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It was a quiet night for two

lovers looking to get away.

A full moon had risen, giving light to their hideaway

on a deserted back road.

They were all alone, just like they wanted it.

But before these enamored youngsters

got too ahead of themselves, something

interrupted their night.

Despite her wishes, he gets out to see

what could have made the sound, leaving her alone in the car.

As the minutes tick slowly by, she

begins to wonder what could be keeping him for so long.

As she turned around to see what had happened,

she could hear the steps of whatever it was approaching.

As it stepped into the light, she couldn't believe

the horror she saw there.

But then, looking down, she saw the worst thing of all.

For as long as there have been

humans, there have been stories.

Stories meant to make sense of the chaos of the world

and give meaning to some of its worst elements.

Gods and heroes arise from these tales,

giving character to the weather, the trees,

and even our deepest desires.

Few of these stories persist to this day.

Science having replaced the old gods.

Yet, even still, anomalies bleed through the fabric

of our modern narratives.

Bigfoot, Dogman, the chupacabra, these creatures

that haunt our nightmares come and go

as they please, seemingly with no explanation,

as either flesh and blood or something else.

There are few stories that capture the imagination,

like that of the Goatman, with the upper body of a man

and the head of a goat.

The creature stalks the halls of American folklore, lurking

on dark backroads, waiting to attack hapless victims

who venture down Lovers' lanes.

So prolific are his deeds that the Goatman has been seen

in virtually every state, waiting for his chance

to strike from his hiding place, leaving

a bloody mess in his wake.

The half-man, half-goat beast has many alleged origin stories,

but none more encompassing than that of the Goatman of Prince

George's County, Maryland.

The Maryland Goatman is a figure

that was first discovered, quote unquote, in the 1970s--

I want to say 1971--

when a reporter ran across a paper that had been filed

with The Maryland Folklore Archive

that talked about a Goatman figure

that occupied an area around Prince's County, Maryland.

You know the different iterations of the Goatman

itself, its origins and so forth, were pretty varied.

But essentially, you had a Goatman

in that area that had been blamed for the death

and dismemberment of dogs, would often

terrorize couples that had been parked

in a Lovers' Lane-type area.

And over time, different origin stories were

proposed for this creature.

The most popular revolves around a place known

as the Beltsville agricultural Research Center,

which is a facility about 10 miles from Fletchertown Road,

where, allegedly, they do different types

of experimentation and development

of new types of livestock breeds, different types

of cows and pigs and so forth.

And so there's a story that there was a mad scientist there

who was either experimenting with combining human and goat

DNA, or there was some type of horrible accident

to which this scientist actually evolved into one

of these goat-like creatures.

The Maryland goat man is an interesting case,

because it's one of those goat man urban legend stories

that has a variety of explanations for it.

Most of these Goatman stories have some kind of myth

that seems to be at the root of them,

trying to explain where they came from

and how they got started.

And the Maryland Goatman is one that has different explanations,

depending on who you ask and what the version of the story is

And that, to me, is what sticks out about this case, the most,

because you have the version where

it was a circus sideshow attraction that

escaped from its confinement.

In some versions, after lightning struck its cage.

There's the theory that it could be

the result of a goat farmer crossbreeding

with one of his own goats.

The really interesting version to me is that--

A doctor, Steven Fletcher, was experimenting with the DNA

of an assistant, along with goats,

and there was a terrible accident that caused him to be

transformed into this human-goat hybrid creature that has

since terrorized the locals around

Beltsville and Bowie, Maryland.

The interesting thing about this one

is that the USDA actually had to make a public statement

saying, this is factually not true,

because the rumors had spread so far

and the story had picked up so much traction.

CRAIG WOOLHEATER Though

clouded in various science fiction origin stories,

to residents of Bowie, the Maryland Goatman was very real.

Just one week following the initial article breaking

the story of the Goatman, three teens

heard strange noises coming from the woods near their homes.

One even reported seeing the animal,

describing it as six feet tall, covered in hair,

and standing on two legs.

It made a high-pitched sound.

The following morning, they discovered

their puppy was missing.

After searching, they found her body near some railroad tracks,

with the head laying a few yards away.

The story spread like wildfire, and soon teens

all over Prince George's County were traveling to Fletchertown

Road in an attempt to have an encounter

with the Goatman of Bowie.

So great was the pandemonium throughout the county,

the story began to grow outside the state,

and soon, everyone knew the Maryland Goatman.

As the story spread, people attributed

more and more incidents to the goat-like entity.

There was a young couple in Maryland who were recently

married, and they were driving home late one night

and they had a flat tire.

So the husband steps out and tells the wife,

please wait here.

I'm just going to go get a tire, get help.

I'll be right back.

Hours go by, and nothing.

Next thing you know, she leans out of the window

and sees a seven-foot-tall Goatman

standing on the car, bent over, and staring

down into the window.

She rolls up the window, terrified, starts screaming,

and just eventually the Goatman walks away.

She passes out out of exhaustion and fear,

wakes up the next morning, still no husband.

But it's daylight out, so she decides

that she's going to go for a walk

and see if she can track down her husband.

She got about 40 feet away from the car

and found the remains of her husband.

Head had been completely ripped off, most of the limbs

were severely mangled.

I've tried really, really hard to dig

up irrefutable proof on this.

I've yet to be able to find any actual police reports on this.

And this is a troublesome part when it comes to Goatman,

is there's a lot of stories, but they're usually

told from person to person.

There's not really a whole lot of actual documentation on it.

The presence of Goatman stories,

like the one previously shared, do not exist in a vacuum.

Commonly referred to as Lovers' Lane Stories, these tales

take place in areas where people go

to be intimate with each other in a semi-public setting,

and there is certainly no shortage of them.

It's usually some remote parking spot

on the outskirts of town, down by the railroad tracks,

under the bridge, someplace where they can have

a limited amount of privacy.

Also, of course, people go to drink and tell stories.

The most famous legends besides the Goatman legend

is the dead boyfriend legend, where, of course,

the teenage couple are getting intimate in a car,

there's a noise.

The boyfriend goes out to investigate

and he doesn't come back.

The girlfriend goes to check what happened,

and he's usually hung from a tree limb above the car.

And then, of course, there's the hookman

legend, that's the other famous Lovers' Lane legend.

A couple parked out on a Lovers' Lane.

The radio is still on, and there's a special bulletin

that's made about an escaped convict who

is menacing the neighborhood, in which

this couple finds themselves.

And about the same time, there's a loud scratching that's

heard on the side of the vehicle on the-- typically,

the guy is driving, then the gal is in the other seat,

and it's on her side of the car.

And some detail that comes through on the radio.

Is that the escaped convict in question

has one hook for a hand.

And this is all too much for both of them,

they freak out and drive away at a fast rate of speed.

