Cryptids of Texas: Monsters, Wild Men & Strange Creatures

Texas is almost unfairly well suited for monsters.

To the east, cypress swamps and dense pine forests disappear toward Louisiana. West Texas opens into miles of scrub, ranchland and desert. Along the Rio Grande, border folklore overlaps with some of the strangest creature reports in the state. Then there are the lakes, back roads and stretches of wilderness hiding surprisingly close to major cities.

Texas has produced monsters to match nearly every one of those landscapes.

A goat-like creature allegedly attacked cars outside Fort Worth. Something enormous crossed the skies of the Rio Grande Valley. Hairy figures appeared around Haskell, Hawley and El Paso. Strange hairless animals became a new face of the chupacabra. Farther east, stories placed wild men deep inside the forests and swamps.

Some cases exploded into newspaper sensations. Others lingered quietly for decades. A few got stranger the closer anyone looked.

The Lake Worth Monster

Summer nights around Lake Worth were already hot and noisy when something else began drawing people toward Greer Island in July 1969.

Three couples parked near the island told police that a creature had attacked their car. Contemporary reports described it as half man, half goat, covered with fur and scales.

Then other people started seeing it.

The following night, Jack Harris said the creature howled and cried before grabbing a spare tire, rim and all, and throwing it toward parked cars. Harris claimed the tire traveled more than 500 feet.

Within days, hundreds of people were driving toward Greer Island after dark. Headlights crowded the roads, armed monster hunters arrived, and police stationed an officer nearby as the hunt threatened to become more dangerous than whatever might be hiding in the brush.

The creature quickly became known as the Lake Worth Monster or Goatman.

Several months later came the photograph.

On November 19, 1969, 22-year-old Allen Plaster was driving along Shoreline Road when a large white figure reportedly rose from the grass beside the road.

He snapped a Polaroid.

The blurry image became the most famous piece of evidence in the case. Years later, Plaster himself said the figure appeared to want to be seen and concluded that the encounter was probably a prank.

Lake Worth already had experience with manufactured monsters.

In 1947, workers at a local boat operation reportedly rigged an inner tube, pulley and fishing line to create a fake lake creature. A newspaper columnist retold the earlier prank in December 1968, only months before the Goatman sightings began.

Maybe the 1969 creature was another prank. Maybe more than one person joined in after the first reports.

Whatever started it, the 1969 monster craze became a genuine Fort Worth phenomenon.

For a few weeks, the dark shoreline belonged to the Goatman.

The Caddo Critter

Five years earlier, another Texas town had learned how quickly a monster could take over the conversation.

In July 1964, residents around Caddo, Texas, began reporting a huge hairy creature. Witnesses described something upright and ape-like, roughly seven feet tall.

Rancher Charlie Gantt reportedly fired several shots at a gorilla-like animal. Nine-year-old Gene Couch said something large showed its teeth and growled at him.

Soon armed residents and law enforcement were searching the area.

The monster had a name now: the Caddo Critter.

Then the story took a turn no one could have planned better.

On August 1, WBAP-TV aired a segment in which C. L. “Leroy” Yarbrough discussed the creature. The original television footage still survives.

Yarbrough later admitted that his part of the story was fake. He had deliberately invented an encounter to prove to a friend that television news could be fooled.

But he had not necessarily created the whole scare. Reports were already circulating before he stepped in.

There may have been a real animal at the beginning. There may have been misidentification. There were almost certainly jokes and exaggerations. And then one man knowingly injected a false story into the middle of everything and watched it become part of the record.

A later UNT reconstruction found frightened residents, questionable photographs, deliberate pranks and people trying to keep the excitement alive.

By then the Caddo Critter no longer needed a creature.

It had a story.

Big Bird Over South Texas

In 1983, Harlingen paramedic James Thompson was driving home from South Padre Island when something large and dark crossed the South Texas sky.

Thompson described a creature with a wingspan of roughly five or six feet and a rough covering that did not resemble feathers. What it reminded him of was something extinct: a pterosaur.

UPI reported the sighting nationally, while wildlife officials suggested more ordinary possibilities such as pelicans and other large birds. Thompson remained unconvinced.

By then, South Texas had already spent years looking upward, producing one of the stranger regional chapters in the history of winged cryptids.

In January 1976, the Rio Grande Herald described a wave of giant-bird reports spreading through the Lower Rio Grande Valley, particularly around San Benito, Roma and Rio Grande City.

Some witnesses described enormous birds. Others described something stranger.

