Sacamantecas

Sacamantecas ("Fat extractor" in Spanish) or mantequero ("Fat seller/maker") is the Spanish name for a kind of bogeyman or criminal characterized by killing for human fat.

Julian Pitt-Rivers reports in his study of Alcalá de la Sierra, the belief that village children can be stolen by an outsider, called el sacamantecas, disguised as a beggar or a trader, who is hired by a rich man whose ill child can only be cured with the blood of healthy babies. The practice of blood donation lent credence to the myth.

Gerald Brenan describes the mantequero as a monster in human form who lives in deserted areas and feeds on manteca ("human fat"). Upon capture, he shouts in a high-pitched voice and, unless just fed, looks thin.

Brenan found the myth alive during his stays in the Alpujarra (Andalusia). In 1927 or 1928, he had sublet his Yegen home to the British writer Dick Strachey, nephew of Lytton Strachey. One day, Strachey was walking on rough terrain where he saw three Romani men, of whom he was suspicious. Fearing that they were bandits, he ran away, but the three men chased him and drew their knives, shouting at him. They believed him to be a mantequero and wanted to kill him and to use his blood for magical remedies. However, the eldest man, a convict, judged it safer to bring Strachey to the mayor. They offered to slit his throat themselves, but Strachey claimed in rudimentary Spanish to be a relative of the British King George V and convinced the mayor that he wasn't a monster.

A friend of Brenan found that in Torremolinos all the girls believed in mantequeros. In the urban version of the legend, an old evil marquis needs transfusions of babies' blood to rejuvenate.