges, including the Isthmus of Panama. This allowed animal populations to migrate between the continents; in the case of South America, a number of mammal groups arrived, including elephants, camels, horses and big cats, known collectively as megafauna. Naturally, they brought their parasites with them, including vampire bats.
There were a number of physically large animal groups already in South America, so the bats soon made themselves at home. At this point in their evolution, one lineage of vampire bats chose a different path to their contemporaries that would lead to their ultimate expression in what is known to vampire hunters and cryptozoologists around the world as the Chupacabra.
The Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico is riddled with a system of around 6,000 caves and sinkholes known as cenotes, the largest of which is 200ft across and 100ft deep. These are the result of millions of years of dissolution of the limestone bedrock that makes up the Yucatán, leading to the formation of vast underground aquifers. The water in these cenotes has allowed rich, fertile jungles to grow and provided a home for the invading megafauna. The vampire bats took up residence in the many sinkholes and caves permeating the region, and it was here that they began to adapt to their new environment.
Already larger than contemporary vampire bats, the Chupacabra lineage also changed its hunting style. Many animals would come to the cenotes to drink at night, so the vampires found they no longer needed to fly the distances required of their relatives. Not surprisingly, they also undertook a rather radical behavioral change, becoming swimmers (probably by accident). Considering the prevalence of water in their chosen environment, this was a logical step, as was the development of their climbing abilities. Bats have always been good climbers, scrabbling around on rock faces, but the Chupacabra took it a stage further. Muscle groups designed for flying and climbing grew in strength, and wings designed for flying adapted to swimming. They could still fly, but it became less important – usually just a method of migrating from one cenote to another.
Spending so much time in the water and living in a generally benign climate resulted in the Chupacabra swapping fur for a fine layer of down, giving them an almost albino-like appearance.
Another, rather unpleasant, adaptation was using ammonia as a largely defensive weapon. Ammonia is a waste by-product of digesting blood; when attacked, the Chupacabra has been known to spray foul-smelling faecal ammonia, which is similar to being violently dosed with smelling salts.
Desmodus rotundus, more commonly known as the vampire bat, is the ancient ancestor of the Chupacabra. (Alessandro Catenazz)
As such, by the end of the last Ice Age, they were radically different from their small, flittering ancestral forms, and were given the scientific name Megalodesmodus cenotesensis – the “giant vampire bat of the cenotes.”
However, the end of the Ice Age heralded the catastrophic mass extinction of the American megafauna, depriving the Chupacabra of its principal prey. Massive environmental change was no doubt instrumental in the destruction of the megafauna, but there is a great deal of suspicion levelled at Homo sapiens, who had first arrived in the Americas about 21,000 years ago. Hunting cultures, using advanced flint spearheads, were hunting even the largest mammoths at this time, and may have contributed to their downfall.
Nothing remains historically (or prehistorically) of the first interactions between early Americans and the Chupacabra, but around 7,000 years ago humans began to settle in Central America as farmers. We can only surmise on the impact the Chupacabra had on the belief systems of the earliest known Mesoamericans, such as the Olmecs, going back to around 1200 BC. All their religions are based on blood and water, often one symbolically representing the other.
For the Mayans, the northernmost part of their empire was the Yucatán Peninsula. It was they who probably first encountered the Chupacabra, using as they did the cenotes to water their crops. This required farmers and workers to go into the caves, where they almost certainly fell victim to the vampires. The cenotes were additionally seen as entrances to the Mayan underworld of the dead, a place also associated with bats. According to Mayan religion, the bats gave off terrible shrieks – possibly an interpretation of the Chupacabra’s high-pitched sonar it uses to navigate in the enclosed caves and also under water. Similarly, two lords of the Mayan Underworld, House Corner and Blood Gatherer, were blood drinkers, attacking the neck and other vulnerable areas of the poor souls traveling through this Mesoamerican hell.
An adult male Chupacabra, drawn from the only specimen known to have been captured alive, currently believed to be housed somewhere in New Mexico. (Reconstruction by Hauke Kock)
At some point in their history, Mayans began making blood sacrifices in the cenotes, as well as gathering water from them. These offerings may have started as a way of distracting or placating the Chupacabras, but soon the vampires became deified and the offering ritualized, the Mayans decapitating their victims. Chupacabra attacks rarely managed this, but their attacks were focused around the face and neck, so it is not too surprising that the Mayans would focus on the same areas.
