Goatman

Fletchertown Road ran northeast out of Bowie through thin second-growth woods, narrow enough that two cars had to slow down to pass each other, and by late November of 1971 it was paved in empty beer cans. Teenagers parked along it every night with their engines off, waiting for something. Residents could not get home. On one occasion a group abandoned two cars and a truck across the middle of the road and went crashing off into the trees after a shape they thought they had seen.

What they were hunting had a goat’s head on a man’s shoulders. Depictions vary, but the outline holds: he walks upright, the torso nearly human, the legs crooked and hairy and ending in hooves, the beard long, the horns large and curving. The face slides between human-with-goat-features and simply goat. The eyes are always wrong. Anyone meeting the image cold would guess they were looking at the western Devil, and the resemblance to Pan, human above and goat below, or to Baphomet, goat above and man below, is close enough that nobody has had to explain the picture to a Maryland teenager since.

The oldest version anyone actually wrote down is gentler and stranger than any of that. On 18 May 1971 a twenty-one-year-old University of Maryland student named George Lizama handed in a fieldwork project for his Introduction to Folklore course. He had gone looking for stories about a figure called the Goatman of Tucker Road, in Clinton, Maryland, and he came back with eight, seven of them the same story.

A Clinton local, Josiah Proctor, told him there really was a Goatman on that road, and that he was an old Black man with a long white beard, a hermit living in a small hut by the bridge. He grew his own food and hunted his own meat, which meant crossing the one-lane bridge from time to time. Passing drivers would see him. He would smile at them, and the car would come apart in screaming. Proctor had been down that road often and never met him. Relatives had, and they were all still alive.

The seven matching versions turn that man into a monster in ten or so moves. He has the face of a goat and the body of a man, or the reverse. He lives in a shack by the bridge on Tucker Road, which is long and dark and treacherous. He used to keep goats, and when they all died he half became one. He comes out at a full moon, stands on the bridge because the bridge is his, grins, and calls out the way a goat calls. He throws bricks. Windshields shatter and cars leave the road, and the strangest part, the part every teller stopped to underline, is that nobody hears the brick hit the glass. Some friend of the teller has seen his eyes shining in the trees. Nobody has ever seen the rest of him.

The project went into a filing cabinet. The Maryland Folklore Archives at that point were several drawers in the resident folklorist’s office, and Lizama’s Goatman file would have sat there indefinitely if a reporter had not come looking for something to run at Halloween. Karen Hosler of the Prince George’s County News found it, and on 27 October 1971 published “University Archives Reveal: Boaman, Goatman, and Ghosts Still Haunt Area.” She moved him twenty-three miles. Instead of Tucker Road in Clinton she put him in the woods off Fletchertown Road in Bowie, and instead of a hermit with goats she gave the county a researcher from the Beltsville Agricultural Farm who had experimented on goats, gone insane, run into the woods, and grown hair until it covered him. Other accounts, she added, said he lived in a shack and beat on parked cars with an axe.

The axe is almost certainly borrowed. It belongs to the Bunny Man, a Virginia legend that circulates in Maryland and the District as well, and it seems to have crossed over on the way into print. It has never left since.

A week and a half later, on the night of 3 November, sixteen-year-old April Edwards of Old Bowie heard noises in the back yard with two friends, John Hayden and Willie Gheen. Hayden remembered an animal about six feet tall, hairy, on two feet, and a high-pitched squeal. In the morning Edwards’s ten-month-old puppy Ginger was gone. Hayden and Gheen went out with baseball bats, and near the Penn Central railroad tracks they found Ginger’s severed head, and several yards further on, the rest of her. Hosler ran it on 10 November under the headline “Residents Fear Goatman Lives: Dog Found Decapitated in Old Bowie.”

The dog was hit by a train. It took until 1998 for anyone to say so publicly, when Hayden’s older brother Raymond, worn down by nearly thirty years of people asking, told a Washington City Paper reporter exactly that. By then it did not matter in the slightest.

Through 1972 the Bowie high schools ran what one former student remembered as a Goatman Squad, a loose body of boys determined to catch him, who circulated their own literature on what he looked like and what he ate. Two weeks after the puppy story Hosler was writing a third article, “Pranksters and Thrill-Seekers: The Real Monsters of Fletchertown Road,” about what her first two had unleashed. At the end of the month the Washington Post sent Ivan Goldman out to Bowie, and after that the thing was regional.

Seven miles south, Lottsford Road in Mitchellville took him on as well, completing a rough triangle of dark, narrow, wooded roads. Lottsford had a genuine reputation to build on. It was where bodies were dumped off the bridges into the streams below, four in ten years and fourteen more after that, and a police chief who had patrolled it remembered turning around and finding another one every time. Teenagers there fused the Goatman with a legend they already knew, the one folklorists file as “The Boyfriend’s Death” and Mitchellville called the Hatchet Man. He simply became the figure at the end of it, the presence never described, the thing scratching on the car roof.

