The Gallup Goatman

And Other Weird Manimals of the Southwest…

The Allen Plaster photo of the Lake Worth Monster (1969). Honestly, it looks a lot like a Hoth wampa, or maybe something you’d find on Sesame Street.

Here’s the thing: when you start nosing around in the stranger and less-visited corners of the American West, you expect to come across things that don’t fit neatly in your mental checkbox of what ought to be in a well-ordered universe.

Bigfoots, UFOs, portals to another time or dimension, maybe a lingering dinosaur, or even a stray Batsquatch or two…yes, I’d say these things are par for the course.

Every so often, though, you hear about something that’s truly out there—I mean really weird.

Not the usual kind of weird, mind you, but the weird that makes you wonder what the hell is really going on, and whether we’ve all strayed into some new epoch in human history in which high strangeness is the norm—like it was in the old, old days before things like AI, SpaceX rockets, computers and internet, smartphones and satellites and TikTok and Substack and all these other newfangled inventions.

More like the days when magic and forgotten gods and strange, part-human, part-animal creatures roamed the earth.

For instance, take the curious rumors of the so-called “Gallup Goatman”…at least, that’s what I’m choosing to call it. I guess it doesn’t rightly have a proper name, but that seems to be as good an epithet as any. These rumors have been circulating for the past year or so, and they’re hard to pin down.

But as the story goes, there are some folks in the town of Gallup, New Mexico, who claim to have seen what can only be called a kind of “goatman,” a half-man and half-goat chimera, something the ancient Greeks or Romans might have called aegipans or fauni, or even satyrs or silenoi. The point is, people say the Gallup Goatman appears of dark nights, lurking near the underpasses or around homeless encampments, or digging around the trash in dumpsters.

So far as we know, he hasn’t harmed anyone yet; but those who claim to have seen him say he’s an imposing and menacing figure, and more than capable of holding his own against any human being—and maybe more than capable of inflicting fatal damage. So, for all we know, the Gallup Goatman may very well be implicated in some of the mysterious disappearances and missing persons cases in the area…

The town of Gallup lies well out in the western part of New Mexico, not far at all from the Arizona border; it’s sometimes known as the “Heart of Indian Country,” or the “Indian Capital of the World,” as it’s a sort of natural crossroads between the Dinétah, the Hopi Mesas, and the Zuni Pueblo. Gallup is known for the El Rancho Hotel, the Perry Null Trading Co.—famous for its fine Indian jewelry—and an absolutely bewildering assortment of restaurants for a town of its size.

Gallup, in short, is the typical sort of mid-sized metropolis you’d expect to find on I-40, smack in the middle between Albuquerque and Flagstaff; it’s also the last place you’d expect to find something as weird and terrifying as a night-prowling goatman. But maybe it’s not so surprising after all—Gallup used to be transected by Highway 666, renamed in 2003 to Route 491, and for obvious reasons.

Hell, you can change the name all you want, but the legacy remains; perhaps it makes a certain kind of sense that this town on a highway bearing the Number of the Beast has come to be haunted by the spitting image of Old Scratch himself.

The story of the Gallup Goatman reminds me of the “Lake Worth Monster.” This was a fascinating cryptid that appeared all the way back in the summer of 1969, during a cluster of bizarre sightings at the eponymous lake near Fort Worth, Texas. The first report of the creature was registered at the Fort Worth police station on July 10, where a badly-shaken man by the name of John Reichart poured out a terrifying tale.

In short, Reichart—together with his wife and several friends—was parked near Lake Worth at about midnight, when…well, a huge something leapt out of a nearby tree and onto his car. The thing was manlike, and was said to be covered in both scales and fur; weirdest of all, it resembled a kind of man-goat hybrid. The police investigated, but to no avail; they did find, however, a massive, eighteen-inch scratch or claw-mark on Reichart’s car, which still remains unexplained.

The story was picked up by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, prompting the evocative headline: “Fishy Man-Goat Terrifies Couples Parked at Lake Worth.” Naturally, this garnered no small amount of local attention, and would-be witnesses streamed into the Lake Worth Nature Center, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mysterious “Man-Goat.” One of these hopefuls was Jack Harris, who saw the creature crossing the road in front of him almost twenty-four hours after Reichart’s bizarre encounter.

A gaggle of cryptid sightseers saw the monster at almost the same time; shortly afterward, a couple of sheriff’s deputies appeared on the scene as well, and testified to witnessing the weird goatman. What happened next, however, was proof that there was nothing shy and retiring about the Lake Worth Monster: a few of the witnesses made as if to approach the menacing manimal, prompting the thing to heft a spare tire in its immense arms and hurl it at the unwelcome interlopers. The ensuing panicked flight was more than enough to cover the creature’s subsequent escape.

There were other sightings in the following weeks and months. One good ol’ boy by the name of Jim Stephens, together with two friends, drove out one night to see for himself if they could find the monster; instead, it found them, jumping onto the hood of Jim’s car, and remaining there until he unhappily collided with a tree. Jim thought the beast was at least seven feet tall if it was an inch.

