Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in, but those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness Bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: Before we hit the road on this stop, I want
Speaker 1: to let you know I'm doing something a little different
Speaker 1: with this episode. If you've been riding along with me
Speaker 1: on this trip, you know the usual rhythm by now
Speaker 1: a little background and then straight into the encounter stories.
Speaker 1: This time I'm slowing down and giving you more of
Speaker 1: the history first, because Maryland's monster has a paper trail
Speaker 1: unlike almost any other creature we've covered, and that paper
Speaker 1: trail is half the story. Some of you already know.
Speaker 1: I host another show called Disturbing History, where I dig
Speaker 1: into strange presidential stories, government cover ups, conspiracies, and the
Speaker 1: real history that the powers that be wanted buried. I'm
Speaker 1: bringing a little of that flavor here to this stop
Speaker 1: on our road trip, and I think once you hear
Speaker 1: where this one goes, you'll understand why. And as always,
Speaker 1: this show is for you, so please let me know
Speaker 1: what you think of this episode and all the others.
Speaker 1: If you're listening on Spotify, you can leave a rating
Speaker 1: and comment right there on the episode. If you're listening
Speaker 1: on Apple Podcasts, you can leave a rating and write
Speaker 1: a review. I've also added a button in the show
Speaker 1: notes that you can click to leave me a voicemail,
Speaker 1: and I genuinely love to hear your voice. Or you
Speaker 1: can always do it the old fashioned way and email
Speaker 1: me at Brian at Paranormalworld Productions dot com. All right,
Speaker 1: enough housekeeping, let's get to the reason you're here. In
Speaker 1: November of nineteen seventy one, a family in Old Bowie, Maryland,
Speaker 1: went looking for a missing puppy named Ginger. They searched
Speaker 1: the brush along Fletchertown Road, near the tracks where the
Speaker 1: Penn Central freight trains rolled through Prince George's County, and
Speaker 1: when they found her, she'd been decapitated. A local paper
Speaker 1: put it on the front page under a headline that
Speaker 1: read residence fear goat man lives, and within three weeks
Speaker 1: the Washington Post had sent a reporter out to a
Speaker 1: two lane road in the woods to ask people about
Speaker 1: a six foot creature that walked on two legs. Here's
Speaker 1: the thing that caught my attention when I started pulling
Speaker 1: the old reports, and I want you to keep it
Speaker 1: in the back of your mind as we go, when
Speaker 1: you actually read what those witnesses said, When you set
Speaker 1: the newspaper headlines aside and look at the descriptions themselves,
Speaker 1: the tall frame, the hair covering the body, the upright
Speaker 1: walk through the trees along the railroad cut. Almost nobody
Speaker 1: was describing anything that looked like a goat. No horns,
Speaker 1: no hoofs. What they were describing sounds like something else,
Speaker 1: entirely something this show has spent a lot of time with,
Speaker 1: and we'll get to exactly what that is later in
Speaker 1: the episode. This is the story of how a college
Speaker 1: folklore project a dead dog and a few hundred bored
Speaker 1: teenagers with cars built one of the most durable monster
Speaker 1: legends in American history. And it's the story of what
Speaker 1: else has been seen in the Maryland Woods, because the
Speaker 1: goat man isn't the only thing people out there swear
Speaker 1: they've met in the dark. We're back on the backwoods
Speaker 1: cryptid road trip, and tonight we're pulling into Maryland. Now
Speaker 1: on the map, Maryland doesn't look like monster country. It's
Speaker 1: a small state squeezed between Washington and Philadelphia, wrapped around
Speaker 1: to Bay half of its suburbs. You could drive across
Speaker 1: the middle of it in an hour and figure there's
Speaker 1: no room left for anything to hide. But I've learned
Speaker 1: on this trip that the size of a state has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with the size of its file, and
Speaker 1: Maryland's file is one of the thickest. We're going to
Speaker 1: open in all fifty states, roughly three hundred reports of
Speaker 1: large hairy things walking upright, going back over a century plus,
Speaker 1: a wolf man, a flying horror with its own newspaper,
Speaker 1: war and the creature we came here for, the one
Speaker 1: with the horns and the axe, the one that made
Speaker 1: teenagers afraid of their own back roads for two generations.
Speaker 1: So pull off the interstate with me. We're heading east
Speaker 1: of d C into Prince George's County down a narrow
Speaker 1: wooded two lane called Fletchertown Road, and we're setting the
Speaker 1: clock back to the fall of nineteen seventy one, because
Speaker 1: that's when Maryland's mind monster stopped being a whisper and
Speaker 1: got itself in the newspaper. The headline ran on November tenth,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one, on the front page of the Prince
Speaker 1: George's County News, a small paper based in Bowie, Maryland
Speaker 1: residence fear goat man lives dog found decapitated in Old Bowie.
Speaker 1: There was a photograph of the remains. The dog was
Speaker 1: a puppy named Ginger, and she belonged to the Edwards family,
Speaker 1: who lived near Fletchertown Road on the north side of Bowie.
Speaker 1: On the night of November three, sixteen year old April
Speaker 1: Edwards and a group of friends were at the house
Speaker 1: when they heard strange noises outside in the dark. They
Speaker 1: looked and they saw something large moving out there. One
Speaker 1: of the friends, a young man named John, would say
Speaker 1: years later that what he saw that night was an
Speaker 1: animal six feet tall Harry and up on two legs.
Speaker 1: By morning, Ginger was gone. The family searched the area
Speaker 1: around Fletchertown Road, out near the Penn Central Railroad tracks.
Speaker 1: Few days later, three local guys Ray, John and Willie
Speaker 1: found her. She'd been decapitated. Her head was never recovered.
Speaker 1: I can tell you exactly what a report like that
Speaker 1: looks like on paper. Missing animal found, deceased, cause undetermined,
Speaker 1: no witnesses to the death itself. It's a sad little
Speaker 1: case that closes itself. Nobody canvasses the neighborhood over a
Speaker 1: dead dog. Except this dead dog turned up two weeks
Speaker 1: after the same local paper had run a Halloween feature
Speaker 1: about a creature said to haunt that exact road. A
Speaker 1: reporter named Karen Hostler had gone digging through the folklore
Speaker 1: archives at the University of Maryland and College Park and
Speaker 1: written up the local legends of the Bowie Woods, the ghosts,
Speaker 1: something called the Boa Man, and a thing the students
Speaker 1: called the goat Man. Her article ran on October twenty seventh.
Speaker 1: A week later, teenagers near Fletchertown Road were reporting a large,
Speaker 1: hairy creature in the dark, and a week after that,
Speaker 1: a decapitated puppy was front page news. The coverage fed
Speaker 1: the sightings, and the sightings fed the coverage. By the
Speaker 1: end of November, the Washington Post had picked it up.
Speaker 1: On November thirtieth, the Post ran a piece by reporter
Speaker 1: Ivan Goldman about a legendary figure haunting the remote woods
Speaker 1: of Prince George's County, and it described what residents were reporting,
Speaker 1: an animal like creature that walked on its hind legs,
Speaker 1: around six feet tall, hairy, and fast enough to drop
Speaker 1: down and move on all fours when it wanted to.
Speaker 1: That's the moment the goat Man stopped being a campfire
Speaker 1: story and became a documented American legend. A monster mentioned
Speaker 1: in the Washington Post has a birth certificate. Every article
Speaker 1: written about the creature in the fifty years since, every
Speaker 1: Halloween feature, every television segment, every book chapter, including this episode,
Speaker 1: descends in a straight line from that one month of
Speaker 1: coverage in the fall of nineteen seventy one. And researchers
Speaker 1: can prove it because the earlier oral tradition left almost
Speaker 1: no ink at all. And I want to walk you
Speaker 1: through the whole thing, because when you lay it out
Speaker 1: in order, this case teaches you almost everything about how
Speaker 1: a monster gets born, how it feeds, and how it
Speaker 1: survives for fifty years. Then I want to take you
Speaker 1: deeper into the Maryland Woods, because Prince George's County's half
Speaker 1: goat axe murderer shares that state with something older and bigger.
