Nelson Corales · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Moca, Where the Chupacabra Began

added29 August 20261995

In March 1995 farmers in this Puerto Rican town began finding sheep and goats dead, drained of blood, with two neat punctures in the neck. Within months the count ran into hundreds across the island. Witnesses described a creature the height of a man, moving in bounds, with spines along its back and huge black eyes. A Puerto Rican journalist coined the name — goat-sucker — and in thirty years the chupacabra has spread from Mexico to Chile.

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A legend about the whole city — the pin is approximate

18.39472, -67.11333

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DebunkedWhite

Canóvanas and the Chupacabra from the Cinema

In the spring of 1995 drained goats began turning up in the Puerto Rican town of Canóvanas, and Madelyne Tolentino described the thing she had seen through her window: about four feet tall, huge black almond eyes, a ridge of spines down its back, thin arms. The world's entire image of the chupacabra comes from that description. The investigator Benjamin Radford tracked her down in 2010 and established that a few weeks earlier she had seen the film Species, in which the alien Sil looks exactly like that. The animal carcasses, when vets opened them, had been killed by dogs and coyotes, and still had their blood.

130 km away

CryptidYellow

El Yunque

The only tropical rainforest in the United States national forest system, covering the mountains of eastern Puerto Rico. Local accounts have the chupacabra coming down from here to the farms, and place a secret laboratory somewhere in it from which the thing escaped. The forest needs no legend to impress: a hundred and twenty inches of rain a year, permanent cloud, and the sound of coquí frogs, heard everywhere and almost never seen.

141 km away

Abandoned buildingGreen

Plymouth

Plymouth is an abandoned ghost city situated along the southwestern coast of the island of Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory in the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean Sea. Historically the island's capital, primary commercial center, and port, the municipality was systematically destroyed and buried beneath meters of volcanic ash, pumice, and catastrophic lahars during the 1995–1997 eruptions of the Soufrière Hills stratovolcano. Plymouth holds a unique global geopolitical status: it remains the world's only de jure official capital that is completely uninhabited de facto, earning the international designation of "the Pompeii of the Caribbean."

552 km away

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