Building a fortean library
3. HOW TO DO CRYPTOZOOLOGY
Cryptozoology has a problem: it deals with rumour, hearsay, legend and myth as if these things amounted to verifiable documentation of rare and elusive species. But that, said the ‘father’ of the subject, Bernard Heuvelmans, should be no bar to investigating what (if any) creatures may have inspired these stories. A fair point, although mainstream zoology has tended to take a dim view of a ‘science’ that depends on anecdote, and that despite many an expedition in its name signally fails to produce hard evidence such as spoor, bones, nesting-places, or even a series of properly focused photographs of even the largest of cryptids.
There’s another way of going about cryptozoological research, of which J Nathan Couch’s Goatman: Flesh or Folklore is an example, perhaps especially useful to those venturing near this field for the first time. As others, seeking other creatures, have before him, Couch first came across his subject by way of a campfire story. In about 1870, went the tale, a young newlywed couple decided to take the narrow, treacherous Hogsback Road, about 15 miles (24km) south of West Bend, Washington Country, Wisconsin, to their new home – at night. A wheel on their wagon broke, as they do, and the groom decided to walk off into the dark, back to town, for help. Hours crept by, until eventually the anxious bride heard someone approaching. But what human made such odd snuffling sounds? And then came a terrifying, goat-like bleating. Undeterred, as young women in such stories always are, she took a peek out of the wagon, and “a terrible form stood in the moonlight. It was a creature covered in coarse red hair standing on two legs like a man, but with the horned head and long muzzle of a goat.” Cue shriek of young bride. Finally she slept, although there was still no sign of her husband. She woke with the sunrise, and naturally went to see if he was anywhere about. “On the ground, she found large, cloven-hooved tracks that turned from the wagon and disappeared into the tree line… There, at the edge of the forest, the ground around a large oak tree was drenched in blood. She looked up to find the mutilated remains of the man she’d just married dangling from a gnarled limb.”
Couch notes that the story bears a marked resemblance to the cluster of modern urban legends called Lover’s Lane Legends: in particular “The Dead Boyfriend”, with a more tenuous link to one named “Hook Man”, both of which deal with the unforeseen consequences of parking a car in a lonely spot and getting up to hanky-panky. This suggests that the tale set in 1870-ish was a backdating, as a kind of authentication, of later legends centred on Hogsback Road – which, Couch learned, was used as a trysting spot by teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s. He also found another ‘origination’ legend, involving a man with a hook for a hand who lived in a falling-down house on Hogsback Road and would rip open the throats of “any teens he caught making out nearby” (sour grapes, or what?). So one can take this version of the legend as admonitory, a caution against premarital sex or perhaps just against teenage lads being lad-like. But, Couch observed, the backdated version didn’t involve illicit sex – almost the opposite: so near, yet so far. But it does concern the perils of driving on a notoriously dangerous road at night. Which of course teenagers also like to do, and often rather too fast. As Couch encapsulates it: “It certainly seems as if the legend’s emphasis has shifted from chastity belts to safety belts.”
Another origin tale, attached to the YMCA’s Matawa Camp, east of West Bend, told of a “lonely old goat farmer” whose herd was wiped out by disease during the Great Depression of the 1930s. To prevent the disease spreading to his neighbours’ properties, he dug a pit and began to burn the carcases. “With each corpse he threw into the fire, his frustration and anger built. He tossed the final goat into the flames with such rage that he fell into the pit and was burned alive. Now his angry ghost haunts the camp...” As Couch travelled the US from Maryland to California in search of Goatman stories, he heard a somewhat more explicit version of this tale: that the farmer in question had habitually ‘known’ his goats in the biblical sense, and was either doomed to be a half-goat ghost for his sins or had had a hybrid offspring that was less than friendly. (Well, you’d be cross too, wouldn’t you, in the circumstances?) In any case, notwithstanding his pinning the label ‘urban legend’ to his local Washington County Goatman, Couch wanted to know more; and thus began his coast-to-coast quest. Some interesting patterns emerge from what he discovered.
One oddity is that some who encounter Goatman report an oversized goat-creature that walks on two legs (as in the ‘1870’ account); others report the creature’s top half as goatish, the lower quarters as human; and others describe what we would think of as a faun or Pan-like creature – top human, bottom goat. Couch calls the latter ‘satyrs’, although the archaic Greek originals of those were part horse, not goat, and not hooved, but with horses’ tails and ears and enormous wangers.
In due course the Romans conflated the satyrs with their own goatish fauns, who are equated with the Greek nature-god Pan; hence our modern confusion. Pan and his fellow fauns are notoriously priapic (cf. ‘horny as a billygoat’). Couch suggests it’s no coincidence that a goatish creature should manifest in places where people go furtively to fornicate.
