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).

Lee Brickley’s British Cryptids: Bigfoot, Werewolves and the Pig-Man

Blimey chaps! To celebrate the king’s coronation, we’re ‘avin’ a gander at two books from me mate, Lee Brickley, a paranormal researcher from England, innit?

On the Hunt for the British Bigfoot

I don’t think Sasquatch exists. The Pacific Northwest has some of the biggest forests in the world, but people go into these forests every day, and everyone has had a camera on their phones for at least 10 years now. There’s no proof, and the likelihood of proof showing up becomes less and less likely every day. I sincerely hope I am wrong about this, but I doubt we’ll ever find Bigfoot.

Lee Brickley is a paranormal researcher from England. He wrote a book about the British Bigfoot. He claims this creature lives in Cannock Chase. Cannock Chase is a 26 square mile forest in the West Midlands of England. This book recounts several incidents that Brickley and others had with the beast.

Most of these incidents happened within a couple of years of each other, and nearly all of them happened at night. One witness literally claims that the beast looked like “some huge bloke in a monkey costume”, and when Brickley saw the beast himself, a feeling of awe overtook him and he forgot to take out his camera to take a picture… sure.

Brickley claims that he has a frozen footprint in his freezer and that a sample he found in the forest was taken by a shady government agency too.

This is one of the least convincing books I have ever read. I understand that an author choosing to write about topics like this shouldn’t get too wrapped up in pandering to sceptics, but there has to be more evidence than this. It really seems like that author’s motivation for writing this book was his desire to write a book about an English bigfoot. He doesn’t seem to have been concerned with making what he says believable.

Again, Cannock Chase covers 26 square miles. The Rocky Mountains, where Sasquatch is supposed to reside, cover well over 38,000 square miles. If you’re going to try to show that there’s a Bigfoot in the former, you’re going to need something more convincing than an Elvis impersonator claiming he saw a hairy face in his window.

UFOs, Werewolves & the Pig-man

This book was writen a few years before the Bigfoot one. It’s a more general look at the reports of odd disturbances at Cannock Chase. It’s easier to accept some of what’s written here as the reported incidents being discussed occurred over a much longer time frame, and they’re not all the about the same thing. None of them are particularly convincing, but they seem less like lies than the Bigfoot claims.

This book features aliens, giant cats and snakes, ghosts, werewolves, demons and underground government tunnels. It almost reads like a proposal for a season of a shitty British version of the X-Files.

“This shit’s about to get really weird.”
Lee Brickley

The above is actually a quote from the book that introduces its most intriguing section, the chapter on the Pig-Man of Cannock Chase. Apparently some twisted scientists during the Second World War were messing with genetic engineering and got a woman pregnant with sperm that had been riddled with pig DNA. She didn’t show any signs of pregnancy for a while, but a year and a half later she gave birth to a half-man, half-pig creature and abandoned her job and family to live with her mutant offspring in the woods. She supposedly died a few years later, but the pig man lived on. The author heard this story from a waiter in a local restaurant.

There is far space in the book given to the pigman’s background story than there is on his sightings. One of the three people who claim to have seen the pigman was a teenager. He claims he was out at night when a naked man who looked a bit like a pig started chasing him. It was probably just Prince Andrew.

Again, nothing in this book was remotely convincing. The author seems to have written it for people who are willing to completely suspend critical thought. I’m sure these books were fun to write, but I honestly can’t imagine anyone taking them seriously.

The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui – Affleck Gray

The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui – Affleck Gray

Impulse Books – 1970

In 1891, a hiker had a creepy experience while climbing Ben MacDhui, one of the highest mountains in Scotland. He was pottering alone when he heard footsteps approaching him from behind. When he turned around, there was nobody there. He didn’t tell many people until 1925. After this, other climbers who noticed strange happenings while climbing Ben MacDhui came forward. In this book, Affleck Gray, a Scottish mountaineer and historian, collects every single iota of public discussion of the mysterious mountain and the Ferla Mor.

Ferla Mor comes from Fear Liath Mor, Scottish for Big Grey Man (technically “man grey big”). This is the name given to the phenomenon. Apparently people have seen a giant grey man walking around up there. It seems pretty likely that these sightings could have been the Brocken spectre, a spectral phenomenon that makes an observer’s shadow look like a giant. I’ve come across mentions of the Brocken Spectre before when reading books about bigfoot or the yeti, and it definitely could account for visions of a big grey man in the mountains.

