A contemporary monster that is interesting to me is a creature known as a Goatman, which, as the name suggests, is a half-man half-goat hybrid. It’s categorized as a cryptid, like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, and there are different, distinct legends surrounding it depending on where the story takes place. Goatman legends have sprung up in Maryland, Louisiana, and two locations in Texas, but the most intriguing to me is the origin of the Goatman that supposedly resides on the Old Alton Bridge which connects Denton and Copper Canyon, Texas. It’s said that there was a man named Oscar Washburn, who was a black goat farmer living in the now-defunct town of Alton, Texas during the late 1930s. He ran a very successful business, but not everyone was happy about this, including several Klansmen who decided to take matters into their own hands. They kidnapped Oscar and attempted to hang him from the Old Alton Bridge, but when looked down to see if the goat farmer was dead, he was nowhere to be found. According to local legend, the Goatman will appear on the bridge if you cross after dark without lights, you may be grabbed or touched, and objects may be thrown at you.

This particular story of a Goatman parallels the idea from Cohen’s “Thesis IV: The Monster Dwells at the Gate of Difference.” This thesis states that monsters are born out of fear and intolerance for people who are unlike you. Out of all the differences between human beings, Cohen notes that race has played a large role in the creation of monsters: “From the classical period into the twentieth century, race has been almost as powerful a catalyst to the creation of monsters as culture, gender, and sexuality. Africa early became the West’s significant other, the sign of its ontological difference simply being skin color. […] These differences were quickly moralized through a pervasive rhetoric of deviance. Paulinus of Nola, a wealthy landowner turned early church homilist, explained that the Ethiopians had been scorched by sin and vice rather than by the sun, and the anonymous commentator to Theodulus’s influential Ecloga (tenth century) succinctly glossed the meaning of the word Ethyopium: ‘Ethiopians, that is, sinners. Indeed, sinners can rightly be compared to Ethiopians, who are black men presenting a terrifying appearance to those beholding them.’” (Cohen 10) Prejudice based on race (as well as other social categorizations like religion and sexuality) creates monsters out of entire groups of people and this is seen in the legend of the Goatman on the Old Alton Bridge. The legend quite literally demonizes a black man, turning him from a respectable member of his community into an animal hybrid with evil intentions. This legend could represent a white person’s feelings towards black men at the time the story was created, possibly a fear that black members of their community might turn on them. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know the reasoning behind the Goatman legend because no one knows how it got started. This leads me to the question of how fears and anxieties turn into monsters? Are the writers who create monsters aware of what their creatures symbolize or can that only be realized upon reflection?