Getting back to her home, where she's safely

deposited back in the friendly confines.

But assuming that he's at least somewhat of a gentleman,

he comes around the other side of the car to open it for her,

and there, hanging on the handle of the car door,

is a disembodied hook.

So making it that the sound that they heard was evidently this

escaped convict scratching at the car, trying to get in.

I think we have to consider the possibility

that we sometimes have a confluence of different types

of urban legends or campfire tales that come together,

particularly in rural areas, and particularly

in these remote Lovers' Lane areas,

where teenagers go and park at night, where they like to spook

each other and tell stories.

So at some point the Goatman and the serial killer, the hook,

those ideas kind of converged.

Folklorists actually call him a Lovers' Lane

Monster because his legends exist almost exclusively

in places like this where teenagers or someone

of the like gathering.

There's a lot of sightings that happen in locations that aren't

like this, where there's no Goatman legend,

but people say they see creatures like it.

So I think a lot of the locations where he's

near railroad tracks or bridges could

just be the more sensational folklorist-type stories.

The fact that Goatman is associated with Lovers' Lane

areas, I think, speaks to his sort of folkloric role

as a kind of agent of judgment.

And you see this playing out in a variety

of ways, like in the case of the Pope

Lick Monster and the Trestle.

He's an agent of judgment in the sense

that he's punishing you for bad decision making.

It's a bad idea to climb out on this active train trestle

when you could get run down by a freight train

that you can't possibly escape.

Well, in the case of a Lovers' Lane,

it's not quite the same thing, but you

are very much capable of poor decision making

out there in Lovers' Lane.

And maybe a couple drinks in and you're out there with your loved

one, and one thing leads to another,

and here comes the Goatman to be that agent of judgment,

to say, hey, kids, you break it up

unless you want some unintended consequences to deal with.

Here, let me pound on your car hood

to make sure that you get out of here in time.

So I think he does play that function.

If a person is entertaining Goatman as sort

of an actual flesh and blood cryptid,

then there's also the added dimension that most

Lovers Lanes are remote.

You're going out there because you don't want to be

bothered in the first place.

So where are you going to seek out?

Well, it's not going to be a populated area.

It's going to be a Lovers' Lane, a darkened area,

and a place in near the woods that you hope is not detectable.

And those are often those liminal areas

that are also associated with all manner of cryptid sightings.

CRAIG WOOLHEATER The Goatman

is not always relegated to the Lovers' Lane, however.

Traveling from the East Coast, another Goatman

legend emerges, this time in the sun-baked hills of California.

So the Billiwhack Ranch is a former dairy farm that's located

in Santa Paula, California.

It is home to, supposedly, the Billiwhack Monster,

a humanoid-looking creature that has Goatman-like features,

giant horns, and is reported to even carry around a club,

that's violent in nature, tends to attack people that

come across it, and the cryptid story of this

is a little bit more mysterious than what

you typically get in most original cryptid stories.

It has numerous parallels

to the Goatman of Maryland, and what I mean

is that Ventura, California is the basic area

involving Billiwhack.

There's a Billiwhack farms that became established at that time

that it wasn't immediately evident,

but as time elapsed and people dug into the history

of this location, that facility, there

appeared to have been possible CIA

ties to at least the person who was instrumental in founding

the farm site.

So August Rubel is an interesting guy.

He's a pretty smart guy.

One of the things that comes up about him

pretty often is that he's from Europe.

He's Swiss.

So this is a guy that majored in chemical engineering.

This is something that's going to come up in the Billy

whack monster story.

But he also has apparent ties to the OSS, which

is a precursor to the CIA.

It stands for the Office of Strategic Services.

So this is an interesting guy.

He has government ties, chemical engineering ties,

and now he's associated with what

is supposedly a humanoid monster that roamed around his ranch.

Now, the original story involves August Ruble, and with

his chemical engineering background,

was trying to manufacture a super soldier using goat DNA,

and building an indestructible force that can

be utilized in World War II.

That's story A.

Story B is that ruble was more of almost

like a James Bond-type of character,

where he went off during World War II

and rounded up Nazi scientists that Hitler

was utilizing to build his own version of a super soldier.

And he rounded those guys up, brought them back

to Santa Paula, to the Billiwhack Ranch,

and utilized utilize their knowledge to build

the Billiwhack Monster.

And at some point, the monster escaped,

killing many of the scientists, and now

runs free in the Aliso Canyon near the Billiwhack Ranch.

And so what you had were

a couple scattered tales of a Goatman-type figure being seen.

In one case, by hikers who felt that they

were being trailed by a half-man, half-goat figure.

And so that traces back to this idea

of a pseudoscientific origin for the Goatman,

in that regard, that I see the parallels

between Ventura, California and Maryland, as far as origins go.

It's one of the oldest ones that

I've seen reported in newspapers,

I think goes back to the '50s.

A lot of the Goatman stories cropped up in the '70s, at least

in papers.

They may have been talked about by locals many,

many, many decades before that.

The oldest sighting I could find dates

back to 1912, seen by a herd of cowboys wandering

the Aliso Canyon area.

There wasn't much more to it.

Finding the actual cited sources to that story

were a little tough to find.

I couldn't really do it.

It was a lot of just copy and paste, copy

and paste, which is pretty common in this era

with the internet.

So that would actually predate August Rubel even purchasing

the Billiwhack Ranch, setting up his dairy farm infrastructure.

And that would actually more suggest,

too, the Billiwchack Monster predating

any of these World War II ties.

CRAIG WOOLHEATER Both

the story of the Goatman of Bowie

and the Beast of Billiwhack feature genetic experimentation

as explanations for their origins,

but few people would give that theory any merit.

As far as these stories about genetic experimentation

at an agricultural center and half-man,

half-goat being created, my first question is a critical

thinker would be, why?

What would be the advantage of creating a half-man, half-goat.

And I think it almost it seems to draw off

of a very famous story called The Island of Doctor Moreau,

by HG Wells, the great sci-fi writer.

And in that particular story, there's a mad scientist

on an island, and he's experimenting with splicing

human genes with animal genes.

And in fact, one of the creatures

was a half-man, half-goat.

So I think that idea, that seed, was kind of planted deep

in our unconscious minds, and that may

have had an influence as well.

Genetic experimentation is something

I don't know enough about to say that,

yeah, that makes sense to me.

I do just very loosely and anecdotally,

that scientists have attempted to cross human and primate DNA

and that they were not successful in doing so.

So if they were somehow able to cross goat and human DNA,

that would speak to a level of technological sophistication

that is beyond me, certainly, and I

think is beyond our present scientific capability.

So I think that concept of combining humans

with other animals through scientific experimentation

is very interesting to people.

It's got this cool sci-fi quality.

