It was July 1969, and a crowd people at Lake Worth witnessed something they had never seen before: A seven-foot creature on top of a cliff. Rob Denkhaus pointed to a patch of brush on the north side of Lake Worth, across from Greer Island, and held up the grainy black-and-white photo. Denkhaus, the manager of the Fort Worth Nature Center for the last two years and an employee there for the last 20, was about to shed light on a legend.
“I think it was probably in this area,” he said. “Because it had the brush, and the way this vegetation is, it’s not going to change much over time…You gotta have some open ground. You gotta have some short vegetation in front.”
This spot, Denkhaus explained, was probably where Lake Worth’s most infamous photo – of a furry, white something rising from the grass – was taken nearly 50 years ago. Now what was actually in that photo is more of a mystery. But at the time, there were plenty of people who believed – or wanted to believe – in the Lake Worth Monster, also known as “Goatman.”
Witnesses described the creature as half man, half goat, towering seven feet tall and weighing 350 pounds. Hairy, horned and covered in scales, the beast was reportedly seen running across a cliff and tossing a pickup truck tire 500 feet. A story about the uproar appeared in the Star-Telegram in July 1969, and WFAA followed up with a report the next day.
“Just about the time man, in all his wisdom, decides that he has this world and everything in it all figured out, along comes something he can’t explain,” WFAA reporter Jerry Taff relayed from the scene, his tone wavering between tongue-in-cheek and grave concern. Taff asked a witness if the monster had a scaly lizard-like skin, as other had reported. “I was so scared, I didn’t see nothing like that,” the man said.
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At the time of Taff’s report, the legend was pure hearsay. The rumors, though, were enough for police to fear that a mob of rifle-toting citizens would try to take the matters into their own hands. The rumors also inspired a short book, written by Benbrook’s Sallie Ann Clarke. Clarke’s “The Lake Worth Monster of Greer Island, Fort Worth, Texas,” part of which has been posted on the Tarrant County Historical Journal website, featured a picture of Greer Island and an ominous warning:
“Somewhere deep in the thick under brush the Lake Worth Monster hides. What he could write about the people that chased, followed, tracked and shot him, may be as interesting as what the people have said and written about him.”
History of the Lake Worth Monster: Reports of sightings by local citizens of “a half-man, half-goat, with fur and scales” in July 1969 led to the belief that a mysterious creature lived in Lake Worth.
Newspapers reported the alleged sightings, including one in which the monster landed on a man’s car after jumping out of a tree, and another in which it threw an automobile tire at a group of people.
Newspapers also published a photograph purportedly taken of the creature by Allen Plaster, and locals began driving out to the lake at night to get a look at it. Local police investigated the claims, but found no evidence of the monster in the Lake Worth and Greer Island area. According to one reporter, the Goatman legend was spread via summer camp stories, where camp counselors told children to “listen carefully…and you’ll hear his cry on clear nights like tonight”.
In a later interview, Allen Plaster commented on the photo, described as a man-sized “white furball”, that he took while driving past the Nature Center in 1969. Plaster characterized the sighting as a prank, saying, “whatever it was, it wanted to be seen”. Since reports of the monster ceased when school resumed, many suspected the incidents were pranks carried out by high school students.
In 2005, a reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram received an anonymous letter from someone claiming to be one of three high school classmates who, in the summer of 1969, “decided to go out to Lake Worth and scare people” using a tinfoil mask. In 2009, Fort Worth, Texas magazine published a report about an unidentified man who said that he had been a perpetrator of the tire-throwing incident.
Cryptozoologist-blogger Craig Woolheater said he believes the Lake Worth monster is an “undiscovered, uncataloged primate species that walks on two legs.”
Steve S
Being from the DFW area of Texas, I remember that story and think it’s pretty darn cool. I have the book about it.
Charles R
It’s a shame some decided to prank phony things, so that the actual original story gets muddled.
Here is another sighting from same area only in 1976, years after the original
https://bfro.net/GDB/show_report.asp?id=35721