GOATMAN WAS HERE (LESS BLOOD, MORE GUTS: an excerpt from upcoming work of pseudofiction INDRID COLD IS DEAD
Behold, a sneaky preview of my upcoming work of pseudofiction Indrid Cold is Dead . . .
PROLOGUE: What’s this button not do?
It is no secret that I am a steadfast bohemian type, with a head full of Fellini flicks and dreamy equatorial literature. Aw, hell, reader, I’ll just come clean with you: What you are about to read is sort of a hallucinatory overview of my endeavors to encounter a cryptid, or maybe an alien being or ultraterrestrial—or at the very least, find myself muzzle deep in some good old-fashioned high strangeness.
Now, the nature of these endeavors varies greatly. From prepubescent nights spent slinking around railroad tracks in northwest Louisiana (searching for ghosts and wild men of the woods) to idling down the canopy roads of the Florida Panhandle in my 1978 Fiat (top down, tunes cranked) to roaming around some of the most pod-people infested small towns of the USA, east of Rod Serling’s smoking den.
But, yeah, this slender little book is what in the Old World they would call semi-fiction, but here in the New World they are more likely to call a fib salad tossed in nonsense topped with bullshit. It is common knowledge that every time a UFO chaser or cryptidhead swerves out of their way to use a term like Mothership or Mothbunnydogman, an angel gets thwacked across the face with a rubber hose—and with that awfulness in mind, most of this book is, in fact, as truthful as Saint Peter’s pet parakeet. However, should you like to engage in, what they call in some social circles, serious investigative journalism, please look to the excellent cryptidcentric works of John Keel, Ken Gerhard, Stan Gordon, Linda S. Godfrey, Loren Coleman, Lyle Blackburn, Nick Redfern, Lon Strickler, Shannon LeGro, Seth Breedlove, Charles Fort, Ronan Coghlan, George Dudding, David Weatherly, Gray Barker, Ivan Sanderson, and Rosemary Ellen Guiley. And of course I have my own great big piles of moon food from my independent investigations, and from my work as a field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (affectionately known as MUFON), but, yeah, sometimes you got to make the peanut butter and the jelly stand in opposite corners of the room with their backs to each other, yuk-yuk-yuk.
I believe you are now sufficiently primed to begin this book, dearest reader, and I shall leave you with a rather dubious quote from Fred Madison in Chief Freakster David Lynch’s 1997 neo-noir eye-widener Lost Highway: “I like to remember things my own way… How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.”
VJH, September 12th, 2023
~
GOATMAN WAS HERE (LESS BLOOD, MORE GUTS)
Prince George’s County, Maryland
It was obvious that the demons were pretty much in control – John Keel
I jumped off the highway and pulled into a Beltsville, Maryland, an edge city of Washington, DC that mainly consisted of Salvadoran karaoke bars, shabby Ethiopian restaurants, and dump trucks. I idled down the main drag, looking for an honest to God set of English syllables. It was eleven o’clock on a Friday night, and I was a proven marksman when it came to finding late night bustle.
I found a lounge with numbers for a name and curbed the Audi and entered the joint. The bartender looked displeased to see an unfamiliar face, so I paid cash for the chunky-style microbrew I had chosen at random and then tipped him heavily. It was a steadfast ploy of mine—tipping one hundred percent to buy myself a little conditional fanfare. It is a reliable method in which you can obtain information, granted it can backfire severely if you catch the bartender while he is under a weird moon or steeped in a cocaine binge. In the murky world of bartending, excessive gratuity almost always comes with a huge, hideous, implied asterisk.
“Say, brother,” I said, chummily, “I was yappin’ with a buddy of mine about your cozy little town and he told me to keep my eyeballs peeled for Goatman. You know anything about that?”
The bartender threw his bar rag angrily at the ice pin. “Mister, are you cuckoo or what? Don’t you know if you yak about that stuff around here, these beady-eyed spinsters will duct tape your skinny ass to a Tomahawk missile and launch you into the South China Sea?”