It’s not just big shadowy men that people have encountered up this mountain though. Several people have heard creepy music and sinister footsteps. Members of the Aetherius society claimed that the mountain was used as an alien base, and some nutty spiritualists claimed that the Fear Liath Mor was actually a Buddhist master. Is this lad supposed to be a Sasquatch, a ghost, an alien or a what? Another witness claims to have seen a fox walking upright, wearing a top-hat… Yeah. When I said that Affleck Gray collected every iota of discussion of the weird stuff up this mountain, I was serious. I admire the comprehensive nature of this work, but it’s this exact feature of the book that makes it unbelievable. This is a collection of folklore more than anything else. The author never really tries to convince the reader that anything specific is going on, and this is the book’s saving grace.

Some of the chapters feel like filler. There is a big discussion on the possibility of life on other planets that has very little bearing on the rest of the book, and there’s an unreadable chapter on ley-lines. Things get a bit repetitive towards the end of the book too, but it’s fairly short, so it’s not unbearable.

There’s been a few editions of this book. I believe the first one came out in 1970. There is also an ebook available from Birlinn Press.

I’m not convinced that anything particularly weird has happened on this particular mountain. A surprising amount of the book is taken up with discussions on stuff that happened on other mountains. Mountains are weird places though. I think that a mountainside is the perfect place for a person to get a bit freaked out when they’re on their own, and I only wish that I had the opportunity to do so myself. I live fairly close to some mountains, but they’re full of bears and wolves and I’d get eaten within minutes. Ben Macdhui looks like it’s fairly close to Loch Ness and Aleister Crowley’s old house, so I’ll try and get over there once I’ve made my fortune.

Kelleher and Knapp’s Hunt for the Skinwalker

Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah
Colm A. Kelleher Ph.D., and George Knapp
Paraview Pocket Books – 2005

In the mid 1990s, a family claimed that they had witnessed a bunch of weird stuff (UFOs, sasquatches, poltergeist activity, werewolves…) on their ranch. They convinced a right-wing millionaire to buy their ranch so that he could study the phenomena. He spent millions of dollars hiring a bunch of scientists to study the ranch. After several years of observation, the scientists had absolutely zero proof of anything remotely weird happening there.

This book is an attempt to justify all of the time and money that were wasted on this project.

I started off enjoying this. It begins with a giant, bullet-proof wolf prowling around the ranch and soon suggests that the weird stuff that is happening may be being caused by the souls of a bunch of Buffalo-soldier freemasons whose graves had been disturbed by a tribe of Native Americans. I’ve read so much fiction recently that it was very easy for me to suspend disbelief and enjoy the narrative here for its weirdness.

Unfortunately, the Hunt for the Skinwalker soon devolves into the same anti-science rhetoric that I’ve encountered so many times in books about this kind of nonsense. Modern science is too close-minded to reveal anything meaningful about the paranormal. My hole. Honestly, this book was so dumb that I feel absolutely zero desire to try to counter its claims. It’s too stupid to take seriously.

The authors had so little to go on that much of the book is actually taken up with chapters about other places where spooky events have occurred. At one point this book references the work of Tom Dongo. I had a good laugh seeing him listed as a source. The authors here also include testimony from people who remotely-viewed the ranch and sensed a bad presence.

Also, only a small part of the book discusses skinwalkers. Skinwalkers are a kind of evil Native American witchdoctor that can shapeshift. The book concludes that skinwalkers are likely to blame because the authors don’t have any better explanation.

This book is garbage. If you have a copy and haven’t read it, don’t waste your time. Tear it up and use it to make a poo sandwich instead.

Norman Bogner’s Snowman

I started Snowman because i wanted something short. After reading the first few chapters and realising this was a novel about a team of Native Americans and Vietnam veterans hunting a yeti who attacks a ski lodge, I considered giving up. Thomas Page’s The Spirit was based on an almost identical premise, and I wasn’t a huge fan of that book.

Things picked up a bit as I kept reading. The main bigfoot hunter here is called away from a weird drug cult he has started on a Native American reservation, and he’s armed with miniature nuclear weapons. The bigfoot in question is also really, really big, and he’s half-dragon. Yes. He has heat rays and sparks come out of his mouth.