Much of surviving Mayan writing interweaves history and mythology, making it difficult for vampire scholars to determine the facts, but there is clearly a link between blood and water. The Mesoamericans even used fish bones to let blood in as a form of autosacrifice. The moment of death was compared to the sensation of sinking into water; for those sacrificed to the cenotes, this would have been a very literal interpretation. Seashells, fish and water lilies often adorn representations of the Mayan underworld, Xibalba.
The Chupacabras themselves seem to have been mainly located in the northwest of the Yucatán Peninsula, in what the Mayans called The Land of Deer and Turkey, a region thick with swamps and marshes, where the locals grew cacao and where, no doubt, many of the farmers fell victim to vampire attacks.
The Aztecs, whose empire was even more powerful but further north, took the symbolism of blood and water even further. The rain gods were fed blood by the shooting of arrows into human sacrifices, the blood then drizzled onto the ground to encourage fertility and plentiful rain. One of their principal gods, Quetzalcoatl, was revered as a dragon-like feathered serpent and was associated with storms, wind, and blood sacrifice. Vampire scholars have speculated (and again, there is no evidence one way or the other) that Chupacabras are not unlike small dragons; it also may be no coincidence that they often use storms to cover their attacks, their senses unimpeded by rain and thunder.
An Aztec blood-sacrifice. The connection between ancient Mesoamerican religion, blood-sacrifice, and the Chupacabra is a slowly expanding field of research. (North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy)
Another Aztec deity was Mictlantecuhtli, the ruler of the Atzec underworld, Mictlan. He was believed to have huge, dead eyes and a horrible grin, large clawed hands, was desperately skinny and had lost half of his flesh. Worship of Mictlantecuhtli was more usually associated with cannibalism and the Aztec underworld more closely related to dogs, but the description and images of the underworld ruler could quite easily have been modeled on a Chupacabra. The wonderfully bizarre headdresses of Aztec royalty and officials also seem to mimic in some ways the strange nasal folds and ears of the vampires.
Whether the Aztecs had direct contact with the Chupacabras is unknown; much of their religion was derived from that of earlier Mesoamericans, including the Mayans, so the links to bloodletting may be entirely coincidental. However, there is evidence that the Chupacabra population was already spreading north up into what is now Mexico during the “classic” period of Mesoamerican history. This was no doubt the result of increased food availability, either as a result of blood sacrifices being made directly to them or by increased amounts of prey, in the form of humans. Inferred evidence also indicates they spread south out of the Yucatán in the 9th century, descending into the lowlands at a time when many Mayan city states there were collapsing. The human population is reckoned to have dropped a third during the course of that century, possibly as a result of intense farming and overpopulation, triggering an environmental disaster. This instigated a period of open war between the cities as they struggled to survive, battling for land and for prisoners to be offered as blood sacrifices to gods the Mayans believed were now displeased.
Many South American hunters who specialize in fighting Chupacabras still employ traditional methods and modes of dress on their hunts.
The impact on Chupacabra numbers can only be guessed. Never particularly numerous and built for stealth, they also moved solely at night, while many of their attacks may have been mistaken for the work of jaguars or pumas, or even the much smaller vampire bats. As such, a census of numbers and distribution is impossible to create. What is left is guesswork, mostly garnered from reports drafted by the Spanish Conquistadors, who arrived in Central America in 1519, shattering the world of the Mesoamericans forever.
To many Aztecs, Hernán Cortés seemed like Quetzalcoatl himself, whose return had been foretold in Aztec legend. Wearing metal armor and astride the first horses to enter South America since the end of the Ice Age, he and his companions must have seemed godlike, but the Spaniards (actually Castilians) were after gold and slaves while spreading Catholicism, the two often going hand in hand. After attempts at diplomacy, appeasement and witchcraft failed to placate the erstwhile invaders, Aztec emperor, Montezuma, decided they had to be stopped by force.
The Aztec elite fighters were the Eagle and Jaguar warriors, who could only adorn themselves as their namesakes after proving their fearlessness in battle. However, Mesoamerican warfare was usually less about killing and more about the taking of prisoners to feed the voracious appetites of the human-sacrificing priests. As such, when they first came up against the cannons and small arms, swords and armor of the Conquistadors, they stood very little chance. The Castilians were further aided by treachery and smallpox, and soon the Aztec empire had been brought to its knees.
