The Pollok Chupacabra Carcass

2004. Elmendorf, a tiny town southeast of San Antonio. Something had been killing chickens on Devin McAnally's poultry property. He began spotting a bluish varmint. One morning he crept up on it while it ate mulberries and shot it with a rifle propped in the fork of a tree. The animal was nearly hairless, with blue skin, long fangs, a rat-like tail and a severe overbite. It became the Elmendorf Beast, and by late July the San Antonio Express-News was on the story.

Later accounts claimed that in October two more carcasses turned up in the same area. The record tells a different story. One carcass is documented that month. It was found some 250 miles away, in East Texas.

Friday, October 8, 2004. Pollok, about 20 miles from Lufkin, at the edge of Davy Crockett National Forest. Stacey Womack's mother called her in distress. Something was under the house. As Womack arrived, an identical animal ran across the road about a quarter mile from the house. Head and tail down.

Under the house, the creature raised its head toward the light. Then it lowered it again. Shortly before noon, Womack's brother shot it in the right eye with a .22 rifle and pulled it out with a lariat.

Womack was a Lufkin dog breeder who had spent more than 20 years at Ellen Trout Zoo and with a local vet. This animal unsettled her. "It's just such a creepy creature when you see it." Its blue-gray skin was almost hairless, powdery and without elasticity. "So necrotic, its tissue was just rotted." The front legs were much smaller than the hind legs. A long, rat-like tail curled behind its thin frame. The canines were about two inches long and tusk-like, with an overbite of an inch or more. The claws ran 1.5 to 2 inches. Entirely too long for a dog, she said.

When she lifted it by the ears for a photograph, an ear "broke like a cookie." There was virtually no blood. The body looked as if it had been dead "for a month or so." Vultures reportedly left it alone. She photographed everything, shared the pictures with experts and the press, and planned to send the head for DNA testing.

Danny Pence, a parasitologist at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, was blunt. "We looked at it, and of course it's a mangey coyote." A U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist leaned the same way, but could not match the skull or overbite to the coyotes in reference books. Lufkin veterinarian C.R. Shilling called the coyote guess "pure speculation" and suggested demodex mange with a possible congenital jaw defect. One zoo proposed a Mexican hairless dog. Womack rejected it.

In 2006 ABC News reported that several supposed chupacabra carcasses had reached the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. "The animals were nothing but coyotes with severe cases of sarcoptic mange." No published DNA result for the Pollok head has been found.

The Express-News tied the two cases together in a single headline: "Mystery animal in Elmendorf may have an East Texas cousin; Could creatures killed 250 miles apart be chupacabras?" Linda Moulton Howe's Earthfiles ran two reports within two weeks of the shooting. The Lufkin Daily News revisited the mystery in 2011.

Elmendorf is widely credited as the start of the Texas chupacabra carcass era. Pollok followed within months. Cuero, Blanco County, Hood County and Ratcliff came later. Each time, the same question returned. A creature no one could name, or a coyote stripped bare by mange?