But if Goatman doesn’t always look quite like Pan and his friends, he doesn’t smell like a goat either. One witness reported a stink as of sulphur. Others frequently remark on the creature’s rank odour, but never say what he smells of. Which is odd, unless these witnesses are so radically urbanised that they’ve never had the bucolic pleasure of a billygoat’s reek, which is both potent and unmistakable even at several yards. And that’s not impossible: Couch remarks several times that Goatman’s favourite places are suburban, suggesting not only a degree of insulation but of liminality too. Goatman is also, Couch observes, fond of appearing on or near bridges, a classically liminal space. All these things, Couch recognises, intimate that Goatman tales are folklore and legend; or have been shaped into such familar patterns in the retelling.
In some versions of the tale, rather surprisingly (or maybe not), it’s all the government’s fault. Maryland’s axewielding Goatman is the ghastly outcome of a genetic/crossbreeding experiment at the US Department of Agriculture’s Beltville Agricultural Research Center; some say a scientist working there was in search of eternal youth, others say (in the tradition of The Fly) that he somehow became entangled with a goat himself and is suitably fractious about it. If that won’t wash, an alternative Maryland origin tale makes Goatman a horror escaped from Glen Dale Hospital – now abandoned, of course, and often said to be a former lunatic asylum (although actually it was an isolation hospital specialising in tuberculosis cases). California’s Billiwhack Monster (“a nine-feet-tall humanoid with the head of a ram”) supposedly emerges from the basement of the nowruined Billiwhack Dairy. It is the botched product of secret attempts by captured Nazi scientists to create a superman in the 1940s; Couch notes that this legend arose around the time Captain America (a successful genetic experiment, and famously anti-Nazi) was revived in the early 1960s. This reader notes thematic similarities with the disused TNT factory at Point Pleasant, West Virginia, locus and focus of the Mothman. Should you trust everything from John Keel that you read? You’d maybe do better trusting the government.
Couch is no slouch: he recognises that Goatman suffers from inconsistent morphology, folkloric origin stories and clear links with similar kinds of folklore, and urban-legendary attributes such as glowing red eyes. He also recognises the intrinsic pleasure some people get out of elaborate hoaxes: he traces back several Goatman episodes to pranksters, who certainly weren’t in it for the money. And he’s fully aware of the concept of legend trips, and why people, especially teenagers, indulge in them. Thus shielded from naïve credulity, and having noticed that no Goatman narrative can be dated further back than the early 1960s, he goes hunting for an underlying real-world inspiration. And, serendipitously, finds it. We won’t spoil anyone’s pleasure by revealing what he discovers, but will say that while his solution is plausible, we don’t quite buy the connections he makes between his elected ‘actual’ origin and the Goatman tales. Even though his solution explains certain odd aspects of the Goatman (in particular its frequent link with eccentric hermits living in dilapidated shacks), it seems to me a stretch.
Couch’s explanation doesn’t quite satisfy him, either, in the sense that his thousands of miles of questing and hours in libraries and archives have thrown up a hard core of puzzling and sometimes very creepy encounter stories that don’t fit into his rational paradigm. A true fortean, he leaves these accounts open to interpretation, while recognising that they represent genuine experiences, whatever their source.
Unlike cryptozoologists who make little forays into foreign lands and go among peoples whose language they do not speak, Couch has the advantage of investigating a culture he knows from birth, and bringing an awareness of parallel traditions and the odd ways of oral tradition to what he finds. It would be interesting to have his take on Bigfoot. Meanwhile, Goatman: Flesh or Folklore should become a template for how to investigate reports of cryptids, and every fortean should read it.
Couch’s volume should be read in conjunction with Michel Meurger’s trailbreaking Lake Monster Traditions, whose insights still delight nearly three decades after publication. An essential part of Merger’s thesis is that weird creatures appear in places that (for whatever reasons) are already thought to be strange, forbidden, threatening, or haunted. In such places, and in stark parallel to the idea of the legend trip, the apparently objective manifestation confirms the subjective apprehension. Thus, he charts the history of ‘monsters’ in certain places, and observes that over time they morph from phantoms (one of which – one would like to know more – appeared as a flaming haystack, no less) into biological creatures and later into submarines of mysterious origin.
In other words, perceptions of anomalous ‘stuff’ in lakes follow the way our thinking about the world, and particularly the wild untamed world, changes over time – ufologists call it ‘cultural tracking’. Says Meurger: “Cryptozoologists believe in a hidden Nature; sceptics reduce the question to a misinterpreted Nature.” His approach looks less at the what of what people report, intriguing as that is, and more at the how and the why of what they see: and this seems the more fortean – and indeed subtler and more sophisticated – tactic. Another must for the fortean bookshelf.
J Nathan Couch, Goatman: Flesh or Folklore?, CreateSpace, 2014
Michel Meurger (with Claude Gagnon), Lake Monster Traditions, Fortean Tomes, 1988