I told him I did not know that, and the world was probably a better place for it. I ordered another beer—a regular ol’ Coors this time—and left him a five dollar bill on top of the five dollar beer that covered the beer. Anticipating this sort of standoffishness amongst the natives, I had stopped off at a Bank of America earlier in the day and pulled out two hundred dollars in freshly-minted five dollar bills that did not yet smell like a pile of germs.
The bartender let out a huge sigh and leaned in from across the bar and into my personal space. “Look, I don’t know what your deal is, but if you really want some more information about you-know-who, then pop off at that Huddle House up on there on the left across from that Shell station. The little creepster chick who waitresses there on the weekends is a goddamn living breathing encyclopedia on ghosts and ghouls and such.”
I asked him what the girl’s name was and he said he couldn’t remember, so I retracted one of the fives and split.
~
The Huddle House was sparsely crowded. A couple of lone truck drivers and a cluster of drunkies here and there. It was not yet midnight, but the general vibe of Beltsville was spent and sullen.
There were two waitresses—one was old and spavined, with the bendy demeanor of a beaten dog, and the other was suspiciously young and ambiguously Latino. She had turquoise hair and an arm tattoo of some sort of lycanthrope wearing slacks.
I was about to wave her over when she glided up to my table and asked me if I was ready to order. I asked her if they carry beer and she said they did not, so I ordered a Coca-Cola and some hash browns with cheese and chili on top.
“Say, let me ask you something,” I said, before she could confiscate my menu and zoom off. “I’m on a scavenger hunt and it is absolutely imperative that I snap a pic of, well, your local celebrity.” I winked at her twice and she looked at me like I farted out of my face, so I added, “—You know, Goatman.”
Before I could slip her a crisp five, a small herd of meaty guys wearing every season of camouflage was dragging me out and making sure I bumped myself on every hard object in the establishment. They tossed me like a frisbee headfirst into a muddy ditch that was just beyond the parking lot and then stood there smiling at their accomplishments.
Not a single word was said by anyone throughout the entirety of this unfortunate end to my night, a few wayward grunts and snarls, notwithstanding. As a professional permanent outsider, I was used to this type of treatment, but it still severely mussed my mane when it happened.
I had an apartment in the belly-button of Washington, DC, but opted to spend the night just north of Beltsville at a preposterously luminated motel that was nestled up to the highway. I asked the receptionist, a gloomy fellow who seemed mired in some light existentialist warfare, where I could get beer at this hour and he told me I’d have to scoot over to a neighboring county or I could just buy some of his personal stash.
I opted for the latter choice—sixty American dollars for a partially nibbled-on case of warm Peroni and a half-pack of Winston Lights. I was by no means the worst deal in the world, especially considering the hour and the circumstances.
~
Okay, reader, I hear you clamoring for a little bit of personal history and background, et cetera, et cetera, so I will cater to your demands…
I have always had a persistent zeal for the unknown, and I don’t mean the tangible unknown—the scientific unknown of quarks and quanta, nor the tweedy unknown of dreams tigers and labyrinths and mirrors and all that. My enchantment for the unknown lies gift-wrapped at the doorstep of the house of monsters.
I was born in the Florida panhandle on Eglin Air Force base—a true alpha male of an Air Force base—on the first day of the last week of the first half of the 1970s. December 24th, 1974… My father was in the Air Force just long enough to push enough weed to buy a yellow Chevette with wood grain. It was a sufficiently roadworthy vehicle in which my mom to scoot me around without incident.
We moved back to our hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana before I was old enough to pronounce the word lemonade without getting the jitters. (There is a manifest rumor floating around that my first words were Led Zeppelin, but I can tell you with confidence the first thing out of my mouth that wasn’t that milky bile that babies emit on the regular were the words love me two times, bay-buh.)
Shreveport is basically the city Hollywood has you looking at when you think you’re looking at New Orleans. It’s a city whose only development over the last thirty years has been casinos and overpasses and drug houses. It’s the kind of place you go back to after many years of deliberate absence and when the locals say you won’t recognize a thing, they really mean the Arby’s is now a Hardee’s, or the Piggly Wiggly is now a Hoggly Woggly.