But in terms of how genetics actually works and ultimately

motivation and why someone would do something like that,

I think it's a big problem.

CRAIG WOOLHEATER Although

no power-crazed scientists may have created

a human-goat chimera, there are other versions of the Goatman

that may offer different explanations

for the mysterious creature's origins.

Good evening, Fort Worth.

We interrupt our regular programming

to bring you an extraordinary report from Lake Worth.

In an unprecedented event last night, on July 10, 1969,

several residents claimed to have witnessed a creature dubbed

"The Lake Worth Monster."

Reports described the beast as a half-man, half-goat hybrid,

standing over seven feet tall with fur,

scales, and large horns.

Witnesses, including teenagers who were at the lake,

say the monster leaped onto a car,

denting its roof before vanishing into the dark.

The original encounter with the Lake Worth Goatman

occurred in July of 1969, when two

couples were parked at the Greer Island Nature Center one night.

And they claimed that this creature actually jumped out

of a tree, onto the roof of their car,

attempted to abduct one of the women,

and ended up scratching their car.

And they were so terrified that they

immediately drove to the Sheriff's Office

and reported their encounter.

The next night, there were 40 people out

searching for the monster, and allegedly,

in front of about 30 or 40 eyewitnesses,

this creature appeared on a bluff, picked up a spare tire

and hurled it at the crowd, and it bounced about 500 feet.

Now, what's interesting is that the creature was described

as being a white color, but the initial description,

the two couples said that it was a scaly Goatman,

whatever that means, and so ultimately

became known as the Goatman.

But then later on, people said it

had more of like a gorilla-like look to it.

Strange thing about the tire throwing incident with regard

to the Lake Worth Monster is the fact

that it evidently happened with so many eyewitnesses involved.

Between 40 and 50 people, evidently,

were at the rim of this pit.

But all the stories in the paper and in Clark's book report

that the creature threw this tire 500 feet at a rate of speed

that caused everyone to immediately scatter and leave

the vicinity, because they would have been killed

had it hit them.

With such a dramatic entrance

for the Lake Worth Goatman, and with so many witnesses,

law enforcement felt pressured to provide answers.

When law enforcement is brought into the picture, which

is relatively right away, I mean, the first stories

that were filed that appeared in the local newspaper

were within a couple days of each other.

The law enforcement took the stance

that it was an escaped bobcat, that a bobcat had been released

into the wild by their owner, and had taken up residence

in the Greer Island Area and was in the habit of going up

into trees and dropping down onto unassuming people,

especially seem to like landing on cars for whatever reason,

and then scratching them up.

That was their explanation to many of these sightings.

CRAIG WOOLHEATER The newspapers

didn't seem interested in following up on the story

beyond the incredible tire throwing incident,

and many people were content to explain it all away

as the work of pranksters.

And that would have been the end of the Lake Worth Monster saga,

if it weren't for Sallie Ann Clark.

After reading about the incidents in the Fort Worth Star

Telegram, Clark made her way to Greer island

to investigate for herself.

Armed with a camera and a cassette tape recorder,

Clark proceeded to interview dozens of witnesses who claimed

to have encountered the beast.

She then compiled the information,

along with her own observations, into a self-published book

titled The Lake Worth Monster of Greer

Island, Fort Worth, Texas, which was released in September 1969.

All I can tell you about Sallie Ann Clark

is what she reveals in her book.

And so she is a self-described private investigator

and freelance writer.

And what else she was doing beyond that, I have no idea.

But that is the angle that she takes in her book,

and it's a very interesting read.

She goes around in the book describing her random driving

from one location to another, especially

in the vicinity of Greer Island, collecting reports

from individuals, some of which are extremely dramatic stories.

In one case, in the flow of the book,

talks about meeting this young eight, nine-year-old boy

on Greer Island, getting a report

from him that the Lake Worth Monster had killed his cousin.

In detail, she goes into this story about the Lake Worth

Monster swinging through the trees

with his cousin in his arms and then

throwing them, throwing his cousin at a car,

effectively killing him.

And that same boy that she had talked to

falls asleep on a rock.

She wonders, what do I do with this kid,

because it's not her child.

And that as she's wondering what to do,

she hears the sounds of the Lake Worth Monster approaching her.

She climbs up in a tree and watches as the Lake Worth

monster approaches this boy, who's still asleep,

and it scratches the child's cheek

and then wakes up, sees the monster,

and calls out to Sallie Ann, who's up in the tree.

"Lady, lady, I'm seeing the monster that I told you about."

And then after that whole incident wraps up,

she goes to the diner and has a piece of pie.

It's very bizarre.

And to this day, I don't really know

how to take that bit of writing, because she

presents it as factual, take it or leave it.

And it's sort of Gonzo journalism

before that phrase was even coined, I think.

After Sallie Ann Clark's venture

into the case, another notable researcher dug into the Monster

of Lake Worth's story.

Ken Gerhard.

I first investigated the Lake Worth

Goatman about 20 years ago, 2004,

along with another researcher named Nick Redfern.

We went to the Greer Island Nature Center.

We found The Bluff, the area where it supposedly threw a tire

at this crowd of people, and then we went out

onto Greer island itself, which was said to be the haunt

of this Goatman creature.

And we did find a weird teepee-like structure.

We found a large impression on the ground

nearby where something had been laying down,

and we also found the remains of a fish that had been half eaten.

So since that time, I've been to that particular location

a few different times.

I looked around, I haven't found any significant evidence,

and in fact, I spoke to some of the park rangers

there and asked them about the monster legend,

and they kind of tried to brush it off

and say that it was probably a hoax,

maybe someone dressed up in a costume and so forth.

But it's worth noting that there were

a lot of people that claimed to have seen this creature.

But the Lake Worth monster is very--

is described, always, in very aggressive terms.

Beating people against the side of their cars, one

ex-military person that Clark allegedly

spoke to who made a big deal out of the fact

that he had purchased this convertible,

and he was very proud of it.

He mentions it a number of times,

was driving around out on Greer Island,

before all these other reports hit,

and he saw the monster bludgeoning

this guy against the side of his car, almost apparently to death.

And he said, I had far too much to drink at the time,

but I sobered up on my way back to town

because I was going 180, putting this car

to-- taking it to its limits.

CRAIG WOOLHEATER I myself

have done extensive research into the story of the Lake Worth

Monster, even finding witnesses who were only just now talking

about their experiences.

My own book, The Lake Worth The True Story

of The Greer Island Goatman, delves both into the history

of the case and the legacy it has built around my hometown

of Fort Worth.

But the answers as to what the creature is or was

remains a mystery.

One theory, however, presents itself

most prominently in another encounter with the monster.