The end of the Mayans was not so easy. Politically and socially, they were more diverse, with no godhead such as Montezuma to be removed, thereby undermining the nation. The Mayans fought a guerrilla war in thick jungle from 1518 until the last pocket of resistance was crushed in 1697, while across Central America a terrifying combination of drought and outbreaks of European diseases such as typhus, influenza and most infamously, smallpox, wiped out almost 80 percent of the region’s population.
This was equally disastrous for the Chupacabras, whose reliance on blood sacrifice meant their primary food source was gone, while the drought drove them deep underground.
Then, around 1523, the Conquistadors arrived on the Yucatán, and with them the Catholic clergy who saw to their administrative as well as spiritual needs, and Hispanicized Europeans. The latter were from areas familiar with vampirism in its truer forms and what many of the Conquistadors saw as blood-soaked idolatry these Europeans saw as vampire attack. The decision was taken to clean out the threat.
Wily and pragmatic, the invaders were never averse to the hiring of defeated locals to join their army as auxiliaries, and a number of the surviving Aztec elite, perhaps equally pragmatic and realistic, were formed up into units that were sent into the cenotes, nicknamed Mictlans after the Aztec underworld.
Records are spotty about what happened next. Much information was lost due to deliberate misinformation by the Conquistadors in documents being sent back to the royal courts as part of an ongoing campaign to fox Spain’s colonial competitor, Portugal. Moreover, what information did make it back to the Inquisition was often disregarded as the work of perfectly natural predators such as jaguars and, as mentioned previously, vampire bats.
However, there were certain documents that made their way to the Vatican via spies and informants, some of which caused concern and led to the clergy operating alongside the Conquistadors to take on the role of the Inquisition and hunt down this new vampire menace.
Expeditions utilizing auxiliary warriors, especially Aztec and Mayan forces, and led by the Hispanicized Europeans, both soldiers and priests, descended into the cenotes. These first missions were disasters. Religious icons and symbols were a matter of supreme indifference to the Chupacabras and when the Conquistadors tried burning out the vampires they simply fled into the water. Some of the expeditions became lost or disorientated and ended up finding themselves prey to the hungry Chupacabras, already culturally adapted to the hunting of humans.
Female Chupacabras are smaller and have slightly larger ears but are just as vicious. (Reconstruction by Hauke Kock)
Conquistadors torture an Aztec. Such torture was used to reveal the location of many Chupacabra groups. (The Art Archive / Alamy)
However, a few of the vampires were killed and the academics amongst the clergy had a chance to take a look at the perceived threat. It became clear that these were nothing like the vampires encountered by some of the expedition members in Europe. While adapting to a life underground had given them a certain photosensitivity, the Chupacabras were not in any way vulnerable to sunlight like European vampires. This, and the failure of Christian weapons, led the expedition leaders to conclude that these were just highly evolved vermin, more harmful than a man-eating jaguar, but clearly no longer requiring the resources of the Inquisition and clergy. As such, the destruction of the Chupacabra lairs was made a military matter.
The first thing the Conquistadors did was bring in Molossers, tough war dogs that had terrified the Mesoamericans in battle. The ammonia stench of the vampires was easy enough for humans to follow, but the dogs could smell the lairs even amidst the mélange of smells generated by the sweltering rainforest.
They also brought boats into the cenotes. Using fire to drive the Chupacabras into the water, they would then be lanced by native warriors, proficient with atlatls, spear-throwers that could accurately cast javelins a great distance.
Sometimes, the Chupacabras could be coaxed above ground with staked-out bait, such as a goat, donkey, or occasionally, harking back to the religious belief of the Mesoamericans, a child. The hungry vampires would risk exposure above ground at the possibility of an easy meal, and paid for it with their lives.
The Conquistador extermination program lasted barely a year, but was effective enough to wipe out the Chupacabras of the Yucatán. By 1524, the Spaniards were establishing themselves across the peninsula and the few remaining Chupacabras seemed to have scattered into the southern lowlands before turning northwest and migrating slowly up the Isthmus of Panama.
