El Cucuy, also known as El Cuco or El Coco, is the Hispanic version of the Boogeyman. El Cucuy is a monster who exists to ensure that children sleep when they are told to, for if children disobey orders to sleep El Cucuy is said to hunt them down and take them away. Usually, he is said to eat the children or spirit them away, never to be seen again.
Spanish legend has it that El Cuco is actually Francisco Ortega, aka El Moruno. At the beginning of the 20th Century, Ortega was so desperate to find a cure for his tuberculosis that he visited a Curandera, a traditional native healer or shaman. He was told to drink the blood of children, so he kidnapped a 7-year-old boy named Bernardo. Ortega mixed the boy’s blood with sugar and drank it. After that he took the boy to a place where he killed him, crushing his skull with a rock. Then he extracted fat and mesentery to make a remedy to apply to his chest.
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