The last alleged sighting occurred in November of 1969,

when a guy named Charles Buchanan was parked

alongside Lake Worth, and he claimed the creature climbed up

in the bed of his pickup truck and stole

a bag of fried chicken, and then jumped in the lake and swam

away.

Before Buchanan left the scene,

he spotted something on the ground,

a footprint that resembled that of a human,

yet it was 18 inches long.

Cryptid enthusiasts would be quick to point out

that a giant, human-shaped footprint might belong

to something like a Sasquatch, rather

than a goat-like creature.

And indeed, there seems to be a lot

of Sasquatch activity in the areas surrounding Lake Worth.

In the 1960s, newspapers reported run-ins with ape-like

creatures in the areas surrounding Fort Worth,

encounters with so-called wild men.

Large, man-like figures covered in hair

were confrontational in nature, with the wildman

growling, yelling, or throwing rocks at the eyewitnesses.

While Sasquatch are typically described as being covered

in dark hair, some reports, especially those in the Northern

United States, describe Sasquatch with white hair,

matching the description of the Lake Worth Monster more closely.

But the Lake Worth Monster is not

the only Goatman story to be closely associated

with Sasquatch reports.

In 1957, a week-long panic gripped the town of Upper

Marlboro, Maryland, when over 200 people claimed to have

encountered a large bipedal ape that was quickly dubbed

"The Abominable Phantom."

Local authorities searched the woods of Prince George's County,

but found no sign of the alleged creature.

All of this occurring a little less than a decade and a half

before the Goatman of Bowie made his debut.

So you can imagine a lot of this stuff

is about perspective and interpretation.

If somebody's out in the woods where they heard

there was a Goatman and they see a big hairy man-like creature

running through the woods, well, then that's the Goatman.

People aren't thinking Bigfoot, at that point.

They've already had their perspective

colored, to some extent.

If we're open to the idea of Sasquatches

existence, which I know many people are, then the idea

that Sasquatch could be seen and then mistaken for something

else could explain any number of supernatural or cryptozoological

encounters, because many of these sightings

take place from a distance, they're

very fleeting, they're often taking place at night,

they're in very frantic situations.

So if Sasquatch is out there, which

I tend to think there's a pretty good chance that it is,

I think that's certainly a possibility.

What's striking about these descriptions,

though, when we're talking about the Goatman motif,

is this recurring idea of it having horns.

And Sasquatch, if we're going on the assumption

that it's a primate, primates generally

don't have horns, so that's kind of where

we run into some difficulty.

As a cryptozoologist.

First, I have to consider the fact that something

like a half-man, half-goat, an anthropomorphic creature,

is a zoological impossibility.

The two lineages that led to us Homo sapiens and artiodactyls,

or hoofed animals, like goats, the last common ancestor

we shared was about 65 million years ago or something.

So you're talking about two distinct lineages that

went in opposite directions, that evolved

over a long period of time, and therefore,

could not converge again.

So it's a biological impossibility, which almost

implies either more of a supernatural origin,

or there are some people that talk

about diabolical genetic experiments,

where nefarious government agencies

or laboratories are trying to splice human and goat DNA.

Now, admittedly, that type of knowledge

is kind of beyond my understanding,

so I don't know if that can actually be achieved or not.

But it's worth noting that, throughout history, there

have been weird genetic anomalies in humans.

For example, there have been humans born with tails.

It's very, very rare, but it does happen.

And it's called an atavism.

An atavism is when a human displays

an ancient physical trait that's locked into our deep

in our genetic code from a long, long time ago.

And there are also humans that have horns, believe it or not,

they're called cutaneous horns.

And it's actually a strange type of tumor that grows on people,

and oftentimes, on their foreheads, strangely enough,

and it looks just like a horn.

There's a woman in China known as the unicorn

woman that has one of these horn like structures.

So you can imagine, throughout history,

if there were humans with horns or humans

with tails, as rare as that was, how that might apply or spawn

some of these Goatman legends.

While misinterpreted Sasquatch

sightings may explain away some of the Goatman sightings,

it does not explain the description

of horns, which are so characteristic of these

creatures.

A biological answer doesn't seem likely either,

leaving few rational possibilities to explain

the creatures origins.

One of these possibilities leads to a much darker side

of the phenomenon, one that also shines

a light on the darkest parts of humanity.

And it lies only 30 miles away from Lake Worth.

The Goatman of the old Alton Bridge

is one that I find fascinating because of its roots

in local folklore, having to do with a bridge that

connected a couple communities, essentially,

in North Central Texas.

The story is that there

was an African-American goat farmer in the area

who was very successful.

He was doing very well, making a big name for himself.

His name was purported to be Oscar Washburn,

is how the story goes.

Had become fairly successful in being a goatherd

and selling goat products in the area.

And in fact, advertising his wares by hanging

a sign on the Alton Bridge that said, "this way to the Goatman."

And it was his form of advertising.

Evidently, the local KKK didn't like that too much and hated

the idea of a successful Black man peddling his wares,

so they held a clandestine town council meeting where they

outlawed the type of advertising that he had placed

on the bridge, and then went out to accost him and accuse him,

and tried to throw him in jail for this crime

that he was now committing.

They formed a noose, and they were going to lynch him

off of the side of the bridge.

And when they did that--

and here's where many variations occur,

either that they went through with the lynching,

only to find that his body was missing,

or that his head had become separated from the body,

and depending on what version you hear, but they then go back

from that apparently unsuccessful attempt

to kill him, or it was successful,

and they buried the body and told everyone

they couldn't find the body, but evidently, they

murdered the entire Washburn family after that.

And as a result of this horrific event,

this half-man, half-goat entity is now purported

to haunt the old Alton Bridge.

And people go out there and they do ghost investigations.

They go out there at night, they take EM readings and things.

Sometimes they get results, sometimes they don't.

But this is one of those stories that's

associated more with the darker side of this legend.

It's not so much just a monster sighting it.

It talks about some of the worst parts of humanity,

and looks at some of the darkest places in our history

as the backdrop for this story.

So unlike some of these other Goatman legends,

where oh, it was a government experiment or a man cross-bred

with goats, it's grounded a lot more

in reality, in a very dark way.

There's some real weight to the story,

because if that actually did happen to Oscar Washburn, then

there is some sort of justice, that it seems to be much needed.

And to me, this is one of the telltale signs of the Goatman,

in many of these cases, where he appears as a kind of avenger

or an agent of judgment.

The apparent difference

between the Goatman of old Alton Bridge and other Goatman cases

previously discussed is its brutal origin story.

No longer is the Goatman a result of an experiment

gone wrong or a misidentified Sasquatch.

It has now been transformed into a spirit of vengeance,

to right the wrongs that the living

have suffered at this bridge.

The old Alton bridge is one of the things that makes the Lake

Worth Monster so interesting, because you have two Goatman

stories or legends or sightings that are really only about 35

miles apart in a straight line.