Speaker 1: Maryland has one of the deepest files of bigfoot type
Speaker 1: reports on the East Coast, hundreds of them, going back
Speaker 1: before anybody had ever heard the word sasquatch. Some of
Speaker 1: those reports came from truck drivers, from police chiefs, from
Speaker 1: a fisherman standing in a river in broad daylight. So
Speaker 1: here's the question that's going to carry us through the
Speaker 1: next hour. When that many people across that many decades
Speaker 1: report huge hairy things walking upright through the same patches
Speaker 1: of Maryland Woods, what exactly are we looking at, legend
Speaker 1: with good marketing, a case of small towns scaring themselves,
Speaker 1: or a residue of something real buried under fifty years
Speaker 1: of teenage ghost stories. Let's start with the ground itself,
Speaker 1: because you can't understand the goat man without understanding Prince
Speaker 1: George's County. In the sixties and early seventies, Prince George's
Speaker 1: County sits on the eastern shoulder of Washington d C. Today,
Speaker 1: it's dense suburbia, shopping centers and beltway interchanges and subdivisions
Speaker 1: stacked one against the next. But in the years after
Speaker 1: World War Two it was a county caught mid transformation.
Speaker 1: The land closest to the district filled up with new
Speaker 1: housing tracks, while the outer stretches out toward Bowie and
Speaker 1: Glendale and Upper Marlborough and Mitchellville stayed rural tobacco fields,
Speaker 1: wood lots, gravel roads, old family properties, and long two
Speaker 1: lane blacktops running through second growth forest. That combination matters.
Speaker 1: You had tens of thousands of teenagers growing up in
Speaker 1: brand new suburbs, and right at the edge of their world,
Speaker 1: you had dark country roads with no street lights, no houses,
Speaker 1: and no adults. And by the sixties, those teenagers had cars.
Speaker 1: Barry Pearson, a folklore professor at the University of Maryland
Speaker 1: who spent years overseeing the university's folklore archive, has argued
Speaker 1: that the goat man legend is a creature of exactly
Speaker 1: that car culture. The automobile gave suburban kids the run
Speaker 1: of the county at night. It gave them somewhere to
Speaker 1: take a date, and it gave them a reason to want,
Speaker 1: a story that made the dark woods at the end
Speaker 1: of the road mean something. He's also pointed out that
Speaker 1: every one of those kids was sitting in classrooms learning
Speaker 1: Greek mythology, where a horned, hooved half man god named
Speaker 1: Pan chases people through the wilderness. The word panic comes
Speaker 1: from him. Whether or not any Bowie teenager was consciously
Speaker 1: thinking about Pan while parked on Fletchertown Road, the raw
Speaker 1: material was in their heads. The roads themselves became characters
Speaker 1: in the legend. Fletchertown Road in Old Bowie, narrow and wooded,
Speaker 1: running past the railroad tracks Lotsford Road near Mitchellville, Governor's
Speaker 1: Bridge Road, down toward Upper Marlborough, where an old steel
Speaker 1: truss bridge crosses the Patuxent River. That bridge picked up
Speaker 1: a second name, cry Baby Bridge, and a second legend
Speaker 1: to go with it, the one about an infant thrown
Speaker 1: into the water whose cries you can still hear at night.
Speaker 1: Cry Baby Bridges exist all over America. By the way,
Speaker 1: Ohioa alone has more of them than I can count.
Speaker 1: It's a migratory legend, meaning the same story attaches itself
Speaker 1: to whatever lonely bridge. A community happens to have in
Speaker 1: Prince George's County. The cry baby story and the goat
Speaker 1: man story got tangled together until the bridge belonged to both,
Speaker 1: and then there was the fence line nobody could quite
Speaker 1: see past. On the western edge of this whole territory
Speaker 1: sits the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, a federal facility that
Speaker 1: would end up at the center of the goat Man's
Speaker 1: most famous origin story. We'll get there, but first I
Speaker 1: want to show you where the legend actually came from,
Speaker 1: because unlike most monster stories, this one has a paper trail.
Speaker 1: And the paper trail starts in a college classroom. In
Speaker 1: the spring of nineteen seventy one, months before Ginger died,
Speaker 1: a University of Maryland student named George Lozama was taking
Speaker 1: a folklore class. For his class project, he went out
Speaker 1: to Clinton, Maryland, in the southern part of Prince George's County,
Speaker 1: and collected versions of a legend the local kids were
Speaker 1: already telling each other. He gathered eight variants of the
Speaker 1: Goatman story and recorded interviews with his peers. One of
Speaker 1: the people he interviewed was an eighteen year old named Patricia.
Speaker 1: The version she told him went like this. The goatman
Speaker 1: was an old man with the face of a goat
Speaker 1: and the body of a man. He guarded his bridge,
Speaker 1: the Governor's bridge, the one people called cry Baby Bridge,
Speaker 1: and he came out during the full month. He forced
Speaker 1: cars off the roads. He killed people and left no trace.
Speaker 1: He smashed car windows without making a sound. That silent
Speaker 1: window is my favorite detail in the whole early record.
Speaker 1: A monster that smashes your car window without a sound
Speaker 1: is how a storyteller describes a nightmare. And it's dream logic,
Speaker 1: and it tells me that what Lazama was collecting in
Speaker 1: Clinton was living folklore, already polished by hundreds of retellings
Speaker 1: in school hallways and back seats, long before any newspaper
Speaker 1: touched it. When Lazama finished the project in May of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one, his professor filed the interviews in the
Speaker 1: University of Maryland's folklore archive. And that's where things should
Speaker 1: have ended. A student paper in a filing cabinet in
Speaker 1: College Park, read by nobody but graduate students instead. That
Speaker 1: filing cabinet turned out to be a loaded gun. Now,
Speaker 1: the legend was older than Laizama's notebook folkloris and researchers
Speaker 1: who traced the story back, most notably a pre Prince
Speaker 1: George's County writer named Mark Opsasnik, who literally wrote the
Speaker 1: book on Maryland monsters. Have found reports of a large,
Speaker 1: hairy creature in the county going back to August of
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty seven, around Forestville and Upper Marlborough. Those fifties
Speaker 1: accounts are thin. They survived mostly as summaries a hairy
Speaker 1: monster seen near the woods, and there's no way now
Speaker 1: to interview the witnesses or check the details, but they
Speaker 1: established something important. Kids in Prince George's County were scaring
Speaker 1: each other with a local monster for at least a
Speaker 1: decade and a half before a single word about it
Speaker 1: appeared in print, and in all those years of telling,
Speaker 1: the story split into competing origin myths. By the time
Speaker 1: researchers started writing them down, three main versions were circulating.
Speaker 1: The first version says the goat man was a hermit,
Speaker 1: an old man who lived alone in the woods off
Speaker 1: Fletchertown Road, who'd been glimpsed walking the road at night,
Speaker 1: and who'd been twisted by rumor into something inhuman. Stay
Speaker 1: tuned for more Backwoods b Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. I'll say this from a CoP's perspective.
Speaker 1: Every rural community I've ever known has had that guy,
Speaker 1: the property at the end of the bad road, the
Speaker 1: man who doesn't want visitors, the stories that grow around
Speaker 1: him like vines. Some of the oldest goat man accounts
Speaker 1: probably have a real, entirely human man standing somewhere behind them,
Speaker 1: and if so, the legend did him dirty. The second
Speaker 1: version says he was a goat herder. In this telling,
Speaker 1: a local man kept a flock of goats out in
Speaker 1: the county, and one night a group of teenagers killed
Speaker 1: some of his animals as a prank or out of
Speaker 1: playing cruelty. The man lost his mind over it and
Speaker 1: took to the woods with an axe, hunting teenagers ever since.
