A Mexican teen retells the stories that he was told by friends and family about the legendary Lizard Man of Ameca, Jalisco, Mexico, and the drowning deaths associated with it!
I received the following information:
"It was while I was living in Mexico from 2004-2007. In the town where I was living, there's a lake in some hills where people go to BBQ and hang out with family. But one of the things that caught my eye was the white crosses that were all around the lake. I asked family and friends on different occasions what where the crosses were for and they told me it was for the people that have drowned there. I was stunned because it was a lot of crosses, I thought that maybe they didn't know how to swim there, or the majority of people got drunk and got into the lake.
But my cousins and friends told me stories that people were going out for a swim and started drowning. Supposedly some of them yelled that something was pulling them down. I thought maybe it was branches they got caught on, but what was weirder to me was that when I asked my aunts and uncles, they added more to those drownings telling me that not all the bodies could be recovered. That was weird to me because the lake is kind of big but not that big for people not to be found. Two rivers connect to that lake. One that goes into the lake and the other one where water can leave the lake but there's a border dividing it from the lake, it's tall enough for water not to escape but people can go over it with ease.
One of the stories was of a man who drowned and they were able to recover his body, but he was purple by the time they found him with slash marks across his chest and stomach area. That left me intrigued if it was actually true or if people just trying to add on to the lake incidents. Being a teenager, I couldn't go around asking questions. And to be honest I haven't remembered to ask when I visit now.
My Uncle's Story
After knowing I was asking a lot of questions about what was going on with the lake, he told me something that happened to his friend when they were teenagers. He said that his friend had invited him to go fishing at night because that's when fish are easier to catch since they get close to the edge. He told him no because my grandma had grounded him.
Later that night after midnight my uncle heard banging on the door and the doors out there are made of metal, so it shook them pretty bad. My grandma and uncle got up and my uncle went up to the door and opened a little window on the door to see who it was. It was his friend, wide wide-eyed and pale. My uncle asked him if he was alright that it looked like he just saw a ghost and my grandma told him to bring him inside. They sat him down and calmed him and asked what had happened and where was he coming from. He told them that he ended up going to the lake alone on his bike with his gear and was camping out there hoping to get some fish. But after a couple hours, he wasn't having luck, so he decided to leave. He was on the other side of the lake, so he had to go around.
It was a bright night, so he was able to see the dirt road. He was going around the lake when he saw something coming out of the other side where he was going but he didn't pay that much attention to it thinking it was a turtle or a big iguana that roams around those parts. They grow like 3 feet long and are dark instead of green. So, he was riding along looking over to see this thing coming out on all fours and he saw how its wet skin was shining due to the moonlight and saw how it had a reptilian tail but short. The best he could describe it was as if it was a stump of a tail but it was pointy and really wide, almost as wide as its body. He couldn't tell if it had a neck, it just looked stocky from its upper body. He was just looking at how this huge lizard just come out of the lake when all of a sudden it stood upright on its rear legs. That's when he got really scared because he was able to tell that it was big. He estimated it was 2 meters tall (6'7"). He made a noise and this thing turned around and looked at him. It had big red eyes. To be able to tell they were red from his distance he knew they were big he was like 20 meters away (65 feet).
He started pedaling hard with all his fear because to top it all off this creature was downhill from the only road that led him out of the lake and it was just staring at him following him with its stare. As soon as he was parallel to the creature he gunned it down the road and didn't look back at all until he got to my grandma's house which was closer than his house just 5 minutes away from the lake on the bike. He stayed over and left the next day still shocked.
Town Legend "El Chavarin"
I came across this legend a few months after my uncle told me his story and left me stunned because it was too much of a coincidence with everything I had heard by then. The legend takes place in Ameca, Jalisco, Mexico and it's about a fisherman named Lucio who was struggling to provide for his family and made a deal with the devil. He found gold soon after but got paranoid with time and thought his family was just with him for the gold. Since the day he had made the deal, he was always carrying around a snake so one day he took his gold and snake and the people in the town saw him jump over a bridge into the river and never saw him again. The legend goes that he got transformed into this lizard-like monster, with big, scaly skin, big yellow eyes, small tail, and he is the cause of people drowning in that river and the waters that connect to the town's rivers. The town I was living in is only 30 minutes away from there.
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