The Alton Bridge is a little bit south of the Dallas Fort Worth

area, and it's this old iron trellis bridge

that was constructed in 1884.

And for a long time, it was a main thoroughfare.

It was used by people on foot, horses, cars,

until it was finally shut down and they installed a new bridge

and moved the road over a little bit.

The bridge is still there.

You can visit it, you can walk on it,

it's a popular tourist draw.

And there's already a lot of paranormal folklore associated

with these old iron bridges.

Iron itself has a lot of lore and stories

and mythology attached to it.

Bridges are considered places of crossing over, liminal areas.

Water is considered to be a very spiritual, supernatural thing

in a lot of belief systems.

So these old iron bridges, for a lot of people,

represent intersections of high strangeness.

And when people investigate these places

or they just visit them, they very frequently

come away talking about ghosts, hearing voices.

There's this idea in the world of high strangeness

and the paranormal, of strange things

existing in liminal spaces.

Liminal, in this sense, refers to like

a threshold, a place that really nothing has any sort of dominion

over.

So in this sense, things can exist there.

It's not really a place that has a beginning or an ending.

It's just a place that's going somewhere.

It sort of exists in this transient state.

So the idea of a paranormal entity

sort of finding a home there kind of lends some credence.

Now, you get other ideas of like Hecate, the goddess,

she's the ruler of the crossroads.

You have a lot of stories of crossroads being

associated with the paranormal.

It kind of lends into the idea of bridges and train tracks too.

Deals going down there, entities existing.

So I think that could play into the idea

of why things exist near these transient liminal places.

"Crybaby bridges" is a term I'm hearing more lately,

but people will report hearing babies crying,

which is something we know John Keel was talking about

back in the '60s and the '70s.

That's something that's been in our minds for a while.

But a lot of this stuff seems to intersect

with these iron bridges.

Crybaby bridges or crybaby lanes, for that matter,

seem to be a phenomenon that you can find in almost every state.

Every state's got one.

So the the basic premise of the crybaby bridge

is, more often than not, the bridge

becomes haunted because of a terrible accident

that happened there.

People end up dying, and then years later,

activity will start to be reported on there.

Now, in particular, when it comes to crybabies,

this often means that there was a death

of a child or several children.

There's an interesting one in North Carolina that originally

was considered to be a Lovers' Lane bridge,

but has since become a crybaby bridge.

Apparently, what happened here is there was a school bus that

ended up veering off of this bridge,

and all of the children in the driver died.

Fast forward several decades later,

this bridge has now been remade and another road

has been put on the side of it, so the bridge is just

kind of abandoned, and this becomes a very popular spot

for teenagers to go run off and make out

in the middle of the evening.

And it wasn't too far after this little bridge became

a private hiding spot for teenagers that most kids who

went out there started to report hearing children crying

and handprints appearing on the windows.

There's always been a link with supernatural creatures

and bridges of various from various cultures.

Trolls are supposed to live under bridges,

spirits can't cross water, things like that.

If he is a supernatural creature,

allegedly running water can provide energy for things

to manifest, so it might be easier for something

like Goatman, if he is something akin to a spirit that needs

energy to appear, a bridge would be a good location

for him to do that.

And there's often supernatural and paranormal aspects

and stories of many bridges around,

such as Emily's Bridge in Stowe, Vermont,

where there was a tragic story of a bride-to-be who

ended her life around this bridge as she

was stood up at the altar.

And there are many stories like that elsewhere as well.

There's all sorts of haunted bridges all over the world.

We have a couple in Texas.

We have another human-animal hybrid,

the Donkey Lady Bridge in San Antonio,

down on old Applewhite Road.

And that's a very similar story to some

of these Goatman legends, where someone was killed

and somehow they were fused with this animal,

and now they haunt this area.

And it's a tradition, or was for a long time in San Antonio,

for people to drive out there at night and park their car,

go poke around in the woods.

And there are a lot of stories, if you look around online,

of people hearing something or seeing something in the woods.

So it's a recurring motif that we see in our culture.

It's something that pops up all over the place.

I'm honestly not sure if there's really

a paranormal connotation to these goatmen

being seen in specific areas around bridges

and railroad tracks.

I tend to think it's more of a cultural phenomenon,

in terms of the old legends of European trolls living

under bridges and some of those stories.

As far as railroad tracks go, I think

it's interesting to point out that I

grew up next to some railroad tracks, kind of in a rural area.

And there's almost something spooky,

particularly as a young person, when you go out to these areas,

these Lovers' Lane areas, if you will,

where these goatmen have been described.

There's something kind of spooky about railroad tracks,

particularly when you're walking along a long line of railroad

tracks next to a forested area.

I don't know.

It's quite an interesting question.

One could derive the idea that there's

some type of energetic force or something

that conjures up these Goatman images

when you're in these specific types of locations.

The stories of Goatman seem more

paranormal in nature, but why?

I think it's kind of hard to pinpoint

a Goatman entity existing as a biological creature.

There's nothing in the fossil record that

suggests a Goatman could exist.

Unlike a Bigfoot, you have Gigantopithecus, things

like that, that we have evidence of something

like this can actually biologically

walk around and exist.

Goatman, on the other hand, not so much.

However, if you tie in the idea of the supernatural,

the paranormal, and these things existing

without any rhyme or reason, but through fantastical means,

I think something like that can exist.

Maybe it's phasing in and out of reality,

or is some sort of ancient deity that pops into existence,

I think that may be more of what's going on here.

I don't think a half-man, half-goat makes any sense

in the biological kingdom, based on my limited

zoological knowledge.

And unlike a lot of other human-animal chimeric beings

that we see in folklore and mythology,

and even in the modern cryptozoological lexicon,

Goatman is generally described as distinctly being half-human,

half-goat, as having this goat head on a very

distinctly human body.

That doesn't really make sense.

So if it's not a hoax, a hallucination, just

an urban legend, if it's something that actually exists

in the form that we're perceiving it,

you could make the argument that it would have

to be something supernatural.

Something from outside the veil, if you like.

Returning to the beast

of Billiwhack, we see that the paranormal aspect of the Goatman

legend is not far from the more commonly touted origin stories.

Leasowe Canyon is also home to what some Spanish speakers

call the Chivo Man, a Goatman-like entity

with supernatural roots.

So the Chivo Man and the Billiwhack monster,

they're essentially one and the same.

The only difference there is, the Chivo Man has more of roots

in Mexico and Central America, as the y chivo

creature, which is essentially a Goatman-like creature that

is human.

It's a brujo, a witch, a male witch that utilizes witchcraft

to turn himself into a Goatman-like creature

or other sort of humanoid-looking entities.