Speaker 1: Notice what that version does. It aims the monster's rage
Speaker 1: specifically at teens and cars, which is exactly who was
Speaker 1: telling the story. Folklors call that kind of thing a
Speaker 1: cautionary structure. The legend punishes the audience for the audience's
Speaker 1: own behavior. You killed his goats, so he hunts you
Speaker 1: at Lover's Lane. But the third version is the famous one,
Speaker 1: and it's the one that gave the legend its rocket fuel.
Speaker 1: This version says the goat man came out of the
Speaker 1: Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. The research center is real, and
Speaker 1: it's enormous. The federal government established it in nineteen ten
Speaker 1: on farmland north of Washington, and over the decades it
Speaker 1: grew into one of the largest agricultural research complexes on Earth.
Speaker 1: Thousands of acres of pastures, laboratories, barns and test fields
Speaker 1: spread across the northern edge of Prince George's County. Real
Speaker 1: science happened there and still does. Beltsville researchers developed the
Speaker 1: small white turkey that basically became the American Thanksgiving bird.
Speaker 1: They ran breeding programs, nutrition studies, livestock experiments of every
Speaker 1: legitimate kind, which means that for the surrounding communities, Beltsville
Speaker 1: was a huge, fenced federal facility full of animals and
Speaker 1: scientists sitting right next door doing work most people couldn't
Speaker 1: see and didn't understand. The legend filled that gap. The
Speaker 1: story goes that a scientist at the research center was
Speaker 1: running experiments on goats when something went catastrophically wrong. In
Speaker 1: some tellings, the experiment mutates him fusing man and goat
Speaker 1: into a single creature that escapes into the woods and
Speaker 1: starts attacking cars with an axe. In later versions, and
Speaker 1: this is the Internet era talking, the scientist even gets
Speaker 1: a name, doctor Stephen Fletcher, and the experiment involves splicing
Speaker 1: goat DNA with the DNA of his assistant, a man
Speaker 1: named William Lotsford. Those two names are doing something sneaky,
Speaker 1: Fletcher and Lotsford. The two most famous goat man roads
Speaker 1: in Prince George's County are Fletchertown Road and Lotsford Road.
Speaker 1: The legend reached out, grabbed the names off the street
Speaker 1: signs and turned them into characters. That's not evidence of
Speaker 1: a cover up. That's evidence of storytellers doing what storytellers
Speaker 1: always do, stitching the tale to the local landscape so
Speaker 1: it feels like it happened here. The roads came first,
Speaker 1: the doctor came later. No researcher by that name, and
Speaker 1: no such experiment appears anywhere in the actual record, and
Speaker 1: the Department of Agriculture has had to state publicly more
Speaker 1: than once that none of its Beltsville scientists ever turned
Speaker 1: himself into a goat monster. Imagine drawing that assignment in
Speaker 1: the Press Office. Here's the thing, though, the Mad Science
Speaker 1: version one, and it won for a reason. Nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: one was deep in an era when Americans were learning
Speaker 1: over and over that the government really had been running
Speaker 1: secret experiments. Within a few years, the country would hear
Speaker 1: about mk Ultra, about the Tuskegee study, about chemical testing
Speaker 1: on soldiers. The idea that something unnatural might have walked
Speaker 1: out of a federal research facility didn't sound crazy to people.
Speaker 1: It sounded like the news. The goat Man legend borrowed
Speaker 1: that credibility and never gave it back. So that's the
Speaker 1: state of play going into the fall of nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1: A legend at least fourteen years old, three origin stories,
Speaker 1: a college kid's interview sitting in an archive, and a
Speaker 1: county full of teenagers who all know the name goat Man,
Speaker 1: every ingredient stacked and dry, waiting for a match. The
Speaker 1: match was a Halloween feature. Karen Hostler was a young
Speaker 1: reporter at the Prince George's County News in Bowie, and
Speaker 1: in late October of nineteen seventy one, she wrote what
Speaker 1: was meant to be a seasonal entertainment piece. She'd found
Speaker 1: the folklore holdings at the University of Maryland, including the
Speaker 1: goat Man material, and on October twenty seventh, the paper
Speaker 1: ran her article on the legends haunting the local woods,
Speaker 1: the Ghosts, the Bowman, and the Goatman, placing the creature's
Speaker 1: territory near Fletchertown Road. It was supposed to be fun,
Speaker 1: a little local color for Halloween Week, but a newspaper
Speaker 1: telling a community exactly where it was its monster lives
Speaker 1: is handing out a map. Within days, people around Fletchertown
Speaker 1: Road were listening to the night differently. Then came November three,
Speaker 1: April Edward, sixteen years old, at home near Fletchertown Road
Speaker 1: with her friends, Strange noises in the yard, A large
Speaker 1: creature seen moving in the darkness. John's description, given years
Speaker 1: afterward when Ipsisnick tracked him down for an article in
Speaker 1: Strange magazine, stayed consistent with what got reported at the time,
Speaker 1: roughly six feet tall, covered in hair, moving on two legs.
Speaker 1: The next morning, Ginger was missing, and days later Ray
Speaker 1: John and Willie found what was left of her by
Speaker 1: the road near the railroad tracks. Hostler wrote it up.
Speaker 1: The paper put it on the front page on November tenth,
Speaker 1: with the photograph, and old Bowie came apart at the
Speaker 1: seams in the way small communities do not panic exactly,
Speaker 1: more like a fever. The paper kept reporting, residents kept
Speaker 1: calling and accounts an ant animal like creature walking upright
Speaker 1: along Fletchertown Road. Teenagers started driving out at night in
Speaker 1: packs to hunt the thing, which meant the woods along
Speaker 1: the road were now full of moving flashlights and screaming kids,
Speaker 1: which generated more reports, which brought more kids. The County
Speaker 1: News ran goat man coverage through the month, with one
Speaker 1: final front page story on November twenty fourth, and six
Speaker 1: days after that, the Washington Post arrived, and the legend
Speaker 1: of a half goat monster in the Maryland suburbs went
Speaker 1: out to one of the biggest readerships in the country.
Speaker 1: What actually happened provably in November of nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 1: a dog died near active railroad tracks and was found decapitated.
Speaker 1: Teenagers reported seeing a large, dark shape at night. That's
Speaker 1: the physical case. And I'll tell you what any patrol
Speaker 1: officer or animal control officer who's work near a rail
Speaker 1: line will tell you. Trains are terribly efficient at doing
Speaker 1: exactly that kind of damage to exactly that kind of victim.
Speaker 1: Dogs chase things across tracks. A puppy wandering at night
Speaker 1: along a rail corridor is in about the most dangerous
Speaker 1: place a puppy can be. Researchers who've looked at the
Speaker 1: older Prince George's County stories have noted the same pattern,
Speaker 1: dog deaths near the tracks getting folded into the legend
Speaker 1: going back decades. I can't prove that's what killed Ginger.
Speaker 1: Nobody can at this distance, because nobody performed anything like
Speaker 1: a forensic examination on a dog in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1: But between a freight train and a genetically engineered goat
Speaker 1: hybrid with an axe, I know where the smart money
Speaker 1: sleeps and the creature in the yard. Here's where I'll
Speaker 1: be more careful, because I take witnesses seriously. That's a
Speaker 1: habit from the job. April Edwards never backed off her account.