Honestly, this book was entertaining enough when I got into it, but realistically, it’s drivel. There’s a whole bunch of subplots and ideas that go absolutely nowhere. There are some cool bits, but Bogner didn’t seem to understand that these ridiculously over the top elements are the only thing that make the book enjoyable. Too much of the book is filler. Why the fuck would I want a chapter on a love interest in a book in which a peyote munching wacko melts a fire-breathing yeti’s arm off with a tiny nuclear warhead shot from a crossbow at the top of a mountain? I think Bogner should have played up the trashier elements, maybe added a some wheelies, laserbeam and guitar solos.

This book was like airplane food, unappealing at first, but tolerable after the first few bites. It also gave me diarrhea.

James Howard Kunstler’s The Hunt

The Hunt – James Howard Kunstler

Tor Books – 1988

Billy, a pathetic frigid, invites cool dude R.J. on a camping trip to find bigfoot. The back cover of the book suggests that he is really inviting R.J. so that he can kill him, but this isn’t actually what the book is about. The thought of harming his friend does pass through his head when they’re on the camping trip, but only as a passing fancy.

The two lads eventually run into a gang of Bigfoot (bigfeet?), and they manage to kill one of the beasts. Unfortunately, on their way home, R.J. gets hit by a car and their bigfoot corpse gets lost in the woods.

There are a few other little bits and pieces going on in this story, but that’s the basic plot. Let me tell you why it’s stupid.

There’s too much character development for this kind of book. Billy is a little incel nerd, and he’s clearly extremely jealous of R.J. There’s a lot of backstory here, and it’s probably the most entertaining part of the book. But this is supposed to be a violent horror novel about bloodthirsty bigfeet, not a soap opera. Sure, we know why Billy is jealous of his friend, but we have no idea why he decides to try to catch a bigfoot. The revenge/jealousy part of the book has nothing to do with the Bigfoot part.

The ending is a cop-out. Yes, Billy still has the photos of the bigfoot, but by the end, I didn’t give a shit about that part of the book. I wanted to know if he was going to kill R.J. or not. That’s the story this book is set up to tell. R.J. getting hit by a car is a painful deus ex machina.

There are a few bits with bloodthirsty bigfeet, but they take up maybe 2 of the 200 or so pages of this utterly shit book. The book is called The Hunt, but “The Awkward Camping Trip” would be a far more appropriate title. (As a matter of fact, the original title of this book was “Bagging Bigfoot”. I once read a book called “Boffing Bigfoot“.)

This book tries to do several things, but it fails at all of them. Avoid this rubbish.

The First Wave of Valancourt’s Paperbacks from Hell

Last year, Valancourt books teamed up with Grady Hendrix and Will Errickson to reissue some of the better books featured in Paperbacks From Hell. After reading Paperbacks from Hell, I made a list of the books featured therein that I thought sounded cool and tried to hunt them down. Some of the books I read were amazing, but some were utter shit. In truth, I wasn’t super excited when the Valancourt reissues series was announced. My experience with “Paperbacks from Hell” had been pretty varied, and none of the books in Valancourt’s series had the Devil or a guitar on the cover. However, soon after the series was announced, I bought a cheap copy of The Tribe in a used bookstore. I read it soon thereafter and was so impressed that I knew I’d have to read the rest of these books.

the reaping bernard taylor The Reaping – Bernard Taylor
Originally published 1980

This was a very entertaining novel. The writing is excellent, and I found it difficult to put down once I got a few chapters in. The sense of mystery that Taylor develops is awesome, and my only complaint about the book is that it’s too short. I reckon you’re better off not knowing anything about this one, so I won’t give any plot details. I will recommend that you pick it up if you get the chance. Valancourt have put out a few more books by Taylor, and I am looking forward to reading more of his stuff.

whendarknesslovesus valancourt

When Darkness Loves Us – Elizabeth Engstrom
Originally published 1985

Woah, I wasn’t expecting this. Don’t let the doll on the cover of this fool you. This is kick in the bollocks horror.

This is actually a collection of two novellas. The first one, When Darkness Loves Us, is about a woman who gets trapped in a cave. A few months ago, I read an utterly awful novel about a bunch of kids getting stuck in a cave, and this story puts that one to shame. This is twisted horror. Engstrom doesn’t rely on a spooky monster to frighten her reader; she uses the frailty and shortcomings of humanity.

The next story, Beauty is…, was a little harder to get into for me. The protagonist is a victim of brain damage, and I didn’t want to read about anything bad happening to her. Again, I don’t want to give away details here, but I will say that this turned out far darker than I had expected.