And one of the interesting things about that,

if you were to tie in witchcraft into the idea of the Billiwhack

monster, the Billiwhack monster is

located in the Billiwhack Ranch, but that was originally

in the Aliso Canyon area.

That's what the entire area surrounding Billiwhack Ranch is.

Now, "aliso" means alder in English.

So Alder tree.

If you look into elemental magic,

the Alder tree is associated with being

a gateway for the fairy folk, the fae people.

It's utilized as a portal to go from one realm to the next.

So if you were to add in the idea of witchcraft

into the idea of this Billiwhack monster creature,

now you can see why a creature can pop in and phase in and out

of existence, and not really have

any sort of biological precedent for existing.

And the Aliso Canyon area acting somewhat

as a window area, a hotspot for anomalous activity to exist.

When considering the possibility

of the Goatman being something otherworldly,

the floodgates are open to a plethora of explanations.

Nathan Couch, author of the book Goatman: Flesher Folklore,

offers one of the most interesting and unique

takes on what the Goatman may be.

We discussed, like, could he be a zoological creature?

And I think it's an impossibility.

And the fact-- and of course, I said earlier

that he has a lot of supernatural traits

and skills in these stories and in these sightings.

I think if he does exist, he'd have

to be something supernatural, something that hasn't

been explained by science yet.

I think he'd have to be like a nature spirit of some type.

I don't really necessarily mean a spirit,

as in a ghost or human spirit, but pagan religions

worship nature spirits like the fey, fairies or nature spirits,

all these things like gnomes, trolls, things of that nature.

They're all these supernatural creatures that exist in nature

that aren't human, and they have some sort

of supernatural or divine quality to them.

Goatman looks a lot like the god Pan, from Greek mythology.

He was a half-man, half-goat creature.

Pan was the god of the wild.

He was very connected to nature, very

symbolic of humankind's relationship

with nature in the Greek pantheon.

And the term panic, as in extreme fear that we use today,

comes from Pan's name.

That's the root term for that.

Because Pan, when you're walking in the wilderness

and you hear animals howling in the wind and the sounds

of the wild, that's said to be Pan shouting at you

or calling out into the night as you pass through his territory.

So when you look at the modern day

and you have some of these more modern Goatman encounters,

a lot of times, they're accompanied by people saying,

I heard a wailing sound, I heard this horrible scream,

this inhuman cry coming from the night.

So at the very least, there's a tangential correlation, not only

in the physical resemblance between Pan

and the modern Goatman, if you want to call it that, but also

the way in which these things behave

and the way in which they seem to approach

people when they're in these wild and wooded places.

And there is an exact sighting in Dallas,

near white Rock Lake, that I believe Nick Redfern uncovered,

where a woman who was jogging around the lake,

felt like she was being watched.

She turned, she saw this goat-like creature

looking at her, smirking.

It walked towards her a little bit

and then there was a smell of sulfur.

He just disappeared in a flash after laughing at her,

and she said she felt like she was

having a panic attack, something that she had never felt before.

CRAIG WOOLHEATER The parallels

between the Goatmen and the satyrs of the ancient world

are obvious on the surface.

Half-man, half-goat figures that live in the wild,

sometimes feeling travelers with panic

if they are unlucky enough to come upon one at night.

Yet, perhaps the connection is more than skin deep.

The correlation between goatmen

and satyrs or fauns really seems very, very natural

when you stop to think about the functions

of those figures in mythology.

They were associated with virility, fertility.

They were also associated with debauchery and wild parties.

And so it just seems like, in the case of the Lovers' Lane

stories, they're modern retellings

of these sort of Saturnalia.

I mean, that's where the phrase comes from in the first place,

is the satyr.

And the overlap between that and pagan holiday festivities.

Pan, as well, as far as a lowercase god is concerned,

was very much involved with these sort of tales.

And so there does seem to be, again--

although in the modern tellings, it's not so much

encouraging the behavior as it is discouraging

or talking about consequences.

Exacting some sort of judgment.

In the case of Alton Bridge, it's

a folkloric agent of judgment in a frontier justice.

Some consequence must be levied upon those who are doing wrong.

So I do see that there is a way that those paradigms, even

though they they morph slightly in function,

that that seems to be a pattern that

occupies the psyche of humankind, for whatever reason.

There does seem to be a connection or correlation

between some of this activity and the sexual energy

of human beings.

And the prime example of that is you

start talking about poltergeists.

These are often connected to young women who are just

now beginning to come of age, and all of a sudden,

this activity starts.

I think it might have something to do with the fact

that around those times in a person's life,

the chemicals in your brain start to shift,

and therefore, your perception is going to shift.

And when that starts to happen, there's a good possibility

that you might be able to open yourself up to other channels

and see different layers of reality.

And that's where I think a lot of this stuff comes from,

is layers of reality that's stacked on top of us.

And at the same time, I also think

that has something to do with human consciousness and the way

that we remember things as far as history goes.

Because satyrs, they were very popular and very believed

in during Greek times.

Now, fast forward to a time when spirituality is not necessarily

part of our main sphere of existence, but now

we have all of these people who are starting

to take an interest in it.

So now we're starting to see sightings of things

like Goatman, Dogman, stranger cryptids that don't necessarily

have the popularity of, say, Bigfoot or Loch Monster,

but enough sightings in recent times

have certainly made it a little bit more interesting.

You go through this continuum

of natural explanations, supernatural explanations,

scientific, and you'd think that it would stop at that,

but it's kind of gone back in the direction

of the supernatural and dark, even satanic direction.

And I think that's where this idea that is whispered about

or talked about in very cautious ways

is that somehow this thing could have been conjured, in much

the same way as like dogmen are talked about today,

and highly suggested, like in the case of the Beast of Bray

Road, for example, that some sort of occult activity

could have intentionally or inadvertently

brought this thing to life.

And how that works, how long that it stays in our dimension

are questions I'd rather not know

the answers to, but seem to be put forward

as a possible explanation.

CRAIG WOOLHEATER These nature

spirits are not the only thing the Goatman resembles.

With a goat-like head and a man-like body,

the Goatman might as well be the devil himself.

I think what sets the Goatman legend apart

from other cryptids is the fact that our essential image

of a half-man, half-goat conjures

up Satan, demons, the embodiment of ultimate evil.

And so in that respect, the Goatman

is almost scarier than something like a Bigfoot,

or a Dogman, or even a chupacabra,

because it is demonic in nature.

It's got paganistic qualities, so it hearkens back

to that ancient form of evil, something

that evolved centuries ago, something that's still around.

Psychologically, I think people are very, very scared

of the notion of something that looks like a half-man, half-goat

because it's demonic.

The quintessential image

of the Satanic goat-like entity known

as Baphomet stems from early occultist

writers like Eliphas Levi.

Later, it became entwined with inverted pentagrams.