Speaker 1: Decades later, as an adult, she told Opsasnik that people
Speaker 1: had treated her family like ignorant hillbillies, and she pushed
Speaker 1: back on that hard. Her position all those years later
Speaker 1: was simple, what I saw was real, and I know
Speaker 1: I'm not crazy. She believed to her core that whatever
Speaker 1: stood in that darkness killed her dog. I don't think
Speaker 1: April Edwards lied. I don't think John lied either. I
Speaker 1: think a group of teenagers, primed by two weeks of
Speaker 1: monster coverage about their own road, heard something in the dark,
Speaker 1: saw something large, and experienced it through the story they'd
Speaker 1: just been handed. Maybe it was a deer standing tall
Speaker 1: and bad light. Maybe it was a bear, and yes,
Speaker 1: black bears do wander into Maryland. Maybe it was a person,
Speaker 1: which frankly is the possibility that would worry me most
Speaker 1: as an investigator, because a six foot figure lurking outside
Speaker 1: a house full of teenage girls at night is a
Speaker 1: police matter, not a folklore matter. The honest answer is
Speaker 1: that the identification window closed fifty five years ago and
Speaker 1: it's never going to reopen. What's documented is what they
Speaker 1: reported when they reported it, and what the county did
Speaker 1: with it afterward. I'll add one observation from the other
Speaker 1: side of the badge, because monster flaps look different from
Speaker 1: inside a patrol car. When a community decides something is
Speaker 1: loose in its woods, the police feel it before anyone
Speaker 1: measures it. The call volume climbs, prowler calls, shots fired,
Speaker 1: calls that turn out to be nothing, suspicious person calls
Speaker 1: where the person is a shadow, kids caught trespassing in
Speaker 1: places kids never used to bother with. Officers start working
Speaker 1: roads they used to drive past, and every one of
Speaker 1: those extra patrols becomes its own story, because now the
Speaker 1: neighbors have seen a cruiser creeping down Fletchertown Road with
Speaker 1: its spotlight in the trees. And what does that tell them?
Speaker 1: It tells them the police are taking the monster seriously.
Speaker 1: Even when the police are just answering the calls the
Speaker 1: monster panic generated. The response confirms the fear that caused
Speaker 1: the response. I watched that loop run more than once
Speaker 1: in my career over things far less interesting than a
Speaker 1: goat man. And there is no way to police your
Speaker 1: way out of it. It has to burn itself out.
Speaker 1: What the county did with it was turn it into
Speaker 1: a way of life. Mark Opsasnik grew up in Green Belt,
Speaker 1: a few miles from Bowie, and he's told the story
Speaker 1: of how he first heard about the goat man. He
Speaker 1: was in seventh grade riding in the back seat of
Speaker 1: a car driven by a friend's older brother, and whenever
Speaker 1: the younger kids acted up, the driver would threaten to
Speaker 1: dump them out on Fletchertown Road. And let the goat
Speaker 1: man have them. That threat worked on him so well
Speaker 1: that he spent the rest of his life researching the thing.
Speaker 1: By the time Oppsasnik reached high school in the seventies,
Speaker 1: goatman hunting was a full blown teenage institution in Prince
Speaker 1: George's County. Kids through what they called goatman parties out
Speaker 1: on Fletchertown Road and at cry Baby Bridge, car loads
Speaker 1: of teens beer dares somebody's brother hiding in the tree
Speaker 1: line to jump out at the couples. Folklorest have a
Speaker 1: name for this legend tripping. You take the story, you
Speaker 1: drive to the place where the story lives, and you
Speaker 1: dare it to be true. And every legend trip generates
Speaker 1: its own evidence, because a dark road full of keyed
Speaker 1: up teenagers will always produce noises, shapes, screams, and stories
Speaker 1: for Monday morning. This is the environment in which the
Speaker 1: classic goat man encounter stories took their final shape. They're
Speaker 1: the heart of the legend. What follows are the encounters
Speaker 1: as Prince George's County has told them for fifty years,
Speaker 1: collected by folklores, printed in student papers and local features
Speaker 1: passed down at those parties. The most common one, The
Speaker 1: absolute standard is the parked car. A boy and a
Speaker 1: girl drive out to Fletchertown Road or Lotsford Road or
Speaker 1: out by the Bridge on a Friday night and pull
Speaker 1: off onto the shoulder where the trees close over the roof.
Speaker 1: The radio's on low, and at some point one of
Speaker 1: them turns the volume down because there's a sound outside,
Speaker 1: and it takes a second to understand why it's wrong.
Speaker 1: It's hoofs, not the soft four beat patter of a
Speaker 1: deer moving through leaves, but a slow, heavy two beat rhythm.
Speaker 1: Hooves on pavement, walking the center line of the road
Speaker 1: behind the car. The way the story goes, the couple
Speaker 1: sits frozen while it comes up the black top closer, unhurried,
Speaker 1: something that walks like a man but doesn't sound like one.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the story ends with headlights snapping on and tires
Speaker 1: spitting gravel, and a shape in the rear view mirror,
Speaker 1: tall horned, standing in the middle of the road watching
Speaker 1: them go. Sometimes it ends with a scream from the woods,
Speaker 1: a high, tearing sound the tellers always struggle to describe
Speaker 1: part animal squeal, part human voice. The second standard encounter
Speaker 1: is the attack on the car itself. In this one,
Speaker 1: the couple hears the hooves or hears nothing at all,
Speaker 1: and then the vehicle just erupts. Something slams down on
Speaker 1: the hood or the roof hard enough to rock the springs.
Speaker 1: In the versions with the axe, the blade comes through
Speaker 1: a window or buries itself in a door panel, and
Speaker 1: the couple tears out of there and doesn't stop until
Speaker 1: the lights of Roote four fifty and in the morning.
Speaker 1: In the driveway in the daylight, there are dents in
Speaker 1: the sheet metal and long scratches raked through the paint
Speaker 1: that nobody can quite explain. Remember Patricia's version from Clinton,
Speaker 1: collected in the spring of nineteen seventy one. He smashes
Speaker 1: car windows without making a sound. The silent window and
Speaker 1: the axe in the door are the same idea, wearing
Speaker 1: different clothes. The car is the teenagers shell, the one
Speaker 1: place in the county that belongs entirely to them, and
Speaker 1: the goat man exists to breach it. Then there's the
Speaker 1: one about the boy who got out of the car.
Speaker 1: This story circulated around Fletchertown Road for decades, and it
Speaker 1: goes like this. A couple is parked in the usual
Speaker 1: spot when they hear something in the woods. The boy
Speaker 1: gets out to check, tells the girl to lock the doors,
Speaker 1: and walks into the tree line. He doesn't come back.
Speaker 1: The girl waits through the worst night of her life,
Speaker 1: and the searchers who come the next day find the
Speaker 1: boy's severed head hanging in the tree directly above the car.
Speaker 1: His body has never recovered. There is no such case,
Speaker 1: no missing person report, no death investigation, no news account,
Speaker 1: nothing in the record of Prince George's County or anywhere
Speaker 1: else in Maryland that corresponds to a decapitated teenager found
Speaker 1: in a tree over a parked car. What that story
Speaker 1: is is one of the most famous migratory legends in America.
Speaker 1: The one folkloris catalog as the Boyfriend's Death, and it's
Speaker 1: been collected in dozens of states, attached to dozens of
Speaker 1: local monsters and maniacs, usually with the head or the
Speaker 1: body scraping the roof of the car all night while
Speaker 1: the girl thinks it's a branch. Prince George's County simply
Speaker 1: took the national legend and gave it to the goat Man,
Speaker 1: the same way it gave him the cry Baby Bridge.