There’s even a genuine photo of the Lake Worth Monster, taken in October of 1969 by one Allen Plaster, which seems to show a large, white-furred and vaguely humanoid creature doing its best impression of the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot.

The last sighting of the cryptid occurred about a month later, when it was seen swimming across Lake Worth to Greer Island, where, presumably, it must have entered an inter-dimensional or inter-temporal doorway and returned to whatever half-mythical place or time it had come from…for it was never seen again.

Finally, I’ll return to the Dinétah, the Navajo Nation, very close to where we began, for a last story about some of the strange “manimals” to be encountered in the American West. This sighting apparently took place on the vast Black Mesa that borders Hopiland to the north. For anyone who’s been to Kayenta, just south of Monument Valley, or traveled to Tuba City and thence to the Hopi Mesas, you’ve probably seen the great dark rampart or escarpment of Black Mesa looming on the southern horizon.

And according to this weird tale—which comes to us courtesy of the website DarkStories.org—Black Mesa is also home to the “Navajo Horse-Walker.” The witness claims that while spending time on Black Mesa with a friend, they heard mysterious sounds, as of a horse, around their camp at night, and found hoof-prints near their tent the following morning.

The next night, they went for a walk and heard the sounds of the ghostly horse again. This time, however, they saw their mysterious visitant in the flesh:

“We approached the piñon cautiously before stopping dead in our tracks. In the moonlight, we could see what looked like a huge, bipedal horse step out from behind the piñon and into the moonlight.

No, this can’t be right…I’ve seen horses spar on nature specials, and I know they kind of go up on their hindquarters to box each other out for dominance, but this thing was literally walking on its back legs, just like a human. It cocked its head to the side and looked at us with what can only be described as a creepy smile. Something about this creature just seemed…evil. Its eyes didn’t look like a horse’s eyes at all, they were more like beady little buttons, shiny and black. The thing was at least 10 feet tall, and the more we studied it, the more I could see that it really looked more like a human wearing a horse’s head than an actual horse, but the legs were those of a horse, and I could even see a tail hanging down behind it. The torso looked more like a human, with a strong chest and arms with human hands on them. I couldn’t tell if it was wearing a pelt or if the skin was natural, but it had Navajo-style tattoos covering the chest and torso. It also appeared to be wearing some kind of turquoise jewelry around its neck and wrists.

It huffed again and started walking toward us. We freaked and ran as fast as we could, I tripped and turned around to see this horse-like creature lunging at me, trying to grab me with its creepy little hands. I tried to kick it off me when it opened its mouth and I could see what can only be described as vampire fangs with which it was trying to use to bite me. I rolled over to the side and it snapped at the air. I threw some dirt in its face and sprinted back to the tent.”

The creature menaced the two men for some time, before they heard a gunshot followed by the sound of galloping hooves receding in the distance. They were then hailed by their Navajo host, who calmly explained that the two had angered a spirit, and that it had sought to drive them off the land. The man had remedied the situation, and saved the two would-be victims, by chasing the spirit away with a bullet dipped in ashes.

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The sun sets over Navajo country.

Verdict: Now all this talk of “goatmen” and “horse-walkers” has got me to wondering just what is lurking out there in the desert Southwest.

The Lake Worth Monster is an outlier, I’ll willingly grant that. It appeared only once, for a brief period of time, in that eventful summer of ’69; most witnesses claimed it resembled a kind of goatman, but the photo and other descriptions evoke comparisons to a regional Bigfoot of some sort. As for the talk of scales…well, who knows? Perhaps the Lake Worth Monster stepped out of the fertile imagination of some excitable young people; or maybe it was conjured by the collective unconscious of a nation that had just landed a man on the moon, and was looking ahead to even greater exploits and stranger discoveries in the future.

Hell, maybe it was just some joker in a costume.

Or maybe it came to pay us a visit for a while, stepping through a door or rift in the fabric of spacetime, hailing from a remote future or an equally remote past, or even from another dimension altogether. If so, I can understand why he was so angry and aggressive, aggrieved as he must have been at the dismal thought of being stranded amongst such savage creatures as we humans…or, well, Texans at any rate.

All I can say is that I hope the Lake Worth Monster found its way back home again.

As for the Gallup Goatman and the Navajo Horse-Walker of Black Mesa? That’s a different story altogether. These creatures are seen on the Dinétah, or close to it, and—as I’ve explained aforetime—that is a place where high strangeness is simply a fact of life, what with all the skinwalkers, sasquatches, goatmen and horse-walkers, Night Stalkers, griffins and centaurs, the Newcomb Howler, furry children, and even supernatural dinosaurs.

Maybe these monsters are merely the denizens of the “invisible world,” spirits or elementals that the Diné are uniquely prepared to apprehend in a way that the rest of us are not—even if, once upon a time, we or our ancestors could.

Maybe.

What I will say is this: if you’ve a notion to visit the Black Mesa on the Navajo Nation, you’d do well to keep a bullet dipped in ashes on your person, and beware the sound of a mysterious, lonely horse at night. And if you spend any time in Gallup, stay away from the underpasses and dumpsters after sunset…which is sound advice at any time, but especially when there’s a goatman on the prowl.