Thelema, Freemasons, Aleister Crowley, and the teachings

of Anton LaVey, both of whom associated

the Baphomet with the god Pan.

What's more is the sigil of Baphomet

is the official insignia of the Church of Satan.

In many ways, equating the Goatman with the devil

is a natural thought process, but not necessarily the most

explanatory.

Classically, the devil is often portrayed as something

very similar to a satire.

You have the cloven hooves, the rather muscular torso,

and then you have the head of the goat.

Where that imagery actually comes from, I cannot be sure,

but it is now made its way into the psychological aspect of how

we perceive good and evil.

There's a whole stream of thought that goes

into consideration of goat man.

As far as like occult, or we'll just go right to Baphomet

and Satan, it says, why this?

And I think part of this is related to ideas that correlate

to the ability that evil has or does

not have to make and create.

And this has been explored in the writings of C.S. Lewis

and JRR Tolkien and others, but that Satan

does not have the power to create things from nothing.

He can only take what's there and corrupt it.

And so here's where it really gets interesting,

is that the idea, in some cases, like the Pope Lick Monster,

for example, early reports seem to break

in the direction of a sheepman, but later ones

go in the direction of Goatman.

And a correlation here could potentially

be that, in the case of sheep, when you think of a sheep,

you don't think of something malevolent,

you think of something innocent.

You think of something pure.

And taking this to scripture, such as the Holy Bible,

you have the son of God, who is described

in terms of the lamb of God.

So you've got this symbol of purity and goodness.

What's a way to corrupt that?

Well, potentially take it in the direction of a goat, which

is less likable as a figure, certainly one

that we associate with things like eating

trash and living off of that.

While a ram, a sheep's ram can develop horns,

we don't think of a lamb as having that ability,

but a full grown goat has the horns,

and therefore, seems more intimidating

and will, in fact, resort to violence

when that's seen as needed.

So I think that there may be some territory to explore there,

that a goat is a violent or corrupt form

of an innocent little lamb, and maybe, somewhere along the way,

our expectation or perception of what

half-human, half-sheep, then goat, becomes,

is colored by that.

One of the most notable

of all Goatman stories is that of the Pope

Lick Monster of Kentucky.

Some legends suggest that if one walks

to the middle of the train trestle,

the Goatman will appear on the other side.

Others claim that the Goatman is the result of satanic rituals

conducted in a nearby shack.

Stories of the Pope Lick Monster are as varied

as any that have already been discussed,

but they also introduce new elements

into the mythos of the Goatman.

My name is David Domine, I'm a Louisville-based

author and educator, a folklorist as well.

And I've lived in Louisville since 1993,

and one of the first urban legends I heard about

was one that said to be rooted here at the Pope Lick Trestle.

It's called the Goatman.

Some call it the monster of Pope Lick.

This is an active trestle.

We have early mentions of it in 1909

already, so we know this train track has run through here

for at least 100 years.

Interestingly enough, this is a case where an initial, very

old reports seem to describe it as Sheepman instead of Goatman.

And at some point, that tilts in the direction of the goat

instead of the sheep.

There's some rather sort of highly bizarre stories

having to do with origins.

Supposedly, there was this goat-like creature seen

in the wilderness of Canada, and this circus owner

named Silas Garner, who was somebody who I have not been

able to prove ever existed, found out

about the creature hired someone to capture it,

to put it in a sideshow.

Supposedly by capturing this creature, he cursed himself.

And on a stormy night, as the train

was traveling through Kentucky, the Goatman's curse

caused the train to derail, and he escaped, and now lives

under the bridge at Pope Lick.

Others say that there was a local farmer who was a little

too friendly with his goats.

He was breeding with them, and that's one

of the more interesting takes.

Another far more even sinister origin stories

having to do with a farmer who made goat sacrifices, hoping

to gain some sort of satanic dark power,

and he ends up becoming the Goatman.

It's very much an urban legend.

It's said that there's a half-man, half-goat kind

of creature who lives under the trestles,

and he's a siren-type of being.

He likes to attract unsuspecting visitors up to the tracks.

Sometimes he mimics voices, sometimes

he acts like he's in distress.

But for whatever reason, people are led up to the trestle,

and many people don't realize this is still an active trestle,

several times a day.

So there's an almost 800 foot span.

And if you're caught up there where a train is coming through,

there's really no place to go.

All you can do is outrun the train, which most people can't,

or you have to jump over the side

and dangle from one of the pieces of wood

that juts out, which is kind of a hard task

because it takes usually at least five minutes

for a train to rumble overhead.

That's when people often fall to their deaths, or they're running

and they stumble and they fall over the side,

because there's really no railing.

It's just tracks up in the sky.

CRAIG WOOLHEATER One thing

separating the Pope Lick Monster from other Goatman stories

are the very real deaths connected to the legend.

As of 2019, at least 12 people have

been injured while seeking the Goatman

upon the Pope Lick Trestle.

There are some people that have actually

gone out there to look for the Goatman,

and their lives have been tragically ended,

as in the case of a couple who went up there around 2015

or 2016, and they were on the train trestle

and a train started coming their way,

as there are 20 to 25 trains that actually go over this train

trestle every day.

The boyfriend managed to jump and hang onto a steel beam,

where the girlfriend met her tragic fate

90 feet below onto the ground.

JC Bahm was a teenager, I believe, in 1988,

and he was struck by the train and killed,

and presumably fell to his death off of the trestle.

Those stories-- and they're matters of historic fact--

people who have gone out on the tracks and have

died because of it.

So unlike a lot of these other stories where they kind of just

add up to a bunch of fun sightings

and a few spooky stories, this is

one that actually has a tangible death toll attached to it.

Some people have taken it to say that, oh, well,

that means the Goatman is responsible for these deaths,

or the Goatman hypnotizes people and brings them into the woods.

I tend to think some places are just very dangerous,

and that's why people get hurt when they go out there

and don't take the appropriate precautions, when

they go to places that they aren't supposed to go.

But there's no separating this legend

from this place and all of the tragic events

that have gone on here.

CRAIG WOOLHEATER The final key

to the Goatman mystery is the influence of the media.

In the age of information, where a sensational news can and does

influence the decisions of individuals,

the proliferation of certain stories

are bound to ignite the imaginations of people.

A single newspaper article was all

that it took to lure teenagers out

to Fletchertown Road in search of the Goatman of Bowie.

Even years later, when the story of Ginger the Dog

was revealed to have been a hoax,

the legend had grown well beyond the newsprint

and was now part of modern folklore.

Hundreds of people flock to Lake Worth

when the sensational sightings were mentioned

on local television news.

Deaths on the Pope Lick Trestle that were once

seen as accidental were now shrouded in mystery

due to the popularization of an urban legend

through an independent film.