Speaker 1: That's not a knock on the county. That's how folklore
Speaker 1: eats same verdict on the darkest number in the legend,
Speaker 1: the claim that in nineteen sixty two, the goatman slaughtered
Speaker 1: fourteen people, twelve of them children, on a hike that
Speaker 1: wandered too close to his home, hacking them apart with
Speaker 1: the acts while making sounds one supposed survivor described as
Speaker 1: noises only the devil would make. Stay tuned for more
Speaker 1: backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Fourteen
Speaker 1: homicides in a single incident would be one of the
Speaker 1: worst mass murders in Maryland history. It would have generated
Speaker 1: an investigation the size of a city court records front
Speaker 1: pages for a year. There is nothing, no victims' names,
Speaker 1: no case, no clippings. It's a story about a story,
Speaker 1: and every serious researcher who's gone looking for its bottom
Speaker 1: Obsassina concluded, has come up with air. And there are
Speaker 1: the campers. All through the seventies and after, the tale
Speaker 1: went that people camping in the Bowie and Glendale Woods
Speaker 1: are just living along their edges, would be brought up
Speaker 1: out of sleep by screaming in the trees, high pitched,
Speaker 1: ragged described sometimes as a square wheeling like a goat's cry,
Speaker 1: stretched into something with lungs far too big for a goat.
Speaker 1: The Posts coverage in nineteen seventy one captured a piece
Speaker 1: of this in real time, residents genuinely reporting weird animal
Speaker 1: vocalizations around Fletchertown Road during the flap. And on this one,
Speaker 1: I'll give the witnesses more ground because I've spent a
Speaker 1: lot of nights in the woods, and i can tell
Speaker 1: you the Eastern forest is full of sounds that will
Speaker 1: straighten your spine. A red fox scream sounds like a
Speaker 1: woman being murdered. A rabbit in an owl's talons sounds
Speaker 1: like a child. Two raccoons fighting sound like the gates
Speaker 1: of Hell coming off their hinges. People absolutely heard screaming
Speaker 1: in those woods. The question was never whether they heard it.
Speaker 1: The question is what license the legend gave them for
Speaker 1: naming it. The last of the classic encounters puts the
Speaker 1: creature at Glendale Hospital, and this one came later. Glendale
Speaker 1: was a tuberculosis sanatorium, a big state hospital complet in
Speaker 1: the woods near Bowie that treated TB patients for decades
Speaker 1: before closing down in the early nineteen eighties. After it closed,
Speaker 1: the building sat abandoned and abandoned hospitals are legend magnets
Speaker 1: the way lonely bridges are. The story grew that the
Speaker 1: goat man had moved into the ruins, or that he'd
Speaker 1: always been there, an escaped patient, an experiment from the
Speaker 1: hospital instead of the research center, take your pick. Generations
Speaker 1: of trespassing teenagers have hunted him through those wards with flashlights.
Speaker 1: For the record, Glendale treated tuberculosis, the patient experiments, the
Speaker 1: criminally insane wing, the creature in the tunnels. None of
Speaker 1: that is in the institution's actual history. But notice the pattern,
Speaker 1: the same one from the research center. The legend keeps
Speaker 1: migrating toward whatever large, fenced, poorly understood institution the county
Speaker 1: has available, first the federal research farm, then the shuttered hospital.
Speaker 1: The goatman lives wherever the community keeps it. It's unease.
Speaker 1: I want to put you inside one of those legend
Speaker 1: trip nights for a minute, because the accounts of them
Speaker 1: survive from a whole generation of county kids who've talked
Speaker 1: about it since A mid seventies Friday night in Prince
Speaker 1: George's County went like this, Somebody's older brother has a car,
Speaker 1: a Nova or a Duster with a bench seat, and
Speaker 1: words gone around school that tonight they're going goat man hunting.
Speaker 1: Five or six kids pile in after dark and drive
Speaker 1: north out of the subdivisions, past the last gas station
Speaker 1: until the street lights quit and the trees pull in
Speaker 1: tight over Fletchertown Road. The driver kills the headlights because
Speaker 1: that's the ritual, and rolls slow along the black top
Speaker 1: with the windows down, everybody hushed and grinning, listening to
Speaker 1: the woods, and the woods deliver, because on any given Friday,
Speaker 1: those woods contained four other car loads of teenagers doing
Speaker 1: the exact same thing. Kids hiding in the tree line
Speaker 1: to ambush their friends, kids screaming three curves away, a
Speaker 1: big senior in his dad's old coke crashing through the
Speaker 1: brush toward a parked car full of freshmen who will
Speaker 1: spend the next forty years telling people what they heard
Speaker 1: on Fletchertown Road and mostly believing it. The road became
Speaker 1: a machine that manufactured witnesses. Every scream it produced was
Speaker 1: real in the sense that real lungs produced it, and
Speaker 1: real kids heard it, and by Monday it had all
Speaker 1: been deposited into the same account and the account was
Speaker 1: named Goatman. I did plenty of shifts as a young officer,
Speaker 1: breaking up exactly this kind of thing, different state, same
Speaker 1: species of Friday night. And I'll tell you what always
Speaker 1: struck me. The kids weren't faking the fear. You'd pull
Speaker 1: up on a car full of teenagers at some notorious
Speaker 1: spot and they'd be genuinely rattled, talking over each other
Speaker 1: about what they just heard, and the fact that the
Speaker 1: source was probably their own buddy fifty yards up the
Speaker 1: road didn't touch the fear at all. The legend trip
Speaker 1: works because the fear is authentic, even when the monster isn't.
Speaker 1: That's the engine the goat Man ran on for two decades,
Speaker 1: and it's why he never needed to actually show up.
Speaker 1: The county showed up for him. So those are the
Speaker 1: goat Man encounters. Hooves behind the parked car, the axe
Speaker 1: in the door panel, the boy in the tree, the
Speaker 1: screams over the campsite, the thing with horns walking the
Speaker 1: hospital grounds, every one of them electric, and every one
Speaker 1: of them when you chase the documentation dissolving back into
Speaker 1: the same folklore archive where Karen Hostler found the legend
Speaker 1: in the first place, which would be a tidy place
Speaker 1: to end an episode if it weren't for one inconvenient
Speaker 1: detail sitting right in the middle of the original record.
Speaker 1: The witnesses in nineteen seventy one didn't describe a goat.
Speaker 1: Go back to what actually got reported during the flap,
Speaker 1: John's description of the thing in the Edwards yard six
Speaker 1: feet harry on two legs. The accounts the post gathered
Speaker 1: along Fletchertown Road, an animal like creature walking on its
Speaker 1: hind lane, dropping to all fours to move fast. Nobody
Speaker 1: in the primary record is describing hooves, horns, or a
Speaker 1: goat's head. Nobody mentions an axe. Strip the name off
Speaker 1: those reports. Hand them to any researcher in my field,
Speaker 1: and they'd file them without hesitation in a different drawer. Entirely,
Speaker 1: what the people of Old Bowie described in November of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one is a textbook bigfoot report. Even the
Speaker 1: folklorists noticed among the versions Pearson and others cataloged right
Speaker 1: alongside the mad scientist and the hermit and the goat herder.
Speaker 1: There's always been a fourth interpretation that the goat man
Speaker 1: is simply the local name for a bigfoot type animal
Speaker 1: living in the Patuxent River woods, the goat parts, the
Speaker 1: horns and hooves, and the axe belonged to the campfire.
Speaker 1: The thing in the reports is just big, dark, hairy,
Speaker 1: and bipedal, and that reframing changes the whole map, because
Speaker 1: Maryland quietly has one of the richest files of that
Speaker 1: kind of report in the eastern United States. Opsisenik spent
Speaker 1: four years in the late eighties and early nineties driving
Speaker 1: the state, pulling old newspapers and knocking on doors, and
Speaker 1: the result was a survey he published as the Maryland
Speaker 1: Bigfoot Digest, a county by county roster of roughly three
Speaker 1: hundred alleged sightings of Bigfoot type creatures in the Free State.
