Remember the Lake Worth Monster? All about Fort Worth's summer of 1969 legend

July 10 marks another anniversary of the night Fort Worth lost its mind over a furry, scaly creature nobody could quite explain.

If you were around in the summer of 1969, you remember. The rest of the country had its eyes on the sky — Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were only days away from planting a flag on the moon. Kids were humming “My Cherie Amour.” “The Love Bug” was still packing theaters. Up in the Catskills, a farmer named Max Yasgur was getting his pasture ready for a little concert called Woodstock.

And here, the headline wasn’t Apollo 11. It was the Lake Worth Monster.

The night it began

According to the Star-Telegram’s own reporting on the Goatman phenomenon, the first sighting came on the night of July 9, 1969. Three couples parked out near Greer Island told police they’d been jumped by a thing that was half-man, half-goat, “covered with fur and scales.” Cops wrote it up. The paper ran it. And that was all it took.

The very next night, folks came back to the lake looking, and they found him again. Or he found them. A Sansom Park man named Jack E. Harris told a reporter the creature let out a “pitiful cry like something was hurting him,” then grabbed a spare tire — rim and all — and heaved it more than 500 feet at their cars.

Three hundred pounds, they said. Squalling and howling in the dark by Shoreline Road. That was enough. Fort Worth was hooked.

Goatmania hits town

By the middle of July, people were driving out to Lake Worth every single night. Not a few — hundreds. Fort Worth police had to station an officer near Greer Island just to direct traffic. One sergeant said what everyone was already thinking: he wasn’t so much worried about a monster as he was about all the people wandering around out there with guns.

Rick Pratt, then running the Greer Island Nature Center, remembered folks showing up with beer and wine, making a party of it. Guns, liquor, darkness and a 300-pound goat-man supposedly in pain. What could possibly go wrong on a Saturday night in 1969?

More than 70 people eventually claimed to have seen him. Reporters came in from New York and Los Angeles. Papers as far away as Europe ran the story. As Mike Nichols put it in his Star-Telegram piece, our monster was “a cryptid Kardashian” — famous for being famous, and getting more famous by the week.

A local sculptor carved his likeness. A Benbrook woman named Sallie Ann Clarke sat down and wrote a whole book about him, “The Lake Worth Monster of Greer Island, Ft. Worth, Texas.” She later admitted she hadn’t actually seen the creature when she wrote it — but said she’d seen him four times afterward.

The Polaroid

Then came the picture. On Nov. 19, 1969, Allen Plaster, a 22-year-old Fort Worth boutique owner, was driving west on Shoreline Road at 1:35 a.m. with two friends from Weatherford. He had a Polaroid camera in the car. Something white and furry stood up on the south side of the road, and he snapped it.

That blurry instant print — a giant white furball, somebody once called it a “monster labradoodle” — is just about the only physical evidence we’ve got. Plaster gave the Polaroid to Sallie Ann Clarke, and it lives on in her book.

Plaster himself lived a full Fort Worth life. He owned the House of Allen shops and later ran a pet store called Allen’s Ark, managed hotels, started a furniture company and worked as a bail bond agent. He passed in 2019.

But long before that, in a 2006 interview, he told the Star-Telegram what he’d come to believe. “When we drove by, it stood up,” he said. “Whatever it was, it wanted to be seen. That was a prank. That was somebody out there waiting for people to drive by. I don’t think an animal would have acted that way.”

The idea of a real monster, he said, was “silly.”

A clue hiding in the archives

Here’s the part that ought to make a longtime Star-Telegram reader smile. As Bud Kennedy laid out in his columns revisiting the legend, front-page columnist George Dolan had already tipped his hand — months before the Goatman ever showed up.

Back in December 1968, Dolan wrote a joking column about the earlier Lake Worth monster, from way back in 1947. A man who used to run a boat works on the lake had told him the whole story. During those Cold War years when everybody was seeing flying saucers, workers at the boat works had rigged up an inner tube with a pulley and a trotline, making it bob up and down in the water.

“The excitement went on for days,” Dolan wrote, before somebody finally spilled the beans. And even after the joke came out, he added, “some of them might still think there’s a monster in Lake Worth.”

Six months later, on a slow news week in a UFO-crazed summer, along came Officer James S. McGee taking down John Reichert’s report of a Goat-Man scratching his fender and grabbing at his wife. And off we went again.

So what was it, really?

You’ll hear every theory in the world if you sit at the right coffee counter long enough. A really big bobcat. A macaque monkey that got loose from a kennel near the lake — supposedly around the same time Charles Buchanan said he fended off a gorilla-like thing with a bag of chicken. An ape burned in a circus fire. High school kids from Castleberry, North Side or Brewer running a prank that got out of hand. Maybe two or three groups of hoaxers out there at once, bumping into each other in the dark and scaring the scales off one another.

Fort Worth police investigator Dale Hinz had his own idea. Down near Greer Island sat the New Liberty Mission Rehabilitation Center, known as “the Goat Farm” because residents raised goats for the zoo. One of those residents, a man called Foots Fowler, was well over six feet tall with arms hanging past his knees and, as the nickname suggests, feet the size of dinner plates.

Hinz said Foots used to sneak off at night wrapped in goat skins to spook the couples parked at the lake.

The sightings tailed off sharply in September. Right about the time school started back up. Draw your own conclusions.