For decades, bearded Ches McCartney rumbled through the United States in an old car. His rickety vehicle was pulled by several goats, and there are wonderfully picturesque photos of it on the Internet. According to his own statements, he is said to have clocked up more than 100,000 miles since the 1930s. His great role model was Daniel Defoe’s hero Robinson Crusoe, and like him he liked to wear clothes made of goat material. McCartney died in 1998 at the age of well over ninety. His exact age is disputed.
When people talk about the goat man in America, they don’t primarily mean Ches McCartney. And certainly not the wild animal fanatic who ten years ago in the mountains of Utah donned a goat-like costume complete with false horns and mingled on all fours with a herd of wild goats. He risked his life doing it. Even that New Zealand Herald headline at the time: “Fears for goat-Man in Utah wild herd”.
Anyone who mentions the goat man today usually has something completely different in mind. Namely that almost two-meter-tall, terrifying half-man, half-goat hybrid creature that not only scared the US state of Maryland, but the state of Maryland in particular. The creature with its long claws is said to have frightened teenagers, thrown tires through the air and bitten off the heads of dogs. Although no one had seen her there for many years, when a goat with supposedly human-like facial features was born in Malaysia in 2016, the news also spilled over to the American East Coast and fueled the Goatman myth again.
The monster ambushed three couples in a clearing
Its origins are obscure. A 2007 English newspaper article states that the goat man was first sighted in Maryland’s Prince George’s County in 1957 and described as a “strange animal” or “gorilla”. At the end of the 1960s, the monster, sometimes described as scaly, sometimes as hairy, is said to have been up to mischief in Tarrant County, Texas. On July 9, 1969, three couples were ambushed in a remote clearing, who just managed to escape. The only trace of the alleged attack: an 18-inch long, deep cut on the body of a car.
Another attack followed a day later. Then it became suspiciously quiet for decades around the monster, whose salient features should also include its bloodcurdling bleating. according to the Dallas Morning News from 2014 it did not reappear in Texas until 1999. The paper relies on Craig Woolheater. The cryptozoology blogger is quoted as saying, “Personally, I think it’s an undiscovered, uncatalogued primate species that walks on two legs.”
The fact that things have been quiet in Texas for so long may have been because Goatman had meanwhile returned to Maryland. There he experienced his heyday in the seventies. In 1971, newspaper articles first reported mysterious events such as the gruesome discovery of a dog with a severed head, blaming the goat-like creature. The local high school kids in particular enjoyed this sensation, and from then on they carried the story on from year to year. Regular monster hunts in the surrounding forests included. While some believe in the goat man to this day, for others he is simply a well-knit legend, local folklore.
Is the goat man a still unknown animal like the legendary Bigfoot?
The latter naturally includes all those who deal scientifically with folk myths, such as Barry Pearson. The ethnologist from the University of Maryland connects the myth of the Goatman with the booming car culture of the 1960s and 1970s. It gave the young people new freedoms: they could drive around, visit the drive-in cinema, smooch in remote clearings. So they were found victims for the Goatman. But Pearson also refers to ancient myths that play into the story, such as the saga of Pan. After all, the horned shepherd god with the abdomen of a billy goat and the upper body of a man was a rather seedy fellow. Love mad as he was, he hunted nymphs. And he terrified opponents with his scream.
It is no coincidence that the Christian Middle Ages associated him with the figure of the devil. Back then, a popular method of torture was to sprinkle salt on the soles of the accused and have a goat lick it with its rough tongue. If you look at representations of the Goatman on the Internet today, they are also reminiscent of Baphomet. In other words, the symbol that played a major role in the heresy trials against the Templars and was given its style-defining form as a demon with a goat’s head in the 19th century by the occultist Éliphas Lévi.
Of course, those who believe Goatman to be real cite completely different reasons for his existence. She sees him as either a goat farmer who went mad over the killing of his animals by teenagers, an old recluse who lived in close connection with nature, or an as yet unknown animal like the legendary Bigfoot. The most popular theory, however, involves a mad scientist at the Beltsville Research Agricultural Center whose experiments on goats went horribly wrong. Either way, the Goatman lives on, at least in people’s stories – and now also as a popular character in horror films.