Speaker 1: And here's the detail from that research that genuinely made
Speaker 1: me sit back. Forty two of those reports come from
Speaker 1: between nineteen hundred and nineteen forty four, decades before the
Speaker 1: word bigfoot existed, decades before the Patterson Gimlin film, before
Speaker 1: Boggy Creek, before any cultural template existed for this kind
Speaker 1: of sighting, Rural Marylanders were already reporting huge, hairy things
Speaker 1: in their woods. One of those early accounts has stayed
Speaker 1: with me. A man from Chestertown over on the eastern
Speaker 1: shore in Kent County, recorded his memory of something from
Speaker 1: the early nineteen hundreds when he was a boy. Something
Speaker 1: had been slaughtering his family's baby caps. He and his
Speaker 1: brother decided to sneak out at midnight to find out what.
Speaker 1: And what drove them was a sound coming from the
Speaker 1: nearby woods, a sound he described as an awful moaning.
Speaker 1: Now that account is a childhood memory written down decades later,
Speaker 1: and I weighed accordingly. But I've interviewed a lot of
Speaker 1: witnesses in my time, both as a cop and across
Speaker 1: hundreds of episodes of my other shows, and there's a
Speaker 1: texture to that report. I recognize. Dead livestock is not
Speaker 1: a story. Dead livestock is a farm losing money. Whatever
Speaker 1: was moaning in those Kent County woods, the calves were real,
Speaker 1: and somebody had to get up in the morning and
Speaker 1: deal with them. So let's do this properly. Let's leave
Speaker 1: Prince George's County and work through Maryland's monster record the
Speaker 1: way it actually unfolded. Because the goat Man turns out
Speaker 1: to be the middle chapter of a much longer book.
Speaker 1: The chapter before him belongs to a creature with one
Speaker 1: of the strangest names in American cryptid history. On a
Speaker 1: Saturday evening in late November of nineteen sixty five, in
Speaker 1: the countryside outside Frederick, Maryland, near the woods of Gambril
Speaker 1: State Park, a man heard a strange noise in his
Speaker 1: yard and went out to look. It was getting dark.
Speaker 1: As he turned back toward the house, he saw something
Speaker 1: coming at him. He'd later describe it as big as
Speaker 1: a bear, with long black hair, a bushy tail, and
Speaker 1: a growl like an angry dog or wolf. And then,
Speaker 1: according to him, it did the thing that separates this
Speaker 1: account from every routine animal report ever filed. It stood
Speaker 1: up on its hind legs and attacked him. The man
Speaker 1: said he fought it and to whatever in his own
Speaker 1: yard until it broke off and ran into the woods,
Speaker 1: leaving him and his wife and kids terrified. He reported
Speaker 1: the attack to the Maryland State Police. He gave the
Speaker 1: creature a name nobody had heard before, the dua Yo,
Speaker 1: and he gave the police a name for himself, John Becker,
Speaker 1: which turned out to be fake. When police went looking,
Speaker 1: they could find no John Becker and Frederick CA He'd
Speaker 1: said he lived on Fernrock Road near the entrance to
Speaker 1: the state park. There was no fern Rock Road either.
Speaker 1: A reporter at the Frederick News Post named George May
Speaker 1: smelled a story and ran with it, and through December
Speaker 1: of nineteen sixty five, the Dwyo became a regional sensation.
Speaker 1: The paper's coverage pulled in a wave of calls and letters.
Speaker 1: One hundred near Middletown told May his dogs had chased
Speaker 1: something big and black through the woods that he'd first
Speaker 1: taken for a dog or even a bear. Residents out
Speaker 1: along Route seventeen near Ellerton reported that for several nights
Speaker 1: something in the hills had been making a sound that
Speaker 1: would cry like a baby and scream like a woman.
Speaker 1: Hunters reported a strange black beast moving through the timber.
Speaker 1: A woman from Adamstown called the paper demanding that all
Speaker 1: this Dwyo trash be stopped because her daughter was under
Speaker 1: treatment for a nervous condition and the monster talk was
Speaker 1: making it worse. And then somebody delivered the punchline. The
Speaker 1: Frederick County treasure Jurer's office received an application for a
Speaker 1: dog license filled out in the name of John Becker
Speaker 1: on behalf of one duyyo with the one dollar fee enclosed,
Speaker 1: the county God blessed them, issued the license, and mailed
Speaker 1: it care of George May at the News Post. Not
Speaker 1: long after that, the sighting's dried up, and by mid
Speaker 1: December the story faded out, with May suggesting the creature
Speaker 1: had maybe moved along. So what was the Duayo? The
Speaker 1: skeptic in you is probably right. An anonymous complainant with
Speaker 1: a fake name and a fake address describes a fight
Speaker 1: with a wolfman. A newspaper amplifies it, a community spends
Speaker 1: three weeks hearing fox's scream, and a prankster buys the
Speaker 1: monster a dog license. If that call had come into
Speaker 1: my precinct, it's getting written up as unfounded before the
Speaker 1: coffee's cold. The name itself points backward into older Frederick
Speaker 1: County folklore, where the Duayo was already known in local
Speaker 1: tradition as the sworn enemy of the snally Gaster. And
Speaker 1: the snally Gaster deserves thirty seconds of your time because
Speaker 1: it's one of the great case studies in newspapers inventing
Speaker 1: monsters on purpose. The snally Gaster was a flying horror
Speaker 1: of the Middletown Valley, part bird, part reptile, with roots
Speaker 1: in the old German settler stories about a nightmare beast
Speaker 1: called the Schnellergeist the Quick Spirit. In nineteen o nine,
Speaker 1: two Frederick County papers whipped up a full blown snally
Speaker 1: Gaster panic with weeks of increasingly outrageous reports of the
Speaker 1: thing carrying off livestock and menacing citizens, and it worked
Speaker 1: so well that the story got picked up nationally, and
Speaker 1: the papers revived the creature again in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: where the saga ended with the monsters supposedly plunging into
Speaker 1: a vat of moonshine mash during Prohibition. The editors later
Speaker 1: as good as admitted the whole thing was circulation boosting theater.
Speaker 1: So when a Wolfman report with a fake name behind
Speaker 1: it landed on a Frederick newsroom desk in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: that newsroom was sitting in a county with a documented
Speaker 1: hat ff century old tradition of monster journalism as entertainment,
Speaker 1: George may knew exactly what he had and exactly what
Speaker 1: to do with it. Frederick County has been telling itself
Speaker 1: monster stories for two centuries, some of them straight from
Speaker 1: the printing press. The Dwyo of sixty five fits the
Speaker 1: tradition like a key in a lock. The name Dwyo
Speaker 1: shows up in a report from West Middletown, Frederick County
Speaker 1: as far back as nineteen forty four, screams heard tracks found,
Speaker 1: so Becker didn't invent the word, And the following summer
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty six, a man identified only as Jim
Speaker 1: reported meeting a shaggy, two legged animal near a campsite
Speaker 1: on the outskirts of Gambril State Park. Deer sized with
Speaker 1: a triangular head and pointed ears, thin material, anonymous and unverifiable,
Speaker 1: and I hold it loosely. Still, notice the shape underneath
Speaker 1: the werewolf costume, something large, dark, hairy, and standing on
Speaker 1: two legs. Reported in the wooded mountains of central Maryland.
Speaker 1: That shape is about to come back, because eight years later,
Speaker 1: and thirty miles east, it showed up again, and this
Speaker 1: time it brought a crowd. Sykesville, Maryland, sits on the
Speaker 1: Patapsco River in Carroll County, about twenty miles west of Baltimore.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy three, it was a town of around
Speaker 1: fourteen hundred people, an old railroad town on a wooded
Speaker 1: river valley, the kind of place where the police department
Speaker 1: knew most residents by their first names. In late May
Speaker 1: of that year, people in and around Sykesville started reporting
Speaker 1: a monster. The accounts described a huge, hairy, upright creature
Speaker 1: seven to eight feet tall in most tellings, dark brown
Speaker 1: to black, seen along the river near the railroad tracks
Speaker 1: at the edges of yards. One of the earliest and
Speaker 1: most talked about reports came from a young local man
Speaker 1: named Anthony, who saw the thing and set the whole
Speaker 1: town on edge. His mother, a woman named Agnes, gave
Speaker 1: reporters a quote, I love for its complete lack of ambiguity.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. She thought the authorities weren't doing nearly enough,
Speaker 1: said they ought to have gangs of men out searching,
Speaker 1: and finished with I hope it's caught. According to Anthony,
Speaker 1: whatever it was had been seen beyond Sykesville too, over
Speaker 1: in Woodstock and Marriottsville, a few miles down the river.
