Did The Government Create Goatman? How Does This Impact Heathcare?
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Save for one generalized tale of Satanism (The Goatman is a ritualistically summoned demon), the origin stories ascribed to the Goatman are the best kind of local folklore – geographically obsessed, historically revisionist and unflinchingly paranoid. That isn’t to say that they’re particularly original. You’ll recognize the antiseptic white of the research facility’s corridors, and the hollow screams resounding from mental ward cells. Still, of all the secret government labs in all the towns in all the world, the Goatman walked out of Beltsville, Maryland’s.
Given Maryland’s proximity to Washington, D.C., it’s no surprise that the government has been implicated in the genesis of the Goatman. Specifically, it’s the government’s Agricultural Research Facility, located in Beltsville, that often takes the blame (though I would think it unlikely that they also gave their horrific mutation an axe. Perhaps
a rogue Smithsonian curator got involved). If the government has property in or near a town, you can count on it becoming the nexus of at least one sensational and horrifying urban myth (e.g., the U.S.S. Eldridge, the Montauk Project, et al).
There are two schools of thought as to the true nature of the Goatman – some folks believe that he’s an anomalously hairy, super-sized human whose feral lifestyle has earned him the appearance, and corresponding badittude, of a goat; Others think that he is an actual, genuine monster composed of one-half horrifying goatness and one-half unfettered masculinity. For the people whose theories tend toward the former, the Goatman was once a burly, 7-foot-tall government scientist who lost his funding and, subsequently, his mind, then ran screaming out into the woods and began a new life of regimented beard growth and teen sex intervention. (Because a monster? That’s ridiculous!) For the latter camp, the Goatman is the accidental result of a government experiment gone horribly awry. What kind of experiment? It usually isn’t specified, though one version suggests that an early cancer researcher injected a goat with live cancer cells, which, when combined with radiation or something, kick-started the animal’s transformation (metastasis?).
In his book “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” journalist Jon Ronson does, in fact, claim that the government has been known to use de-bleated goats for various training and tests, but given the Goatman’s alleged noisy vocalizations, it seems unlikely that he started as a member of Uncle Sam’s black ops seen-not-heard herd. Fortunately, there’s another, more recent theory: the Goatman is an escaped inmate of Glenn Dale Hospital. Again, in this case, two variations exist – the one where he’s a hulking nutcase and the one where he’s a freakish medical experiment. Both versions agree that he came straight from the stark-raving hell of restrained lunatics and abused maniacs that constituted the now-derelict Glenn Dale Hospital. There’s only one problem with this hypothesis – Glenn Dale Hospital was never, as many websites suggest, a mental hospital. It was a tuberculosis sanitarium used to isolate contagious victims of the then-common disease from the public at large, and from other hospital communities. After the building was declared a free-range asbestos ranch and shut down in 1982, however, paranormal investigators and urban photographers laid siege to the grounds, extensively (and inaccurately) blogging about their explorations of the abandoned Glenn Dale asylum. Interestingly, no story that I’ve found suggests that the Goat Man is an escaped tuberculosis patient, driven insane by his disease and often mistaken for a goat due to his rasping, nasal cough. But I guess a brawny psychopath is more frightening/goat-like than a wheezing tubercular corpse, despite historical veracity.
Nowadays, in deference to his fantastical origins and initial rambunctiousness, the Maryland Goatman seems to have abandoned flamboyant assaults on copulating youth in favor of covert pet theft and vandalism. It seems more than likely that the Goatman has fled its stomping grounds, leaving the people of the Old Line State to repurpose his horrific legacy into a banal catch-all blame depository. Can’t find the dog? The Goatman took it. Something dented your car door? ‘Twas the Goatman’s axe. Thankfully, as Maryland trembles in the wake of their misdemeanorous Scapegoatman, the true monster has taken his act on the road.
Friday: The America Goatman

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?


The best thing about secret government research projects is the fun, random codenames. For example – Project Bluebird… Weaponized birds activated by pitching peanut butter-and-seed-coated pinecones into an enemy camp? Not even a little bit. This 1950s CIA program was created to research alternative (generally psychopharmacological) prisoner interrogation techniques, and to create a new breed of puppet spook, whose free will, up to and including his self preservation instinct, was completely suppressed. Most of the experiment was spent administering low dosages of synthetic drugs and chemicals, including heroin, PCP, mescaline, LSD and ether, to unknowing military personnel stationed at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. While the CIA was tangentially interested in the direct effects of the psychotropics and narcotics, their real mission was to study the exploitability of withdrawal-addled soldiers – a goal they accomplished by suddenly ceasing test patients’ regular mickey slips. Of the 7,000 unwitting Project Bluebird participants, 1,000 demonstrated symptoms of epilepsy and clinical mopiness, including suicide attempts and the writing of songs with the word “Blues” in the titles.

