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He roams the woods of Prince George’s County by day and stalks deserted, mist-covered roads, preying on dogs, searching out lone teenagers and screeching his eerie, high-pitched call late into the night. His body is a grotesque mix of man and beast.

He is Goatman.

The legend that has haunted Prince George’s County for decades has become part urban, legend part ancient folklore. With his own Wikipedia page, Facebook groups and haunted house show, Goatman is an icon to rival any Bigfoot, Yeti or Loch Ness Monster.

His home turf is the university’s back yard. He has been reported seen across the county in Beltsville, Mitchellville and Bowie, though, sightings in Texas, Alabama and Michigan have elevated Goatman to a national phenomenon.

And as this year’s Halloween festivities arrive, his legacy has finally been chronicled in print with the publication of alumnus Mark Opsasnick’s book, The Real Story Behind the Exorcist: A Study of the Haunted Boy and Other True-Life Horror Legends From Around the Nation’s Capital, which includes an in-depth chapter on the Goatman.

Opsasnick said he set out to discover Goatman’s true origins.

After digging through newspaper archives, he discovered a cache of 1957 articles describing an “abominable phantom” lurking in Upper Marlboro with the same physical description as the modern Goatman. Opsasnick believes this phantom is what evolved into the story of Goatman over the next few decades.

“It traveled through the county and was transformed through word of mouth,” Opsasnick said in an interview. “It was used to scare kids to keep them in line and eventually spread through high schools to become a legend.”

It was in the 1970s that Goatman began to spawn other legends.

In one version he was an old hermit creeping around the back roads of the county. In another, he became a kind of Sasquatch figure.

The third legend that emerged became the most popular. This variation told the story of mad scientist, Dr. Stephen Fletcher, who worked in the United States Agricultural Research Center in Beltsville where one of his experiments went horribly wrong. Working with goat and human DNA to try to save his fatally ill wife, Jenny Fletcher, Dr. Fletcher’s research mutated into a hybrid beast; part goat, part man.

This version of the story has become an running joke among employees at the Agricultural Research Center.

“Most of the public knows it is a silly urban myth,” Public Affairs Specialist for the Agricultural Research Service Kim Kaplan said. “There is no evidence at all. I love that one website talked about a couple of teens who found scratches on their door and thought it was the Goatman, because nothing else causes scratches around old moldings.”

In the past 20 years, innumerable versions of the Goatman story have emerged.

“Especially with the advent of the Internet, various reports and sites extrapolated the legend to a point to where they do not even resemble the original stories,” Opsasnick said. “It’s mixed and matched. It all depends on what group of teens you come across promoting the latest story.”

Scientific examination of a photograph taken by an American couple showing a mysterious creature in their vegetable garden may finally throw some light on the existence of the bigfoot.

Earlier this month, Kenny and Margaret Mahoney set up a video camera in their garden after their home-grown vegetables began to mysteriously disappear.

They were stunned to find out a creature resembling a ghostly Dementor from the Harry Potter films prowling at the bottom of their land.

“We initially suspected a deer or a racoon of stealing our green beans. However when my husband produced the pictures of the shape at the bottom of our land we must admit to being surprised,” The Sun quoted Margaret, as saying.

The couple sent the image to their local news station in Kentucky, and soon found themselves at the centre of a ‘bigfoot fever’.

“After we appeared on television we were swamped with phone calls and emails from crypto-zoologists and bigfoot hunters wanting to talk. They all think that we may have stumbled on to something important,” the paper quoted Margaret, as saying.

A team from the History Channel have now even filmed a segment for their show, Monster Quest, with the Mahoneys.

The couple, however, is now worried, and has sent the pictures to a wildlife expert friend fearing the beast was a bear.

“We worried that it might be a bear, so we sent off the picture to a good friend who is an expert in that field. She said in her opinion it looked like fur, but she could not confirm it,” Margaret said.

“Our greatest fear is that it is indeed a bear. However, bears do not live in Kentucky so we are still at a loss as to what this figure could be,” she added.

Source: londonnews

YAKIMA, Wash. — Jim Hebert, a longtime insurance agent in Wenatchee who grew up in Yakima, waited three or four years before he told anyone about his bigfoot sighting while on vacation in Yellowstone National Park in 1994.

Wednesday, though, the 59-year-old Hebert shared his tale on the History Channel show “MonsterQuest.”

The program, which has featured episodes on the chupacabra, Loch Ness monster and giant squids, aims to “examine all the evidence available, from pictures and video to hair and bones, as well as the eyewitness accounts themselves,” according to the show’s Web site.

Hebert said while he was driving through Yellowstone, he looked over into a clearing below a wooded hillside and saw a “black hairy thing about 8 feet tall,” he recalled during a phone call Wednesday evening.

Earlier this year, a crew from “MonsterQuest” flew to Wenatchee and had Hebert reenact his experience in a similar-looking area up Chumstick Canyon in Leavenworth.

“There’s no question I saw it,” he said about what happened 15 years ago, emphasizing the image was blazed into his brain.

“Nobody can shake me,” said Hebert.

Source: yakimaherald