Speaker 1: The reports kept coming through June and into July. A
Speaker 1: truck driver from out of state told police he'd seen
Speaker 1: the creature on a Friday evening and described it vividly.
Speaker 1: In one account, preserved in later research. A trucker on
Speaker 1: Route thirty two in the small hours of the morning
Speaker 1: came upon a seven to eight foot dark figure sitting
Speaker 1: near the roadside, which rose and moved off into the trees.
Speaker 1: Witnesses in several reports mentioned a smell pungent, skunk like
Speaker 1: hanging around the siding locations, and the story traveled well
Speaker 1: past the town line. The Baltimore Paper covered it. The
Speaker 1: Baltimore Afro American ran it under headlines about fear gripping
Speaker 1: the town. Sykesville made news across the region as the
Speaker 1: home of the Sikesville Monster. Here's what elevates Sikesville above
Speaker 1: almost every other case in this episode. For me, the
Speaker 1: response was official. The town's police chief, a man named
Speaker 1: Omer Heber, went out to where the creature had been
Speaker 1: reported and found large human like tracks pressed into the mud.
Speaker 1: He did what a good investigator does with impression evidence.
Speaker 1: He cast it. The plaster cast preserved a footprint thirteen
Speaker 1: inches long and seven inches wide. The hunt for the
Speaker 1: creature that followed involved the police, a state game warden,
Speaker 1: officials from the Baltimore Zoo, and investigators from paranormal research groups,
Speaker 1: all walking the woods along the Patapsco after a siding
Speaker 1: near South Branch Park, police restricted access to that whole
Speaker 1: side of town. People who lived through it have described
Speaker 1: the town as feeling practically quarantined. The Baltimore Zoo's assistant director,
Speaker 1: doctor Ted Roth, examined the footprint personally. His assessment, delivered
Speaker 1: to the press was that the track had been made
Speaker 1: by a large human foot, and he added a detail
Speaker 1: you couldn't invent that the foot appeared to have fallen arches.
Speaker 1: He said he planned to go back out to Sykesville
Speaker 1: to try to work out what the rest of the
Speaker 1: body attached to that foot might look like. Another zoo
Speaker 1: assessment was less generous, suggesting the print could have been
Speaker 1: made by a sandal, and the Maryland State Police offered
Speaker 1: the deflating official theory that the whole flap was hysteria
Speaker 1: kicked off by the legend of Boggy Creek, the drive
Speaker 1: in Bigfoot movie that was playing in Baltimore theaters at
Speaker 1: that exact moment. I want to be fair to that
Speaker 1: theory because the timing is genuinely awkward for the believers.
Speaker 1: Boggy Creek came out in nineteen seventy two and was
Speaker 1: a monster hit through seventy three, and it planted the
Speaker 1: image of a shaggy river bottom creature in millions of heads.
Speaker 1: A town on a wood river twenty minutes from theaters
Speaker 1: showing that movie. Erupting in shaggy river creature sightings is
Speaker 1: exactly what a contagion model predicts. Some percentage of the
Speaker 1: Sykesville reports were almost certainly people seeing the movie in
Speaker 1: the woods. But the theory has to climb over the
Speaker 1: physical evidence, and the physical evidence is that thirteen inch
Speaker 1: cast a footprint isn't a mood. Either something pressed that
Speaker 1: shape into the mud or somebody manufactured it. If it
Speaker 1: was a hoax, fine hoaxes happened constantly in this field.
Speaker 1: I've spent years documenting them. But then doctor Roth of
Speaker 1: the Baltimore Zoo examined a hoax up close and came
Speaker 1: away describing anatomy a large human foot with collapsed arches,
Speaker 1: which is a strange thing for a prankster to fake
Speaker 1: and a stranger thing for a zoologist to imagine. And
Speaker 1: if it was a barefoot human being with size enormous
Speaker 1: feet wandering the Potapsco woods, scaring a town for six weeks,
Speaker 1: that's its own unsolved case. Everybody who's ever dug into
Speaker 1: this case has wanted to examine that cast. Chief Hebert
Speaker 1: kept it, and when he eventually left office and moved
Speaker 1: out of state, the cast went with him. And here's
Speaker 1: the detail that makes researchers grind their teeth. When people
Speaker 1: went looking decades later for the official records of the
Speaker 1: Sykesville investigations, the file searches came up empty. No reports
Speaker 1: could be located covering the creature investigations, despite the police
Speaker 1: involvement being thoroughly documented in the Carroll County Times and
Speaker 1: other papers at the time. I don't reach for cover
Speaker 1: up explanations, and I won't hear small departments in the
Speaker 1: seventies purged files, lost files, flooded files, and moved files
Speaker 1: into somebody's garage on a regular basis. I've seen evidence rooms,
Speaker 1: but the practical result is the same either way. The
Speaker 1: best physical evidence in Merril encrypted history walked out the
Speaker 1: door with a retiring police chief and the paperwork evaporated
Speaker 1: behind it. The sightings tapered off that summer, and the
Speaker 1: story would have a clean ending, except that the Sykesville
Speaker 1: Monster filed one more appearance eight years later. And the
Speaker 1: witness put his name on it. On May ninth, nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty one, a man named Lawn was fly fishing on
Speaker 1: the south branch of the Patapsco, about a mile downstream
Speaker 1: from downtown Sykesville. It was daytime. As he fished, he
Speaker 1: noticed a stray dog, a big mixed breed, working along
Speaker 1: the opposite bank, maybe fifty feet away. The dog stopped
Speaker 1: at a large clump of brush near the water and
Speaker 1: started barking and growling at it, and then, by his account,
Speaker 1: the brush produced the reason. Something large and dark that
Speaker 1: had been concealed there came out of cover, and what
Speaker 1: Lawn says he watched cross that river bank was a tall,
Speaker 1: hair covered, two legged creature which moved off up the
Speaker 1: slope and was gone. Lawn reported what he saw, and
Speaker 1: by local accounting, his report stands as the last police
Speaker 1: report ever filed on the Sykesville Monster. He didn't disappear
Speaker 1: afterward either. He went on to spend decades as a
Speaker 1: paranormal research and writer, and he's retold that riverbank encounter
Speaker 1: in books and on television, including when the Sykesville case
Speaker 1: got the documentary treatment years later. He also shared it
Speaker 1: with me a few years back, during an interview on
Speaker 1: my Sasquatch Odyssey podcast, make of that career what you will.
Speaker 1: Skeptics will note that a life changing monster siding is
Speaker 1: a great origin story for a man who then sells
Speaker 1: monster research. I'll note the other edge of that blade,
Speaker 1: which is that the siding came first in daylight, with
Speaker 1: the second witness present, who happened to be a dog,
Speaker 1: and the dog saw it too. You can't coach astray,
Speaker 1: and Sykesville, to its credit, never pretended the whole thing
Speaker 1: hadn't happened. Forty one years later, in twenty fourteen, when
Speaker 1: the cable series Monsters and Mysteries in America built an
Speaker 1: episode around the case, a pub on Main Street through
Speaker 1: a viewing party for the town, and the local paper
Speaker 1: covered the anniversary the way other towns cover a championship season.