South Texas police officers Arturo Padilla and Homero Galvan reported a huge dark bird near San Benito. Other accounts involved oversized eyes, odd faces and proportions that witnesses struggled to match to familiar wildlife.

Around Robstown, the creature took on a local identity:

El Pájaro Gigante de Robé — the Big Bird of Robstown.

It entered songs, artwork and local storytelling. Somewhere along the way, Big Bird began colliding with a much older legend.

La Lechuza

Across South Texas and northern Mexico, generations have told stories about La Lechuza, an enormous owl associated with witchcraft.

Sometimes she is a woman who transforms into an owl. Sometimes she has a humanlike face. Sometimes she waits in a tree or follows someone walking home late at night.

The details change from town to town.

During the South Texas Big Bird scare, residents around Robstown began connecting the new flying creature with the old owl-woman tradition. Texas Standard traced the overlap between the two traditions.

A modern creature flap had flown straight into an older piece of border folklore, leaving two stories occupying the same night sky.

The Texas Chupacabra

The chupacabra that arrived in Texas did not look much like the one that started the legend.

The original chupacabra legend that emerged from Puerto Rico in the 1990s described an upright creature with large eyes and strange projections running down its back.

Texas gave it four legs.

By the 2000s, ranchers and motorists were finding hairless, gray-skinned animals along roads and fence lines and calling them chupacabras.

The Elmendorf Beast

Near Elmendorf in 2004, rancher Devin McAnally shot a nearly hairless, blue-skinned canid after dozens of his chickens disappeared.

Wildlife biologist Brian Mesenbrink looked at photographs and believed it was a coyote with mange. San Antonio Zoo staff were less certain and suggested an unusual dog might also fit.

Later DNA from the decomposed carcass was too degraded for a clean species identification, although testing confirmed that the animal belonged to the canine family.

The mystery had already done its work. Photographs of the odd carcass helped attach the chupacabra name to a very different kind of creature.

The Cuero Chupacabra

In 2007, rancher Phylis Canion found several blue-gray carcasses near her property.

She kept the head of one.

Cryptid stories usually leave behind tracks, memories or photographs.

This one left DNA.

Researchers at Texas State University examined the specimen and identified it as a coyote. Biologist Mike Forstner said the DNA sequence was essentially a match. CBS/AP reported the results.

Other Texas chupacabra carcasses have produced similar answers, but the legend did not disappear. Instead, the hairless Texas canid became one of the most recognizable modern versions of the chupacabra.

The creature had crossed borders.

Texas changed its shape.

The Bear King of Marble Falls

Decades before Bigfoot became a household name, Texas newspapers were already printing stories about impossible creatures.

One of the strangest appeared on January 27, 1901.

The San Antonio Sunday Light told the story of a young woman named Ramie Arland, who supposedly went looking for wandering goats near Marble Falls and encountered something moving on four legs that nevertheless resembled a human being.

Then the story became stranger.

A Kickapoo guide, the article claimed, refused to enter the Moon Mountains of the Santa Rosa range, where enormous bears were supposedly ruled by a great bear-man king.

Arland believed she had met him.

The creature allegedly seized her and carried her away. Settlers and cowboys organized a pursuit. When they finally found it, the thing appeared human enough that the hunters supposedly hesitated before shooting.

It is a fantastic story.

It is also full of problems.

The whole thing reads less like a preserved Texas legend and more like the kind of sensational newspaper yarn that once filled columns with lost tribes, wild men and impossible beasts.

But the original 1901 newspaper survives.

Whatever the Bear King was, Texans were reading about a humanlike monster more than half a century before Bigfoot became famous.

The Hairy Things of West Texas

By the 1960s and 1970s, creatures resembling the hairy humanoid tradition were appearing across Texas under much less majestic names.

Texas gave us the Haskell Thang and Hawley Him.

The Haskell Thang

In the summer of 1964, people around Haskell, Texas were talking about a mysterious hairy creature.

The name was not invented later by cryptid writers.

An August 5, 1964 edition of the Abilene Reporter-News refers directly to the Haskell “Thang” while discussing the region's monster reports.

By then, Caddo had its Critter and Haskell had its Thang. Texas was naming monsters faster than anyone could catch them.

Hawley Him

Thirteen years later, three teenagers at the Abilene Boys Ranch reported seeing a roughly seven-foot shaggy figure in the thick brush outside Hawley. One of the boys said the creature threw a rock that hit him in the leg before a rifle shot sent it running.

The Abilene Reporter-News dispatched young reporter Roger Downing into the shinnery with two armed monster hunters.

They found no creature, but they did find tracks.