Shreveport sits in Caddo parish in the northwest tip of Louisiana—a region that has more allegiance to the dudsville caboose of Texas than it does the wild child state that it emanates from. I know for a fact there was not a fleur-de-lis north of Natchitoches until the year 2010 on the dot.
In the early ‘80s I would often go to my aunt and uncle’s house to listen to Cheap Trick and watch Dragonslayer, and I was routinely enrapt with their wackadoo collection of books with sinister covers and freaky titles like Alien Animals and I ended up putting myself on a daily regimen of this phylum of imagination fodder before I was old enough to eat hard candy. As a result, when my father would take me deer hunting and deposit me up in a stand at spookteen o’clock in the morning, every pre-sunrise rustle in the woods was surely either the Jersey Devil or Mothman or some sort of phantom pooch or basically anything but the deer or squirrel that, in retrospect, it probably was.
I soaked up everything I could about monsters (the sleeker and more fashionable “cryptid” didn’t debut until I was steeped in adulthood), and I began to actively seek them out around the various semi-rural neighborhoods that I lived in. I mean, why go gar gigging and bass fishing and squirrel hunting when what the taxidermy man really wants to lay his greed-glazed eyes on is a skunk ape?
My brother and I blazed a zillion trails around the neighborhood on our four-wheelers. I took a silver and black .22 rifle everywhere I went (often substituting the .22 for a BB gun, when the social climate called for it—Children of the Corn had only recently come out at the box office and every pre-teen kiddo across the states was bug-eyed with glee about the film, and a buck-toothed eight-year-old with a loaded rifle, head to Ked in camouflage, was sure to make your average fully-grown adult fidget a like hamster).
Anyway, back to Beltsville…
The motel bed was as lop-sided as a three-legged elephant but since I no intention of sleeping—tonight or ever—I was okay with that. It was a nonsmoking room, as they all are these days, so I opened the window and pulled off one of the socks off my feet and put it over the fire alarm.
Someone knocked at my door. Without thinking, I opened it and standing in front of me was the girl with turquoise hair from the Huddle House.
“Can I come in?” she said, rubbernecking at her surroundings like a Sopwith Camel pilot.
“I don’t see why not,” I said, standing off to the side so she could enter.
She let out a little fake cough because of the cigarette smoke and then asked me if I could have a beer.
I had put about eight beers in the sink and dumped a bunch of ice on top of them. The rest were still in a cardboard box, moored next my shoes alongside the bed.
“They’re still room temp, and this ain’t a cold room,” I said, adopting an avuncular tone with the girl.
“It doesn’t matter how hot or cold they are, so long as they got bubbles in ‘em.”
I could not have agreed with her more, so I grabbed one of the beers and opened it with my lighter and gave it to her. “Out of sheer curiosity, how old are you?”
“I’ll be twenty-one in two years, seven months, and five days,” she said, as if reading a script.
“Better you than me,” I said, peaking out the blinds. “How did you know where to find me?”
“Those dudes that played human pinball with you told me.” She took a swig of beer and stifled a burp. “They followed you out here to make sure you were out of city limits.”
On closer inspection, the girl seemed Eastern European. Romanian, probably, which explained the pseudo-Latino look.
“Very considerate of them. Tell ‘em I say thanks.”
She ignored me and said, “You can’t just go around blabbing your head about Goatman like that. It’s a really stupid thing to do, you know?”
I did not know, and I told her as much. She sighed real big. I decided to change the subject. “And who is this dapper gentleman?” I said, talking about her little wolfman tattoo.
“Oh… this is Ralph.”
“Pretty neat little tattoo,” I said, lying through my teeth and lips and everything else. I had seen many tattoos in my life, and this was not one to remember. “Is it temporary or permanent?”
“It’s permanent,” she said, fingering it. “At least I hope it’s permanent.”
“You win it in a raffle or what?”
“Long story.”
“Short legs,” I said, indicating the wolfman’s disproportionately short slacks-clad legs. “Why’d you decide to give him the Calvin and Hobbes treatment?”