Speaker 1: The woman running the town's Main Street program, who also
Speaker 1: leads its ghost tours, told reporters flatly that people had
Speaker 1: taken the creature seriously in seventy three, that the searches
Speaker 1: and the restricted zones were real, and that when she'd
Speaker 1: gone hunting for the official investigation records from those years,
Speaker 1: none could be found. A town of fourteen hundred doesn't
Speaker 1: get many entries in the national record. Sykesville's entry is
Speaker 1: a footprint, and they've decided to own it. Sykesville wasn't
Speaker 1: alone in the seventies either. The same decade produced a
Speaker 1: cluster of reports on the far side of Baltimore in
Speaker 1: the marshy wooded country where the Gunpowder River meets the Chesapeake,
Speaker 1: and locals gave that one its own name, too, the
Speaker 1: Harewood Park Monster. Harewood Park is a small, tucked away
Speaker 1: community in eastern Baltimore County near Middle River in Chase,
Speaker 1: backed up against tidal creeks and woods. In nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: residents there started reporting a creature. And what's useful about
Speaker 1: this flap is how ordinary and inconsistent the details are,
Speaker 1: because that's what real side and clusters actually look like.
Speaker 1: Some people reported nothing visual at all, just branches snapping
Speaker 1: in the dark and a smell like rotten eggs rolling
Speaker 1: through the yard. A married couple reported seeing the thing
Speaker 1: near a pumping station. One witness put it at nine
Speaker 1: feet tall with green eyes, another put it at eight
Speaker 1: feet with red eyes and a stench like a cesspool.
Speaker 1: A cab driver reported the most dramatic version a seven
Speaker 1: to eight foot beast that threw trash cans at his
Speaker 1: approaching cab. Multiple accounts mentioned a screen gorilla like in
Speaker 1: piercing carrying across the marsh at night. The witnesses couldn't
Speaker 1: even agree on eye color, and honestly, that raises my
Speaker 1: opinion of them. Coordinated stories match independent glimpses of something
Speaker 1: confusing at night across a span of months, don't. It
Speaker 1: doesn't make the creature real, but it makes the report sincere.
Speaker 1: Harewood Park picked up its own local origin theory too.
Speaker 1: Directly Across the Gunpowder River sits Edgewood Arsenal, the army
Speaker 1: post where the government spent three decades running chemical exposure
Speaker 1: experiments on soldiers and volunteers Mustard agents, nerve agents, LSD PCP,
Speaker 1: a program that shut down in nineteen seventy five, one
Speaker 1: year before the monster showed up. Some locals have wandered
Speaker 1: out loud ever since whether their monster summer was some
Speaker 1: kind of spillover or test. The evidentiary status of that
Speaker 1: idea is thin. It's speculation stacked on coincidence, and nobody
Speaker 1: has produced a document connecting Edgewood to anything in Harewood Park.
Speaker 1: But I bring it up because it's the same move.
Speaker 1: A third time. Bowie hung its monster on the Agricultural
Speaker 1: Research Center Glendale, hung it on the hospital, Harewood Park
Speaker 1: hung it on the arsenal. Every Maryland community that meets
Speaker 1: a monster immediately looks around for the nearest fence with
Speaker 1: a government seal on it. Sometimes folklore is just a
Speaker 1: map of what a town doesn't trust. The record keeps
Speaker 1: going Obsasnik's Survey and the Enigma Project, a Maryland research
Speaker 1: group that spent years on these cases, logged a string
Speaker 1: of sightings in Harford County in the late seventies, including
Speaker 1: one nineteen seventy eight report that paired the creature with
Speaker 1: a low flying, brightly lit craft, which I mention only
Speaker 1: for completeness, because the moment a case welds a hairy
Speaker 1: hominid to a UFO, my evidence first alarm goes off
Speaker 1: and stays off until somebody shows me a photograph. One
Speaker 1: anonymous report doesn't get to marry two mysteries. Over on
Speaker 1: the Eastern Shore, sightings were reported in the Blackwater Wildlife
Speaker 1: Refuge in Dorchester County back in nineteen sixty seven, and
Speaker 1: more came in nineteen seventy six around Chrisfield and Salisbury,
Speaker 1: which The Washington Post was still riding about as late
Speaker 1: as nineteen eighty nine, and the file didn't close with
Speaker 1: the twentieth century. On July thirty first of two thousand,
Speaker 1: in the early morning hours, construction workers building the Arundel
Speaker 1: Mills Mall in Hanover in Anne, Arundel County reported watching
Speaker 1: a huge, fur covered creature moving in the woods off
Speaker 1: the site, with some accounts putting it at twelve feet
Speaker 1: tall with glowing red eyes. Twelve feet is a number
Speaker 1: I frankly can't do anything with. That's a figure straight
Speaker 1: out of a movie poster, and glowing eyes are almost
Speaker 1: always reflected light doing what reflected light does. But the
Speaker 1: context deserves a fair look. Those crews were clearing and
Speaker 1: grading hundreds of acres of woods on the edge of
Speaker 1: the Patuxent Research Refuge Corridor, some of the last big
Speaker 1: unbroken forest in that part of the county, and construction
Speaker 1: on that scale pushes every living thing in the wood
Speaker 1: lot out ahead of the bulldozers. Whatever those workers saw
Speaker 1: at the tree line in the dark, they were standing
Speaker 1: exactly where you'd expect displaced wildlife to be moving and
Speaker 1: exactly where a large animal with a home range being
Speaker 1: erased would make its last appearances there it sits in
Speaker 1: the record either way. Hard hat crews on a commercial
Speaker 1: job site calling in a giant thirty years after Fletchertown Road,
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes drive from the goat Man's home turf three
Speaker 1: hundred reports spread across a century from Garrett County in
Speaker 1: the mountains to the Chesapeake Marshes. That's the file the
Speaker 1: goat Man actually lives in. There's one more piece of
Speaker 1: the afterlife worth telling. The goat Man never faded the
Speaker 1: way the Duyo did. He got syndicated. In nineteen ninety seven,
Speaker 1: an Australian documentary crew from the series Animal X came
Speaker 1: to Maryland to hunt him for international television. The Washington
Speaker 1: Post has trotted him out for Halloween features decade after decade.
Speaker 1: He's turned up in comic books, in horror games, in
Speaker 1: a dozen ghost tour scripts, and in twenty thirteen, a
Speaker 1: folklorus named David Poglia published the full academic treatment, a
Speaker 1: journal article tracing exactly how a Prince George's County teen
Speaker 1: legend diffused outward and became canonized as Maryland's monster. Other
Speaker 1: states have their own goat men, some of which I've
Speaker 1: already covered on this show, and others will get to
Speaker 1: on this road trip. Texas has one on a bridge
Speaker 1: outside Denton. Kentucky has the Pope Lick Monster on its
Speaker 1: railroad trestle, and I've covered that one on the road
Speaker 1: trip show. But the folklore scholars generally hand Maryly in
Speaker 1: the Crown Prince George's County built the American goat Man's
Speaker 1: Home Office. Fifty years of college students in College Park
Speaker 1: have opened those same archive folders Karen Hostler opened in
Speaker 1: every October, some local news producer sends a camera out
Speaker 1: to Fletchertown Road to stand in the leaves and say
Speaker 1: the name one more time. And somewhere under the leaves
Speaker 1: along that right of way is whatever remains of a
Speaker 1: puppy named Ginger, the only confirmed casualty in the entire
Speaker 1: history of the Maryland goat Man. Fifty five years of
Speaker 1: horns and axes and screaming in the trees, and when
Speaker 1: you drain the legend all the way down, what's sitting
Speaker 1: at the bottom is one small dog, one grieving sixteen
Speaker 1: year old who never stops saying she saw something and
Speaker 1: a train that never had to answer for it. Di