Goatmen and Satyrs

The recent Texas conference on the Goatman (see Nick Redfern’s report) reminded me of all the other Goatmen and Satryrs tales I’ve heard down through the years. Goatmen stories have been told in cryptid circles from such high profile locations as Maryland-Virginia, near Washington D. C., and thirty years ago, from near Lincoln, Nebraska.A few years ago, I was on a radio station out of Bangor, Maine, and the hosts were discussing stories they had been told by their parents of a “hoofed horror” from the woods up in the County. But tales sometimes are merely foggy remembrances of clouded memories of attempts to keep kids in line, and only vaguely are based in reality, of course.

Nevertheless, I still remain surprised by Mark A. Hall’s 2005 attempt to categorize such sightings in a way that might be better understood. A hard pill to swallow perhaps, I thought, but at least worthy of being open-minded and reading about them. I’m not denying there’s a body of these reports, now what do we do about them?You can find a definition for “Satyrs” in the sense of rethinking that Mark A. Hall is doing, at his Glossary of Living Fossils.

“Satyrs - A form of ape related to the Yetis. Their extraordinary physical capabilities have caused them to be called ‘goat-men’ out of a mistaken perception of their mode of locomotion….See ‘The Satyrs in Our Midst’ in Wonders for September 2005.”

Hall’s article is in Volume 9, No. 3 of his now-hard-to-find Wonders, and he did nicely pull together all the scattered reports in one place.

In 2005, I was at the Texas Bigfoot conference, being interviewed by a red-headed young man with a XL-1 video camera named Todd Partain. He was in the midst of shooting his documentary, Eyes In The Dark, about the eye glow experiences of field researchers, his own childhood experiences, and the veil of isolation and ridicule society imposes on cryptozoology. Sounded like a good project, so I did the interview, signed his release, and we began to say good-bye, as I began to move on to another conference activity. But Todd stopped me in my tracks.

Off camera, post-interview and casually, Todd froze me with a simple question…”Have you ever heard of people seeing a Satyr?” I thought, now that’s an interesting cryptid name to use with me right now, considering what I had just re-read Hall’s work on the plane. Yes, I said, I’d heard about something like that, what did he mean, I asked him. He then briefly told me about a “thing” he’d heard about from Louisiana, his home state. Todd wasn’t aware of Mark’s article, and sent me the details after I returned home. Needless to say, I’ve done some more wondering about this whole subject.

So, for Halloween from 2005, here is Todd Partain’s account, which he gave me permission to share with you...

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