The girl ignored me again and started fucking around on her phone. I got up and grabbed another beer. Eventually she put her phone away and enthusiastically engaged me and we talked about everything and nothing for half an hour or so while we drank our beers. I told her my name and she told me hers and I forgot it before it was halfway inside my ear. Julia, maybe, or Julie. She offered to take me to an old spooky bridge where Goatman occasionally still gets spotted. Governor’s Bridge, the natives called it; one of several bridges in the area with all sorts of hideous juju and Rated R lore. It was over on the other eastern fringe of nearby Bowie, but nothing was really far from anything here in the Washington, DC area. On the way we would hit a couple of roads where Goatman was known to often set up shop (or chop, rather?—it is said that Goatman is often accessorized with a pickaxe).
“I’ll drive if you navigate,” I said to her, putting on my shoes. She agreed to this and we jumped in my rental.
Three ELO songs later, we were on the desolate stretch of road that Goatman allegedly haunts.
“Lottsford Road… Bit a misnomer, innit?” I told her, switching on my high beams and slowing the car to an idle. “Where I come from, roads are paved, and they have two lanes at the very least.”
“You’re one of those people who has to remark on every single pleasure and displeasure they experience, huh,” the girl said, rolling down her window. She started sniffing at the air like a bloodhound and said, “Eww… You smell that?”
“Smell what?”
“That,” she said, scrunching her face up. “Smells like if you ate a bunch of cat food and then, like, puked it all up.”
Jesus. That bartender had called this called this girl a creepster and he had not been exaggerating. Unfortunately, the grisly imagery that her wayward description conjured up engaged my brain before I could slam the door in its face. Still, I smelled nothing aside from the vanillaroma air freshener that dangled nervously from the rear view mirror.
And then—
Bam! Bam-bam-bam!
The first thing I thought when the blood splattered all over me was, why the hell did I wear my light blue denim jacket instead of my expendable black denim jacket, knowing goddamn well some shit like this was probably going to happen… And then I remember thinking, man, that is soooo freaky, bloody fucking smells, man, it smells like how multivitamins taste, if you’ve ever had the misfortune of having to chew one up. It’s that same grody sort of barftastic metalloid anti-taste… And then I remember thinking, whose goddamn blood is this anyway? And why do they have so much of it. And why’s this girl screaming like a damn torture victim? And then more bam-bam-bam… And I saw the pick-axe before I saw the thing wielding it…My wherewithal kicked in and I gunned it, with the girl hanging either halfway out of the car or halfway in the car, depending on your perspective. Somebody somewhere started yelling, “Stop! . . Yo, man, STOP!”
~
I like to research new cryptids—new cryptids to me, at least—before I go slithering all over Biscuitville or wherever trying to find them. It was my own personal theory that any creature endowed with such a surly moniker as Goatman must emit a stench akin to that of a refrigerator-size stack of turds. And I little cursory internet research told me I was right.
“. . . And then I smelled something like burnt meat lovers’ pizza,” said one unfortunate anonymous soul who was unlucky enough to get within wafting distance of Goatman. “Like, really burnt. Like, you set the oven to eight hundred degrees, and you put the pizza in, plastic wrapper still on it and such, and then go upstairs and crawl into bed and konk out and stay that way ‘til the fire department or whoever shows up.”
Another anonymous person who had encountered Goatman was less specific. “One time I went campin’ with this buddy of mine who got real mad at his rubber boots because they weren’t fittin’ perhaps as comfortably as he would have liked, and, man, this ol’ boy starts pitchin’ a fit and callin’ his boots every curly syllable under the sun and moon and stars, and, make a long story short, he finally takes ‘em off and throws ‘em right in the middle of this big fire we had goin’ and, man, I tell you what, them burning boots smelt just like our mutual friend whose name I shalt not mention.”
“One time I ate a whole washbasin of homemade peanut grease—long story, lol—and my farts and burps smelled exactly like what I smelled right before I had my encounter with Goatman,” said another anonymous person who had had an encounter.
The internet is stuffed to the baleen with this variety of looney tunes esoterica concerning Goatman and his brethren.
The world has no shortage of Goatman theorists, and many of them are crazier than a sprayed roach.