This was a good collection. Engstrom’s horror is unsettling, but I enjoyed the ride.

the nest douglas

The Nest – Gregory A. Douglas
Originally published 1980

The Nest was incredible. Excluding Cujo, the only ‘animal attacks’ horror novel I had read before this was the underwhelming yet ludicrous Fleshbait. My complaint with that novel was that it never went far enough, always shying away from a potentially gory good bit. I can only say the opposite of The Nest. There were a few scenes here where things probably went too far, gloriously grisly scenes of visceral carnage. This book had me squirming every time I sat down with it. Cockroaches are fucking gross at the best of times, and they are particularly frightening after developing a taste for human meat. I consumed this one in audiobook format, and each night I would sit up alone listening to it with all the lights off. This was an excellent way of making myself feel uncomfortable. I thoroughly recommend this book.

the spirit thomas page

The Spirit – Thomas Page
Originally Published 1977

I got around to The Spirit last, and this was a bit unfortunate. Of the series, this is the one I enjoyed least. It’s about a killer sasquatch, and unfortunately I had only finished reading Jack Kewaunee’s Psychic Sasquatch book a few days before picking this up. I was well and truly sick of Sasquatches before I even started this one. It’s nowhere near the worst horror novel I’ve ever read, but I just didn’t enjoy it as much as the others in this series.

the tribe bari wood valancourt

The Tribe – Bari Wood
Originally published 1981

I actually reviewed The Tribe for a different post last year. It was great. I loved it.

This post covers only the first wave of this series, but by now Valancourt have put out a second wave and a bonus title. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of this awesome collection. You may have noticed that I’ve been reviewing a lot of books from Valancourt recently. This publisher specializes in underappreciated horror novels, and they have been doing some pretty spectacular promotional offers recently. If you’re reading this blog, you’ll probably be impressed with their catalogue. Go buy some books from them and support this awesome publisher.

The Psychic Sasquatch and their UFO Connection – Jack “Kewaunee” Lapseritis

The Psychic Sasquatch and their UFO Connection
Jack “Kewaunee” Lapseritis
Wildflower Press – 1998

With a title like The Psychic Sasquatch and their UFO Connection, it was only a matter of time before this book ended up on this blog. Surprisingly, it’s actually more stupid than you’d expect it to be. The basic idea here is that Sasquatches are inter-dimensional beings that can use their minds to speak with people. The reason there are so few pictures of them is that they can go into a different dimension by vibrating their molecules whenever they need to avoid detection. Oh, and they were brought to Earth by aliens. (Oddly enough, this is not the first book to appear on this blog about this topic.)

alien sasquatch

Yup, this is a mad one. It’s more new-agey than I hoped it would be, and it has that whole ‘science is too close-minded to account for this phenomena’ vibe running through it that we’ve encountered a hundred times before. I’d hate to actually meet a person who believed this nonsense. (They’d almost definitely be white and dread-locked with a collection of crystals.)

There’s also a confusing amount of Christianity in here too. I laughed when I read the following line in one of the first chapters, “The next morning I was sitting on the front porch reading the Bible when Bigfoot arrived and began talking to me.” Kewaunee concludes the book with a denial of human evolution too. The Book of Genesis is literally true. A psychic Sasquatch told the author that aliens put Adam and Eve on Earth. The aliens later brought down other people – this explains how we have different races. The aliens had brought Sasquatches down here long before humans though. Oh, and dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans. The author references a bunch of books on ancient aliens to back this up.

sasquatch

The nature of the Sasquatches’ telepathy is hard to wrap your head around. Kewaunee tells the tale of a pregnant Sasquatch telepathing to a woman to ask her to ask Kewaunee to help deliver her baby Sasquatch because he was a “master herbalist”. (Her sasquatch family couldn’t help because they were visiting another dimension.)
Why she didn’t ask the author directly is unclear. Kewaunee was able to receive messages from other Sasquatches, and when the Sasquatch baby was eventually born, Kewaunee was able to telepath to the mother to congratulate her, so distance was not the issue.

Also, apparently telepathy can operate consciously and unconsciously. You can send messages to people’s minds without them knowing about it. The author describes a woman sending telepathic messages to her husband that he simultaneously noticed and didn’t notice. I found this part really hard to understand.

