As stories of the Goatman clop their way westward across the American continent, the thoughts of a nation turn to Maryland’s monster in a desperate bid to assimilate his cloven feet and rugged beard, his buff physique and uneven temperament, his steely glare and nasal bray, into the larger framework of national mythology. Texas! Missouri! Oklahama! California! The Goatman marches. In the same way that Maryland turned their intrepid mutation into a nightstalking vessel for an age’s worth of urban legend – the hookman, the Crybaby Bridge and even Bigfoot – so, too, do other states incorporate the fantastical axe-wielding émigré into their own local folklore.

While the Goatman blazed his way across the American South, stopping once in Arkansas to brandish a severed human leg at a Sonic waitress and once in Texas to chase after a rowdy band of teenagers, rumors of his possible connection to El Chupacabra began to surface. Could the insidious goat sucker that’s been exsanguinating American beef stock be the unholy progeny of the Goatman’s cross-country sex safari? Probably not – though it has been suggested. A more popular theory is that, given his penchant for ruthlessly dispensing with neighborhood pets, the Goatman might be El Chupacabra’s cousin. Sounds similar to Maryland’s “Bigfoot is a relative of the Goatman” theory, no?

While the Goatman diverted northward through Oklahoma and, eventually, Washington State, Bigfoot aficionados began to balk at the monster’s popularity. Many modern Sasquatch enthusiasts branded the creature a children’s story, undeserving of either national press or rigorous scientific attention. In a 1998 article in the “Washington City Paper,” (“The Legend of Goatman”) Tennessee Bigfoot hunter Scott McNabb dismissively declared, “Goatman is not an interest of mine.” McNabb went on to explain that, unlike Bigfoot, the Goatman tale lacks historical and scientific plausibility. Other Bigfoot hunters, while equally skeptical, have been more diplomatic in their assessment of Maryland’s fair-weather paranormal mascot – perhaps, they posit, the so called “Goatman” is a sasquatch that has fallen ill and lost patches of hair, causing it to appear more like a human/animal hybrid than a full-on missing link. One thing’s certain – for someone who’s feeling a bit under the weather, homeboy sure gets around.

The question is, what is it about the Goatman story – once the paragon of a locally confined myth – that has allowed its progress from anytown, MD to everytown, USA? Other equally compelling taxonomical conundrums (the Dover Demon, the Loveland Frog, the Beast of Bray Road, etc.) have gained national attention without ever managing to parlay local infamy into a physical nationwide presence.

Maybe it’s the fact that, as a humanoid creature with a consistently dark, but methodologically varied, modus operandi, the Goatman fits in nicely with America’s array of local Bigfoot analogs (Skunk Ape, Wild Man, Sasquatch, Tsiatko, etc.), many of whom display varying behaviors, but all of whom exhibit similar physical attributes. Bipedal posture. Hirsute bodies. Man-like faces. Heck, even Marylanders have posited the Goatman as Bigfoot’s genetic constituent. And the thing both Bigfoot and the Goatman have over, say, the Loveland Frog (a giant frog) is that they kinda look like big, hairy dudes in the woods. In the eyes of an observer, an axe-schlepping lumberjack is just four beers and forty feet away from the Goatman (or from evidence that Bigfoot’s a shill for the logging industry).

Maybe it’s a combination of natural Internet proliferation combined with his striking resemblance to the devil. Given that urban legends tend to spread most readily among an American teenage demographic that has, for decades, afforded all things Satanic a bleary eyed thumbs up (see every pentagram etched apathetically on to middle-school notebooks ever), a story about an evil marauding demon who hunts down doers of “it” comes pretty much campfire ready.

Maybe it’s just because he’s a man-sized goat with an axe.

Regardless, you might think about setting an extra place at the kitchen table. And picking up a third ticket to prom. The Goatman is coming to your town. And attending your prom after he eats dinner at your house. Maryland totally owes you one.

The legend of the Maryland Goatman is as much a narrative chimera as its deformed antagonist is a physical one. Descriptions of the hulking manimal, whose bushy beard and hairy human torso sit atop sinewy goat legs and fibrous hooves, immediately recall the mischievous satyrs of Greek mythology. Pop a couple horns on his fat, angry head (as some cryptozoologically inclined artistes have), and the Goatman even looks a bit like certain artist renderings of Satan, only with a cartoonishly threatening double-bladed axe in lieu of the classic sinner-pokin’ pitchfork.

I know. It’s hard to think of a modern story that doesn’t owe something to the Greeks or the Pagans or medieval personifications of evil. (Maybe “Sideways,” but even there – who can honestly look at Paul Giamatti without picturing him wearing a diaper and shooting heart-tipped arrows at a cartoon dog just as it’s looking at a cartoon cat?) But even as a modern American urban legend, the Goatman is a different animal.

Take, for instance, the monster’s aforementioned ‘50s debut – a bombastic affair in which the axe-toting Goatman went violently a-knockin’ on the hood of a car that was a-rockin’. After gleefully cutting in on the teenage couple’s horizontal mambo, the crazed monster fled into the woods, leaving the terrified adolescents practically peeing their pants, but actually just peeing the car seat near the pants that they had so lustfully removed. This story, and its ensuing echoed repetition among the randy pubescent suburbanites of Prince George’s County, bears all the tongue-clucking sex-negative hallmarks s of the ubiquitous hook-handed killer urban legend. Granted, some irritating scraping and a hook on the door handle is a bit subtler than enraged, melee-ready, bipedal livestock, but, you know, whatever it takes to chop a message through those thick teenage skulls, right?

Now, I don’t know about where you live, but here in Ohio, we’ve got at least two dozen alleged crybaby bridges – water-spanning roadways from which nighttime drivers claim to hear the sobbing of apparitional infants and women. These bridges are reported in every state (to the extent that well-known folklorist and artist Jesse Glass even declared the phenomenon Internet-perpetrated “fakelore”), and every bridge has its own story about a drowned baby or a suicidal lady, blah blah blah, hear the pathetic whiners’ posthumous boo-hooing. In Prince George’s County, though, that isn’t a fussy ghost you hear bawling its stupid eyes out under the bridge – it’s the Goatman. And he’s braying. Because he’s enraged. Or in heat. Either way, it’s another prevalent urban legend that Maryland has appended to the ink, type and whisper patchwork that is the Goatman tale.

A few imaginative Marylanders have even gone as far as to dub the Goatman “Bigfoot’s cousin.” Man ape. Man goat. It’s all the same to them.

The Goatman story may be composed of a buncha locally repackaged urban myths, but he isn’t only that. He has an origin story. More accurately, in typical “now make it giant and crazy and give it an axe” Maryland fashion, he has about five. And all of them are winners. Check back on Wednesday to find out how this bridge-sobbing hump disrupter came into being, and what the U.S. Government had to do with it.