The Chupacabra: The Complete Legend of Latin America’s Mysterious Goat-Sucking Creature | Folklore for Sleep

A slow, quiet retelling of the chupacabra legend, from the first reports to what people eventually found, made for falling asleep to.The whole story of Latin America's most famous modern monster, told at a pace that's deliberately too slow to follow properly. That's the point. You're not meant to reach the end.This one is young, which makes it unusual. Most folklore is centuries old and impossible to trace; this started in Puerto Rico in the mid nineteen nineties and spread across half a continent within a few years, and you can more or less watch it happen. It began with farm animals found dead in a way people couldn't explain, and one witness whose description — upright, spined, with large dark eyes — was given to a newspaper and never really left. What follows is how the story travelled: through Mexico, into the American southwest, into Chile and Brazil, changing shape as it went until the thing being described in Texas had almost nothing in common with the thing described on the island. Then the bodies started turning up, and were tested, and turned out to be coyotes and dogs with a severe skin condition that made them look like nothing anyone recognised. Which explains a great deal and, as usual, has settled nothing.But the point of this recording isn't really the legend. It's the hour or two spent drifting through it. The voice stays low and even the whole way through. No music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Nothing in it is built to frighten you. Every sentence sits at roughly the same level as the one before it, so nothing ever pulls your attention back up to the surface.That's what makes it work on the nights when your head won't switch off. It's just interesting enough to give your thoughts something to hold, and slow enough that they let go of it on their own. You don't have to follow along. You don't have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift off somewhere in Puerto Rico in 1995 and wake up much later, several countries further along, you've used this exactly the way it's meant to be used. Most people don't make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Chinese classics, Latin American folklore and old stories from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can't sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episodes every day.