In the 2005 film “White Noise,” Keegan Connor Tracy’s anxiously stuttering character tells Michael Keaton’s character that Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) is dangerous… “like homemade Ouija boards and… and, and teenage séances on Halloween.” Of course, desperate to hear from his dead wife, the recent widower doesn’t listen, and his obsession with pressing is ear to the mortal coil finds him at the business end of some serious supernatural monkey business. In real life, the supposed spirit voices that force their way through the surface noise of amateur paranormal investigators’ off-brand microcassettes are as likely to corrupt your soul as the hidden Satanic messages that pop-averse evangelists Where’s Waldo out of reversed Beatles’ songs. Even so, if any of you are thinking about doing a little ethereal eavesdropping, maybe should start out small – say, with animals.
is that, despite the legend’s seemingly holy origins, Europeans also believed that it was never good to listen to the speaking animals (probably because it’s pagan as f***). My favorite story re: talking animals – don’t listen to them! comes from the German Alps:
When the muted scratching behind the farmhouse’s old wooden walls turned into strange hissing and humanoid gurgling, the Irving family began doubting their early theories of wild mice and scavenging rats. So it seemed reasonable and, like, totally OK when, in 1931, a swaggering, bushy-tailed mammal sashayed out of the darkness and introduced himself, in perfect English, as Gef, “an extra, extra clever mongoose.” Over the years, Gef entertained thirteen-year-old Voirrey (the only Irving who could actually see the creature), and her parents, James and Margaret, with tales of his exotic Indian upbringing, fantastical claims of supernatural powers and even scandalous neighborhood gossip, which he claimed to obtain through extensive eavesdropping and daring spy missions. Occasionally, Gef would get rowdy and toss objects around the Irving house, or perpetrate Kutcherian japes, like the time he convinced the family that he had been poisoned, but overall, the mongoose’s seven-year stay, as documented in a journal kept by James Irving, was a pleasant one.
The Grrl Power theory of poltergeist phenomena basically states that adolescent girls are like psychokinetic pressure cookers. Puberty heaps on the hormones, while historically male-biased cultural norms encourage young women to repress their burgeoning sexuality. Teenage angst! Social pressures! Familial stress! In certain young women, the combination of these factors supposedly leads to involuntary Carrie-style outbursts that are suspiciously similar to activities traditionally labeled as poltergeist goings-on.
Way back in 1682, when men were men and poltergeists were still thought to be nothing more than ghostly, table-flipping Foley artists, Richard Chamberlain, the secretary of the colony of New Hampshire, was hanging out at a local watering hole when most of all hell broke loose. Utensils took to the air and flew at the patrons and staff. Bricks and rocks cut deadly arcs through the barroom. Hammers, spits and iron-crows rose in unassisted flight and assaulted the confused crowd of onlookers. When the chaos ended, Chamberlain immediately confronted the pub’s owners, George and Alice Walton, coining the phrase “WTF?” in the process.
adolescent appetites for prankery. As (ahem) research progressed throughout the 20th century, however, the poltergeist phenomena began to look less and less like traditional spirit activity. In modern day parapsychology circles, the party line is this: reported hauntings are generally centered on a place or an object, and last for extended periods; poltergeists are usually linked to individual people (most commonly females under the age of 20) and stop abruptly after only a few months. According to Gauld and Cornell, 98% of reported hauntings are actually cases of poltergeist activity, and that’s a number you can trust because it’s math AND science!
If the all-powerful monster kid from that Twilight Zone episode (“It’s a Good Life”) decided to trap Dan Brown and Alan Moore in a sealed elevator, the Bembine Tablet is one of the few viable conversation topics on which both could probably agree to waste the precious, dwindling oxygen.
Li’l William Creech’s legs were paralyzed, and his father, Doctor Richard Creech, was at his wits’ end. Willy had been stretcher-bound for almost a year. The regular electrical treatments designed to zap function into his hopeless, rubbery gams had, time and again, proven utterly unsuccessful. If anything, the boy’s condition seemed to be worsening. That’s when Doctor Creech received a letter from his mother, imploring him to dose the child with Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People – miracle tablets designed to treat most forms of weakness, including heart palpitations, nervous headaches, partial paralysis and even the post-flu icks. Always the simpering momma’s boy, Dr. Creech immediately crammed his son full of Doc Williams’ superlative curative and, lo and behold, the boy was back on his feet after only four short months worth of daily pill binges.



