What the Hell is a Goatman?

Goatman: Flesh or Folklore? – J. Nathan Couch

Honestly, I had never heard of Goatman before seeing this book, and I was surprised to find that it’s not just something the author made up. Goatman is an American urban legend. He’s a half-man, half-goat freak that kills teenagers when they are making out in their cars. Some believe he was a genetic experiment gone wrong, but others believe that he was a dude who was wrongfully executed. His head popped off when he was hung, so he replaced it with a goat’s head and set out for revenge. Pretty cool.

This is obviously just a story that has no basis in reality. Nobody has ever had any proof that such a creature exists, and all sightings of such a creature have been sketchy and unbelievable. Despite this, J. Nathan Couch wrote a book that questions if such a creature could be real.

Things get ridiculous pretty quickly. The author questions if Goatman could be a satyr, a descendant of the Greek God Pan. Couch acknowledges that this seems unlikely, but he rolls with it anyway. In a way, I admire the author’s approach in this book. He leaves no stone unturned. He examines every piece of evidence and considers all possibilities. It’s still pretty silly though. In books about Bigfoot, there is nearly always a discussion on the possibility that the Bigfoot sighted was just a bear, a far more realistic scenario. In this book, there’s discussions on possibility that the Goatman was just a Bigfoot. Goatman can even talk in a few of the encounters described. Surely nobody actually believes in this?

Ultimately, Couch admits that Goatman is almost definitely just an urban legend. He claims that the stories may have originated from a real lad who used to travel around America with some goats. Even this seems pretty unlikely to be honest.

This book was clearly well researched, and while Couch discusses crazy ideas and unbelievable witness accounts, he doesn’t blindly accept them or present them as factual. This is a pretty good book on the Goatman phenomena. The problem is that the Goatman phenomena is really dumb (maybe a little less dumb than Pigman, but dumb nonetheless).