I don’t want to get too involved in trying to explain or debate the absolutely stupid nonsense in this book, so I’ll just share a few interesting tidbits of information that I gathered from it:

Aliens and Sasquatches have underground research facilities in the mountains that they let some people visit occasionally.
There’s an island on the Connecticut River that is inhabited by a tribe of 50 prehistoric humans. They are roughly 4 foot tall and too fast to catch or photograph.
Sasquatch only stink when they’re scared, like a skunk.
Mermaids are real, but if you capture one, the American government will take it off you and destroy all evidence that you had it.
Sasquatches can trade bodies with people and birds.
Despite what many Bigfoot hunters believe, the Sasquatch people are the observers here, not us. If we want to talk to them, we have to act nicely in the hopes that they’ll want to talk to us.
The author, a master herbalist, had a herniated disc in his back and liver cancer, but refused allopathic medicine. An alien doctor cured him.

Although this book was utterly ludicrous, it was also a serious pain to read. It’s very dense, very repetitive and very boring. I strongly recommend that you do not waste your time reading this foolish book of nonsense. Kewaunee has other books, but I probably won’t read them. Look him up on youtube though; he has a rather commendable mullet

Bigfoot: The Mysterious Monster – Robert and Frances Guenette

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Schick Sun – 1975
I’ve stated before that I think Bigfoot could exist. The purpose of this book is to make his existence seem more feasible, but after reading it, I feel a little more sceptical than I did beforehand. That’s not to say that it’s a bad book; some of the arguments in here are quite interesting. The issue is that it was published 40 years ago, and every day that has passed since its publication has added to the likelihood that Bigfoot is either imaginary or extinct. There are too many cameras in the world for him not to have been photographed clearly at this stage. It would be cool, but the fact that they could exist isn’t enough to convince me that they do exist.
The book is based on a film that you can easily find online, and much like The Outer Space Connection, both the book and movie cover the same material. (I’d recommend watching the film before trying to track down a copy of the book.) There’s not really much to say about the content; it’s pretty much what you’d expect. There wasn’t enough material on Bigfoot, so it includes a relatively big section on the Loch Ness monster, and there’s also a part where they tried to use a psychic’s testimony as evidence for the existence of these creatures. That bit was pretty stupid.

Mysteries of the Unknown – Time Life (Part One)

I didn’t want to review these until I had read all of them, but that will probably never happen. This is a 33 volume collection of books on the ‘mysteries of the unknown’. Some of the books are very cool, but a lot of them are extremely lame. (I’d say about half of them are about psychics.) They contain a nice mixture of essays and articles, and they’re all full of fancy pictures. It’s a really nice set to have, and I got mine for fairly cheap. I find that they’re quite good if you read them as primers before getting stuck into more difficult/older books on the same topics. I’m going to briefly review three of them today, and I’ll do some more in a few months. The full collection

Ancient Wisdom and Secret Sects

I read this one a good while ago. It’s probably the best introductory book on secret societies that I have read. That’s not saying much really, as I have only read three such books. What I am trying to say is that this is a far better introduction to secret societies than Arkon Daraul’s piece of shit. It goes into detail on the assassins, the masons, the Rosicrucians and the Golden Dawn. I thought it was pretty enjoyable.

This is some bullshitty Golden Dawn picture from the book. The bird at the bottom has serious attitude and the lad at the top is wearing a wiggy.

Speaking of the Golden Dawn, I went to the Yeats exhibition last time I was in Dublin, and I took some pictures of his occulting stuff. Here they are:

Sorry William, but that Angel is fucking lame.

Another notebook and some dodgy tarot cards.

Transformations

This one was pretty good too. It’s mostly about vampires and werewolves. It discusses the potential causes of vampirism and lycanthropy without getting too bullshitty. There was also a nice section on Vlad the Impaler, and it has lots of cool pictures, including this saucy snap of Theda Bara.
What a babe!

Mysterious Creatures

This one mainly focuses on Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. I like the fact that these books give fairly objective accounts: They don’t try to disprove anything, but they don’t feel bullshitty either. I don’t believe in the Loch Ness monster at all, but I do think that Bigfoot COULD exist.
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This lad also made a brief appearance. He is wrecked.

My lovely wife and I recently celebrated our wedding anniversary in Harrison, British Columbia. Harrison is a bigfoot hotspot and home to Sasquatch Park. We didn’t see one while we were there, but it’s a really nice place. I would definitely recommend going if you get the chance.
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