“Well, Goatman’s genes are pretty much split right down the middle,” said one self-proclaimed Goatman expert via email correspondence. “Fifty percent goat, fifty percent man. You ever seen that movie The Fly? Cronenberg flick from the 80’s with what’s-his-nuts in in? That’s pretty much how it went down. Classic case of transmogrification gone awry and such.”
“I have been studying Goatman all my life,” said another, “and the only thing I can tell you for sure is that he’ll go friggin’ nutso on you if you call him Sheepboy.”
Another is more diplomatic with his theories. “See, Goatman really only has one natural predator, you know, besides good ol’ boys with hunting rifles, and that is the Chupacabra,” he said, responding to my queries via phone call. “You see, cabra means goat, and I’ll let you figure out the rest.”
“I’m pretty sure he’s just some sort of tulpa or manifestation that the Capricorns whipped up,” said another. “I mean, what else they got to do but stare at their savings accounts and gripe about born so close to Christmas, yuk-yuk-yuk.”
~
Okay, back in the car, huff, puff, huff, puff… Less blood, more guts, pretty please… Goatman was on my hood now, that was for sure. And he was doing a little equatorial wiggle like Manu Chao. Something landed in my lap that looks like a chicken gizzard. That’s when the weird girl stopped screaming and started laughing her head off.
“Ho-lee crap, man, you should see your face!” said the girl, smiling real big like a drunk hobo.
“I see my face multiple times daily, pretty much every day on the calendar.”
I pulled the car over, realizing that I had been pranked. The thing with the pick-axe, I was told, was her boyfriend wearing some type of kinkster onesie, and the pick-axe had Fisher written down one side of it and Price written down the other side. The blood had really been blood, but it was deer blood and not people blood.
Okay, lesson learned, don’t roll into town and start treating other people’s cryptids like a box of ten dollar shark jerky at some beachfront tourist trap. Be sensible and courteous and discreet with your inquiries. Hotcha, hotcha.
~
Once you are fully submerged in the realm of the outré, be it the supernatural and paranormal or UFO’s or cryptids or the whole creepy loaf, it is difficult to extract yourself. I have seen men lose their minds and never recover them. Once while fishing for bass in the C&O Canal near the DC/Maryland border, I happened upon a man swatting at invisible mosquitos and yelling at the sky like it owed him money.
“I know you’re up there, you son of a biscuit eater!” he was saying, teeth bared.
Against my better judgement I approached him and asked him with whom he was conversating.
“I’m talking to GOD, man! . . Only it ain’t God. It’s some capricious thing that don’t care about you or me or any other bag-of-bones on the planet! It’s playing with us, man, I’m telling you, it’s just playing with us.”
I saw nothing in the sky aside from a few busted-up city birds.
“I don’t think he’s up there, brother. Maybe try him back later.”
The man ignored me and accelerated his insults. I abandoned my inquest and reengaged my fishing rod.
~
If a cute little dog is found sans head and mangled beyond belief in Act 1, it sure as hell better be blamed on an upright humanoid monster by Act 3. This is the general rule of cryptid lore. Fact is, though, the Goatman legend appears to have indeed started with a family pooch named Ginger who had the misfortune of having its head detached from its body, and nothing will stir up the human imagination like a mutilated dog. Skeptics say Ginger was probably hit by a passing car or train, but others believed the dog met its maker by way of a more sinister means, albeit an unlikely one.
Or is it?
Turns out that quite a few doggies in the area met equally gruesome fates, which gave strength to the Goatman theory.
And then of course, there have been Goatman sightings by the denizens of Prince George’s County and environs. Bigfoot-like creature, but with horns, seven to eight feet tall, three hundred pounds, says one account. Ditto, ditto, but twelve feet tall, says another. It does appear that something has been slinking around farms and golf courses and patches of wilderness just east of Washington, DC.
Some folks believe Goatman is a classic case of transmogrification gone haywire at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center: man does experiment with goats, man presses wrong button, man emerges from laboratory looking like half the Halloween section at Target, et cetera, et cetera.
~
Months after my adventures in Beltsville, I did a little sortie to the Governor’s Bridge, a hundred-plus-year-old truss bridge located in the middle of a Tim Burton-esque mire about ten miles east of the District line in Bowie, Maryland. The Governor’s Bridge is one of several bridges around the area where Goatman allegedly conducts his creepy business.