Downing later quoted his original August 1977 report: the fresh prints showed four toes and the ball of a foot, measured about five inches wide, and appeared to have been made with a roughly four-foot stride. The search also found considerably more ordinary tracks from coyotes, dogs, rabbits, goats and cowboy boots.

Footprints have played an outsized role in hairy-humanoid reports far beyond Texas. Some of the best-known examples are examined in our archive of Bigfoot tracks and casts.

The boys kept referring to the creature simply as “He” or “Him.” Downing combined that with Hawley.

Hawley Him was born.

Downing later retold the Hawley search and how the strange name came about.

The Horizon City Monster

Farther west, the trees disappear.

Outside El Paso, there is open desert, scrub and long sightlines. That makes the Horizon City Monster an especially strange place to put an ape-man.

An El Paso Times retrospective traced the story back to September 20, 1975, when three teenagers reportedly encountered a gorilla-like creature near the Horizon City golf course.

Former sheriff's deputy Bill Rutherford later remembered investigating a footprint associated with the case.

His verdict was not encouraging: it looked dug.

Yet the story survived.

Decades later, residents were still describing a tall, dark-brown, gorilla-like figure wandering the desert east of El Paso. The syndicated El Paso Times retrospective preserves both the newer reports and the 1975 case.

No convincing physical evidence has emerged.

But imagine the sight for a moment: a seven-foot hairy figure crossing open desert in the headlights.

Bigfoot reports by region usually give their creatures considerably more cover.

Horizon City gives it nowhere to hide.

Wild Men of the Big Thicket

East Texas gives them plenty.

The Big Thicket is a maze of pine forest, hardwood bottomland, bayous and swamp. The National Park Service describes it as an unusually diverse meeting place of ecosystems.

It is also the kind of country where wild-man stories can linger.

Long before every hairy humanoid was automatically called Sasquatch, East Texans told stories about Wild Men, Raggedy Men and Old Mossy Back. Later came Bigfoot and Wood Ape.

Unlike Lake Worth or Caddo, the Big Thicket never needed one giant monster panic. Its stories accumulated slowly: something upright beside a road, tracks along a muddy bank, a strange call from deeper in the trees.

Similar swamp-country reports appear farther northeast, including Arkansas's Fouke Monster.

The Sabine Thing fits into that same East Texas tradition, another local name for a hairy humanoid reported around the Sabine River country.

Lake Worth had a monster summer.

The Big Thicket had decades of stories.

The Ottine Swamp Thing

Near Palmetto State Park, around the small community of Ottine, Texas changes again.

Dwarf palmettos crowd the ground while water, mud and thick vegetation break up the woods. Local stories give that landscape its own hairy creature: the Ottine Swamp Thing.

Former game warden Glen Sachtleben told Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine that locals spoke of a monkey-like creature living in the woods, following people after dark and throwing rocks at them. He said he knew grown men who refused to visit the area at night. Texas Parks & Wildlife preserves his account.

Sachtleben also admitted that he joined the legend himself during a 1990s festival, wearing a Wookiee mask and camouflage suit while riding a motorcycle in the parade.

The upright, humanlike shape assigned to creatures such as Ottine and the Big Thicket Wild Men also places them near the broader world of humanoid cryptids, even when individual traditions overlap heavily with Bigfoot lore.

The Ottine Swamp Thing may not have the newspaper trail of Lake Worth or Caddo.

It certainly has local character.

From Swamps to Desert

Texas contains pine forests, swamps, rivers, ranch country, mountains, barrier islands and enormous stretches of desert. Its monster stories sit at cultural crossroads too: East Texas leans toward Louisiana and the Deep South, while South Texas belongs to a borderland culture stretching far beyond the Rio Grande.

The creatures change with the landscape.

Lake Worth produced one explosive summer of Goatman sightings. South Texas had enormous birds and an older owl-woman tradition waiting to absorb them. Farther west came hairy figures with names like Haskell Thang and Hawley Him, while the open desert around El Paso somehow acquired its own ape-man.

Then there is Caddo.

People were already reporting a creature when Leroy Yarbrough deliberately added a fake encounter to the story. His lie did not kill the legend.

It became part of it.

That may be the best lesson buried in Texas cryptid history.

A sighting is only the beginning. After that come witnesses, newspapers, photographs, jokes, hoaxes, local memories and decades of retelling.

Eventually, figuring out where the creature ends and the legend begins can become the biggest mystery of all.

Texas still has plenty of empty country left.

Whether anything strange is actually hiding in it is another question.

But Texans probably aren't finished finding monsters.