The Goat-Man Of Benbrook Lake

By James Donahue

Benbrook Lake is one of many man-made water reservoirs created in Texas and throughout the dry Southwestern Park of the United States where water is an important commodity for cattlemen. This lake, located near Fort Worth, has gained a bit of fame since it was created in the mid-1900s. It appears to be the home of a "goat-man," or a bigfoot creature that gets spotted from time-to-time. It has even had its picture snapped.

The most recent recorded sighting occurred in October, 2005, with an early-morning swimmer at Holiday Park, located at the lake, encountered what he described as a large, dark furry creature that he said stood on its hind legs and was about seven or eight feet tall.

"It was pushing through a stand of reeds about 200 yards from me. The reeds came up to my chest, but only reached the animal's waist. It appeared to walk upright, grunting in a belabored manner," the unnamed witness said.

He said the beast was turned away from him so he could not make out any facial details. Needless to say, the would-be swimmer fled the area, dashing back to his pickup from where he watched the "animal" disappear into the woods.

The following spring, researcher Bud Kennedy, obviously hearing about this sighting, interviewed a number of residents of the area, collecting stories about the Benbrook Lake Monster.

It seems that the beast, or one that looked very much like it, was witnessed by Mark Fricke, a 190year-old security officer stationed at Carswell Air Force Base. Fricke said he saw "a big black creature which looked like a large bear" while he was at the lake. He said he was sipping a soft drink in the park when the monster splashed through some nearby shallow water and disappeared in the brush. He told the Dallas Morning News that the creature was at least seven feet tall.

Kennedy managed to track the origins of the monster back to 1969 when a number of locals had similar encounters.. That was when it was captured on film by a passing motorist who snapped its picture as it stood on the side of the road. The image is blurry, but you can make out a form of something very large and hairy.

Back then, the creature gained the nickname "goat man." But Kennedy said the police just wrote the whole thing off as a teenage prank. He said other locals who saw the creature still insist to this day that whatever it was, it was some kind of creature.

One believer is Loren Coleman, a Maine author who did some personal investigating. He said that because there were numerous sightings by several credible people, he believes "it was too involved for a prank."

Among the stories collected by Kennedy: John Reichert said the creature scratched his car. Jack Harris said he saw the beast throw a tire about 500 feet. Charles Buchanan said he was confronted by a gorilla-like creature at the lake and chased it off when he threw a bag of leftover chicken at it.

Allen Plaster, a local businessman, was the guy who snapped that fuzzy image. He said he and a friend were driving west along the shore one night when the woman in his car spotted the creature. He said she pointed and yelled: "Look! Look! Look! There it is!" He said "something furry stood up" on the side of the road, so he stopped his car and reached for his Polaroid. His picture caught the creature running away.

But Plaster believes to this day that the monster was a hoax. "I realize that when we drove by it stood up. 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."