Even though it was deep December, I still took my fishing rod as a sort of pretense prop for skulking around the woods. Generally the people that live outside of Washington, DC do so because of their steadfast animosity for other people, and I did not want to be mistaken for a burglar or passing Satanist. I also took it because I knew for a fact people pull pickerel out of the Patuxent River all twelve months a year.
The road to the Governor’s Bridge was blocked off by some graffiti-covered concrete barriers about a quarter of a mile from the actual bridge, so I parked the car in a nearby nature reserve and continued the trek on foot. Beyond the barriers the road became overgrown with grass and weeds and old spindly trees. It basically looked like what happens if Poison Ivy defeats Batman and you don’t insert more tokens.
I approached the bridge, which to my dismay was accessorized with a couple of fishermen—a stubby guy and a tall skinny guy…
“Aye, man, any luck?” said the skinny one, chomping his brains out on a Swisher Sweets cigar.
“Not yet, brother. I just pulled up,” I said, casting into the river. The Patuxent was about twenty yards wide and maybe three feet deep; more of a creek than a river but still plenty fishable. “How about you guys?”
“Oh, a couple of itty bitties and that’s about it.”
We stood there fishing in silence for a little bit. One of the dudes was humming Le Marseillaise.
I cleared my throat and said, “I hear this bridge has a bit of mystery surrounding it.”
“Yeah, but it’s all bullhonky,” said the stubby one. “I’ve been coming out here and exploring these woods since I was old enough to dress myself and I ain’t never seen nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Same here,” said the skinny one. “I bet I’ve boinked thirty different girls under this bridge, all without incident.”
Sure, there’s a sucker born every minute, but a million shiny new killjoys come squirting out of their mothers every three point five seconds.
I said adios to the two dudes and worked my way down the shore for a little while, casting about, occasionally rubbernecking at the woods around me. Man, there was not an honest-to-God fish anywhere in this river… Whoa. I heard the distinct crunch-crunch-crunch sound of someone walking through a forest during the late autumn or winter. Or maybe not? Nothing nowhere… There. A few prissy deer, running—but from what?
I got the spook mumps so I began working my way back toward the bridge. The fishermen were gone. The road seemed impossibly more desolate than it was a slender hour ago on the way out here. And yet I felt like I was being very intently watched. I had read enough Oliver Sacks to know there is no more mischievous critter on the planet than the human brain—especially one out in the woods by its lonesome… A brand new bugger of a thought ambushed me: I had become dreadfully obvious to me that there was zero point zero chance the car would still be in the parking lot of the nature reserve where I had left it… But why? And where would it be now? There was no reason for it to be towed. And it was a very difficult car to break into, I knew from experience . . .
I got to the nature reserve. The car was there, just as I had left it.
Well, almost just as I’d left it.
There was a note on it, under the windshield wiper, midnight blue ink, penmanship in three different time zones…
You park like Goatman smells, you dipshit commie spinster!
It was no prize-winning parking job, no doubt about it, nor was it offensive enough to merit a malice-sodden handwritten note… I held the note closer to my face, inspecting it… I had seen this cryptic handwriting before, with its insolent slant and buggy undulations . . .
Damn, man. No way . . .
That feeling of intently being watched heated up again so I swiveled around real fast. Not a thing anywhere. No birds or squirrels, even… I reexamined the note and the handwriting upon it. Yeah, no way, man…
To confirm my awful little hunch, I took my Cross Townsend rollerball pen out of the left pocket of my jeans, flipped the note over, and wrote down a single four-syllable word…
Doppelganger.
The penmanship was identical.
Well, heck.
I checked the backseat and the trunk… Nope, no stowaways. I guess the other me just wanted to top off his big full day of doing nothin’ by leaving me a little passo-aggro note to freak my out and then skip off to wherever. All this reminded me of an old saying (that I created and curated, myself) . . .
Life is short, revenge is long.
The author contemplates the difference between rocks and pebbles while visiting the Governor Bridge in the belly button of Goatman Country.
Bowie, MD
~