Studies by UNESCO indicate they were surprisingly adaptable and resilient. There were plenty of jungles and waterways for them to disappear into, but there was a lack of large prey. As such, they were drawn to human settlements, feeding on livestock and the occasional unlucky human; it also seems they became scavengers, an easy way to find food at a time when disease was devastating the indigenous populations of the region. Few in number, and with few humans to notice, the Chupacabras’ passage north went largely unobserved.
Their fortunes changed when Francisco Vásquez de Coronado set out in search of gold in southern North America, bringing with him herds of cattle. Some of the vampires shadowed the expedition through the deserts of the region, living off the blood of the occasional stray, eating the dead and taking the occasional live human victim.
The sparsely populated regions of Central and southern North America allowed the Chupacabra populations to establish new bridgeheads. The rugged, mountainous terrain, limestone cave systems, empty deserts, and thick forest all provided havens, and as cattle farming took a hold in the region, the vampires found new prey. Even so, these were tough environments and their numbers were never able to swell to anything like those of the Yucatán. They disappeared from sight and, as such, the Yucatán vampires more or less vanished into myth and legend.
How far north they traveled has become a matter of debate. UNESCO vampire units were on hand during the cattle mutilation scares of the 1970s. Some of these took place as far north as South Dakota. Evidence of Chupacabra involvement is circumstantial, but the report of strange medicinal smells around the carcasses of the victims could indicate the presence of ammonia. There were also reports of unusual footprints around the bodies, not unlike suction cups. Chupacabra are “knuckle walkers” and could quite easily account for these unusual punch holes in the ground. Perhaps most significant was the complete exsanguination of many of the animals involved, and the apparent application of an anticoagulant to expedite this. Like their ancestral bat forms, Chupacabras possess a natural anticoagulant in their saliva.
The causes of many of these cattle mutilations (which also involve horses and other livestock) remain the source of much conjecture and conspiracy theories, but UNESCO, in a report in 1985, did conclude that there was strong evidence in some cases of vampirism by Megalodesmodus.
Much stronger evidence of Chupacabra attacks came from their old hunting ground in Central America and led ultimately to the informal term for the species. In 1995, a number of sheep were killed, and exsanguinated, in Puerto Rico. Soon after came reports of the cryptid that became known as the Chupacabra, the “goat sucker.” The early descriptions immediately drew the interest of UNESCO’s vampire unit. While there was no doubt some hysteria and sensationalism was involved in many of the sightings, there was enough solid evidence to support a sudden rise in the threat level posed by the vampire. Many of the reports of strange, naked-skinned animals with bizarre limb proportions were attributed to dogs or coyotes with Sarcoptes scabiei, better known as itch mites, which cause fur loss and unpleasant and unsightly rashes. In serious cases, the infected animal can look almost naked.
A number of reported Chupacabra specimens happened to have been eaten by vultures or such, or have turned out to indeed be coyotes. Two were allegedly shot by animal control officers in Hood County in 2010, but nothing further was heard about these and they have been secured by UNESCO.
Sightings of the vampire have occurred as far north as Maine, but are centered mainly in the southern USA and northern Mexico. However, there is now increasing evidence of a Chupacabra presence in major cities, using the new underground network generated by sewers and storm drains. How long they have been there is unknown, but they so far do not constitute an infestation. UNESCO vampirism officials have been conducting investigations (often posing as sewer workers or even vagrants) to assess the extent of the problem, but many of the cities suspected of harboring Chupacabras have hundreds of miles of tunnels that are many centuries old, and the cities are teeming with plentiful food supplies (including many people whose presence won’t be missed, like vagrants, runaways, addicts and criminals). Cities where a presence has been positively identified include Los Angeles, New York (specifically Manhattan), Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Mexico City and Tijuana.
However, the presence of Chupacabras remains a low priority for UNESCO and the SAU units. As the vampires do not pass on the condition as Strigoi do, they are considered a minor threat, at least for now. But the true size of the problem remains to be seen and will only become clear on completion of the UNESCO survey. In the meantime, there are many in SAU who feel prevention is better than cure, and already expeditions have been mounted into the sewers of New York, Chicago and Mexico City to develop tactics in eliminating any possible future threat. Many of these are modeled on the Conquistadors and their Mesoamerican vassals.