The Lake Worth Monster: the Greer Island Goatman, Fort Worth, 1969

In the summer of 1969, Greer Island was a place to park. The shore of Lake Worth, on the northwest edge of Fort Worth, Texas, was a popular night-time hangout. Today it lies inside the Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge. A police dispatcher said reports of "this thing" had been coming in for about two months. "We've always laughed them off as pranks."

Around midnight, 9 to 10 July 1969. John Reichart was fishing near Greer Island. His wife Linda sat in the car, reading. Then she screamed. In Lyle Blackburn's retelling, John turned to see "something moving around on top of the car, then it was on the ground next to the passenger window trying to get at Linda." He lunged at it and shoved it away.

The Reicharts and two other couples, six people in all, went to the police. They said they had been attacked by a thing "half-man, half-goat, and covered with fur and scales." It had leapt from a tree onto the car. John remembered it as massive, on two legs, with horns and white hair. Officer James S. McGee took the report. John showed him an 18-inch scratch down the side of the car. Reporter Jim Marrs broke the story in the Star-Telegram: "Fishy Man-Goat Terrifies Couples Parked at Lake Worth."

The next night, the lake filled with people. Crowds of up to about 200 gathered, TV crews among them. Almost forty people claimed to have seen the beast. They heard a disturbance and a loud scream. Then "a tire with a rim came flying 500 feet off that ridge." Onlookers saw "a 7-foot hairy creature running along the edge of the ridge." Some said it had horns, like a goat. Others saw scales, like a fish.

The sightings ran into November. That autumn, Allen Plaster photographed a large white shape in tall grass near the island. Newspapers published the Polaroid. On 7 November, Charles Buchanan said something pulled him out of his pickup. He stuffed a bag of chicken in its mouth. It swam towards Greer Island.

Fort Worth police searched the Lake Worth and Greer Island area. They found no evidence of the monster. One sergeant was less worried about the creature than about "all those people wandering around with guns." Marrs later said police questioned several Castleberry high-school students and found "a faceless gorilla outfit and mask." Tracks "too big for a man" were reported, along with dead sheep.

Hoax claims followed for decades. A 2005 anonymous letter to the Star-Telegram said the writer and two friends from North Side High School had used a gorilla suit and a tinfoil mask. In 2009 a man named Vinzens said he and friends had been rolling the tire when it hit a bump and went airborne. In 2006 Plaster himself concluded: "Whatever it was, it wanted to be seen. That was a prank." A kennel owner had also lost a macaque monkey that summer.

None of these claims has been verified. Sallie Ann Clarke, author of The Lake Worth Monster of Greer Island, claimed five sightings of her own. She offered a $5,000 reward for polygraph-backed proof of a hoax. No calls came. Craig Woolheater of the Texas Bigfoot Research Center called it "an undiscovered, uncataloged primate species."

Since 2009, the Nature Center has hosted the Lake Worth Monster Bash every October. In 2024 Blackburn published Lake Worth Monster: The True Story of the Greer Island Goatman. More than half a century on, Fort Worth still tells the story of its Goatman.