It was the summer of 1969.  I was 11 years old.  Apollo 11 was ready to blast off to the moon.  The Vietnam War raged, with close to 200 young American men perishing there each week.  There was soon to be a huge rock and roll party on a farm in New York State, down the road from a little town called Woodstock.  And the Goatman terrorized the shore of a lake just outside the city of Fort Worth.

Say what?

The first sighting was the night of July 9.  The next day, the local newspaper carried the story above the fold on page 2 with the headline, “Fishy Man-Goat Terrifies Couples Parked at Lake Worth.”  Lake Worth is about 15 miles from downtown Fort Worth, and was a popular stop for young couples looking for a quiet place to practice romance away from the watchful eyes of parents.  It was also close to the Jacksboro Highway, a rough stretch of honky tonks and whorehouses, including a joint that Willie Nelson once described as having the meanest, toughest crowd he ever played for.  Sometimes that Jacksboro Highway rowdiness made its way over to the shoreline of the lake.

Were those couples necking in their cars actually targets of drunken mischief instigated by rowdies from the highway?  No, apparently not.  All of the goatman descriptions were eerily similar – the creature was about 7 feet tall, with scales and white fur.  A few noticed ram-like horns, as well.  One of the witnesses showed police an 18 inch gash the creature put along the side of his car when he leapt onto it from a nearby tree.

There had been a few isolated police reports earlier that summer of other sightings like that by the lake.  The police had simply ignored those reports, assuming them to be pranks.  This time, however, the witnesses were adamant, and they were obviously scared.  And they were talking to the press.

The next evening, between 20 and 30 local residents, including police, combed the area.  Suddenly, a loud, pitiful cry was heard, unlike anything anyone there had ever heard before.  In the early evening twilight, they could make out a large, white, furry creature on a bluff, between one- and two-hundred feet away.  As the crowd began to rush toward the creature, it reached down and picked up a large tire and hurled it high into the air at the crowd, and then disappeared into the brush.

Throughout the remainder of the summer, hundreds of people searched the area.  There were a few more sightings.  Many claimed to have found large footprints that were too big to have been made by a human.  More ominously, blood was seen on the white limestone outcroppings that are found throughout the area, and a farmer reported finding dead sheep.  The police were not too worried about the goatman, however.  Their larger concern was the danger posed by hundreds of goatman trackers carrying fully loaded Remingtons, Brownings, and Colts. 

By late August, with the start of school, goatman sightings decreased significantly, but did not stop entirely.  One witness claims to have seen the goatman three times during the next several months.  However, the police closed the file and blamed the sightings on pranksters.  When 1969 turned into 1970, goatman sightings came to an end.

Was there a goatman wandering the shore of Lake Worth?  In 2005, a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram received an unsigned letter whose author claimed to have been the perpetrator.  He said he went to the lake with two friends to scare couples necking in their cars.  They fashioned a mask out of tin foil, which could account for the scaly appearance of the creature.  After spooking the parkers, they rode over to the nearest Dairy Queen for coke floats.  The goatman, the letter writer continues, is now 55 years old, is definitely human, and lives quietly in the town of Joshua, down in Johnson County.

The trouble is, someone else made the same admission in another letter a few years earlier, only this time the envelope carried a Beaumont postmark.  Beaumont is 300 miles away from Johnson County.

This summer, Fort Worth magazine outed a man named “Vinzens” who admitted being the tire thrower.  According to “Vinzens”, he actually rolled the tire down the hill, but it soon hit a boulder and bounced, giving it the appearance of having been thrown.

Local resident Sallie Ann Clarke won’t hear any of that.  The octogenarian says she saw the goatman three times.  That creature was definitely not a  prank.  Unfortunately, a stroke has left her with very limited speech capabilities, and she is unable to elaborate on what she saw.  But tell her it was a prank, and her disapproval will be unmistakable. 

It has been nearly 40 years since the last goatman sighting.  But when I was an 11 year old living just 20 miles or so from Lake Worth, the story of the goatman was nearly as big a deal as the moon landing.  It provided welcome relief from sad stories coming out of the jungles and rice paddies of Southeast Asia.  The story of the goatman occupied my interest every bit as much as the strange gathering of thousands of hippies and kids not all that much older than me on a big field near a town called Woodstock. 

I kind of miss the Goatman.