Tlahuelpuchi: Mexico’s Shape-Shifting Blood Witch of Tlaxcala

Moonlit adobe village in rural Tlaxcala with a glowing bird silhouette above the rooftops

Of every vampire tradition I have followed over twenty-five years, the tlahuelpuchi of rural Tlaxcala is the one that unsettles me most — not because it is the strangest, but because it is the best documented. Most vampire folklore reaches us through a haze of second-hand retellings and eighteenth-century pamphlets. The tlahuelpuchi was recorded in … Read more