For a creature Maryland now calls its state monster, he has an unhelpfully short paper trail. George Carey was the Maryland state folklorist, based at the University of Maryland, inside Prince George’s County, and he published two books of Maryland legends in 1970 and 1971, covering the county generously. Neither mentions the Goatman. Neither does Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren’s collection of 1876, nor Whitney and Bullock’s Folk-Lore from Maryland in 1925. Whatever he was before 1971, he was small, and he was local, and he was quiet.

There is a plainer candidate underneath him. The Prince George’s woods held a lot of hermits and itinerant trappers in the middle of the century, men who came out of the trees now and then to frighten children, and a Bowie police commander confirmed to Goldman that one such old man really had lived in a shack out there. A local reverend recalled that the trappers wore heavy hide coats through the wet heat of a Maryland summer, and that children called them Coatman.

What he can do, he does silently and at the edge of the light. A brick arrives through a windshield with no sound of impact. A dog goes missing overnight and turns up in two pieces by the tracks. In 1983 a Bowie police officer was telling a version in which the Goatman beheaded a German Shepherd for barking at him and set the head upright in the middle of its owner’s back yard, which is a colder act than anything in the 1971 material and shows the legend acquiring intent. What he cannot do is exist without someone to tell him. The folklore students kept collecting him almost yearly through the seventies, sporadically through the eighties, and then stopped in 1990, by which point the informants could only produce the Hatchet Man story and could not always remember whether the Goatman was in it. He got out just in time, into Strange Magazine and a Discovery Channel episode and an X-Files comic and a Hyattsville haunted house that finally gave the mad scientist a name, Dr. Fletcher, taken from the road he was supposed to haunt.

Texas grew its own. At the Old Alton Bridge outside Denton, an 1884 iron truss on the National Register, the story is that a Black goat farmer named Oscar Washburn hung a sign on the crossing reading “This way to the Goat Man,” and that the local Klan came for him in the late 1930s and lynched him over the side. When they went down to the creek the body was gone, so they burned his house with his family inside. He is said to take the ones who knock three times, and mostly the ones with Klansmen in their bloodline. Denton County researchers have gone through the death records, the census and the newspapers and can find no Oscar Washburn and no lynching in 1938. What Texas does have is a documented count of more than seven hundred lynchings between 1882 and 1942, which is the reason the story keeps its grip whether or not the man was ever real. Kentucky has its own goat-man on a railway trestle at Pope Lick, and Fort Worth spent the summer of 1969 chasing a seven-foot Goat-Man around Lake Worth. None of them descend from the Maryland one. They grew separately, in the same soil.

The eight legends George Lizama collected are still in the Maryland Room at Hornbake Library. A scholar who wants to read them has to write ahead and request the file by name.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Goatman?

The Goatman is a monster of Prince George’s County, Maryland, described as an upright figure with a man’s torso and a goat’s head, horns, beard and hooves, usually carrying an axe. He is said to haunt three dark rural roads, Tucker Road in Clinton, Fletchertown Road in Bowie and Lottsford Road in Mitchellville, where he attacks parked cars and kills household pets.

Where did the Goatman legend come from?

The earliest recorded versions were collected in Clinton, Maryland in May 1971 by University of Maryland student George Lizama for a folklore class project. His informants described an old hermit living by a bridge on Tucker Road, a former goat herder who threw bricks at passing cars. A reporter found the project in the university’s folklore archive that October and published it, which is when the legend spread across the county.

Was the Goatman ever real?

No evidence supports a goat-headed creature, and the 1971 incident that made the legend famous was a hoax. A Bowie family’s puppy was found decapitated near railway tracks and blamed on the Goatman, but in 1998 one of the boys involved admitted the dog had been hit by a train. Maryland’s earlier folklore collections, including two books by the state folklorist published in 1970 and 1971, never mention the Goatman at all.

Why does the Goatman carry an axe?

The axe first appeared in the October 1971 newspaper article that spread the legend, and folklorists think it was borrowed from the Bunny Man, a hatchet-wielding legend from Virginia that also circulates in Maryland. It is absent from the older Clinton versions, where the Goatman throws bricks instead. It has stayed attached to him ever since.

Is the Texas Goatman the same creature?

No. The Goatman of the Old Alton Bridge near Denton, Texas is a separate legend about a Black goat farmer named Oscar Washburn, said to have been lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1930s, though county researchers can find no record of the man or the killing. Kentucky’s Pope Lick Monster and the Lake Worth Monster of 1969 are also independent. They share a shape, not an ancestry.

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