In every major case of the Goatman,

there lies a strong media backing to the legend.

And with every legend tripper that seeks out the Goatman

and has an experience either real or imagined,

the mythos continues to grow.

I think part of the reason why there are so many origin stories

and such variants has, in part, to do with the explanatory power

of things over time.

And what I mean by that is 150, 200 years ago, you

would have had sort of agrarian, naturalistic explanations

for things, yet mundane sort of reasons

that a Goatman might appear.

In other words, a fleshly union between farmer and animal,

as sickening as that is to consider,

that is one stream of explanatory story

that was given about that.

And then you start to bring in folk religion, witchcraft,

and so forth.

And now, the devil and dark forces

become to swirl into the story, where if some sort

of pact or agreement was made.

Then that would result in a necessary consequence of making

a deal with the devil, is you have to pay

a price that you don't expect.

And certainly, being forced into the form of a goat man

would qualify as one of those terrible prices to pay.

And then, with the rise of science as something

that explains everything, you get into then stories

having to do with breeding taking place,

normally in a secret facility where, evidently, DNA

of some type could be spliced.

And that sort of rules the creation,

if you will, of a creature like Goatman or Sheepman,

where you're moving away from a kind

of spiritual religious overtone into the realm

of a scientific, reasonable explanation.

Goatman is generally always, at least

in the stories I've looked at, somehow

intimately tied to human nature.

Again, if we look at Pan and those early stories

that talks about how humankind interacted with the wild,

how we viewed wild places, and what we learned to fear,

it symbolizes this mash up of humanity and something wild.

And again, a lot of cryptids do that.

But these modern Goatman stories, the origin stories

are always racism, genetic experiments

gone wrong, humans and animals intermixing, just bad things.

A lot of cryptid stories, we get monsters that

kind of represent humanity.

They're upright, maybe they're hominids, Bigfoot stories.

But Goatman reports seem to, again, just talk

about the worst parts of humankind.

Science gone wrong, racial prejudice, greed, violence.

There's never anything positive in there.

There's never anything that we look at and go,

that makes me feel a little bit better about the world.

Unlike with, say, again, Bigfoot encounters

or some other potentially unclassified animals,

the Loch Monster.

People have these encounters and it changes

their life for the better.

I don't think we've heard a story like that about Goatman.

The locations where

he's a known legend, like the trestle at Pope Lick,

so you have those types of stories, which probably

not even a morsel of truth in them,

but you have sightings of creatures

that very much could be in the realm of real experience.

Like perhaps a lot of these sightings

have nothing to do with the outlandish stories they've been

given, people are experiencing them

and then people are attaching plot

lines from movies and comic books

and campfire stories to these sightings.

I think there's so many different versions

of Goatman just because again, sort of exists

as this primordial fear that we have,

this idea of fear of the woods, fear of the unknown,

and the idea of going back, again, to Pan,

the trickster God of the woods.

There was essentially a Goatman entity that

would lure you to your doom.

Maybe that sort of memory, that genetic memory that we have

of danger in the woods, has been personified

into the idea of this Goatman-like figure that--

now that can exist all across the world, in every state,

in every country, in every dark wooded area that we wander into,

the idea of this goat man waiting there to get us

can exist and live and thrive, and is probably experienced

by numerous amounts of people.

When considering the archetype of a Goatman,

I think there are many different influences

and we have to accept that many of our cryptids

are actually examples of what I call composite identity,

meaning there's different influences

coming together to form this one specific archetype.

And so, for example, the idea of a half-man, half-goat

goes back a long time.

In the fifth century BC, we find the first Greek interpretations

of creatures known as satyrs, which are essentially

forest beings that are often portrayed

as having goat-like features big ears, horns.

So that particular idea has been around a very, very long time.

And then that evolved over time, and I

think those ancient Greek mythologies

and legends were adapted by the Romans,

and the satyrs became the fauns.

And then as Christianity took over,

a lot of these old pagan ideas of things like satyrs

were kind of pushed to the side.

And then eventually, early interpretations

of Satan or the devil began to resemble a half-man, half-goat,

almost as if Christianity was saying,

OK, well, these old pagan ideas of goatmen, these are demons.

These are the devil.

And so the Goatman, therefore, become an evil entity.

It's become kind of an embodiment of pure evil

or demonic activity.

And furthermore, I think we have to acknowledge

that a lot of urban legends and campfire tales

actually migrate and evolve.

And as different communities and areas

adapt these monster stories, they put their own brand on it.

There are always some similar themes or motifs in terms of,

it's out in the woods, in a remote area,

or near an old spooky stone bridge.

So the basic themes remain the same.

I think a good parallel example are

these legends of giant catfish living under dams.

And I've been to many places in the United States--

Arizona, Georgia, Texas-- where I've heard this recurring story

about below a dam, there are these car-sized catfish

that will swallow people and animals and things.

And so you find these similar legends in different places,

and it's almost as if they kind of migrated.

Similarly, a lot of these Goatman stories

may have migrated from Europe, with European immigrants

that brought some of the old world stories and tall tales.

And finally, there's an aspect in terms

of when you consider what occurs at Lovers' Lane areas.

Teenagers are lustful, they're looking to party,

so they're out there, they're drinking,

they're doing things that their parents don't want them to do.

And so it's almost like there's an unconscious connection here

to ancient Greek mythology and the satyrs, who were

the original party animals.

They were out with Dionysus, they

were drinking wine, they were debaucherous, chasing women.

And so I think by associating the Goatman legends

with these remote Lovers' Lane areas,

it's almost like we're harkening back

to the earlier age of paganism and the types

of debauchery that occur in places where

people are not supposed to go.

What sets the Goatman legendarium

apart from other cryptid stories is

that I think it's hard to even consider it a cryptid.

If we're taking of an old school approach to cryptozoology

and saying that a cryptid is simply an animal that's

gone undiscovered and uncatalogued,

but it's out there waiting to be found,

Goatman doesn't appear to be that kind of entity whatsoever.

It doesn't seem to occupy a physical space.

Spiritual space, perhaps, or a folkloric space, yes,

depending on what stories you're listening to.

Monsters associated with Goatman legends

have done things like kill people.

But when you're asked to produce even an obituary,

you run into dead ends immediately.

So I think the central issue is that Goatman is like a cryptid,

wedded with urban legend, wedded with folklore and stories

that humans have been telling ever

since they could tell stories.

The Goatman, it seems,

is greater than the sum of all of its pieces.

It is more than folklore.

It is more than a cryptid.

It is something that has seemingly

existed alongside humankind for thousands of years,

and yet never physically existed.

Perhaps it's the inexplicable nature of the Goatman

that keeps us coming back to that bridge after dark,

or stepping into the woods in hopes of adding

our own experience to the legend,

perpetuating the mystery well into the future.