WXRW Haunted Heartland Interview 08-16-19
Back on August 26th, I had the pleasure of being interviewed on Haunted Heartland, a wonderful paranormal program which airs on Milwaukee’s WXRW! If you missed it, you can listen to HERE!
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Goatman: The Midnight Delivery #1
Guess what came in the mail yesterday?
Goatman: The Midnight Delivery #1 by Tim Vargulish! Tim is a hilarious and talented indy comic creator who’s written and drawn numerous comics about everyone’s favorite hoofed crypid super hero!
If you like Goatman, and you love comics, go support Tim’s publishing efforts! Copies of this great comic, and many others can be obtained by visiting Goatman Comics on Facebook!
J. Nathan Couch appears on The UnXplained!
Hey Gang,
Just another quick note saying thanks to everyone who’s contacted me after appearing on History Channel’s The UnXplained.
It was a wonderful experience, and it was a pleasure getting to appear on the same screen as wonderful cryptozoologists as Loren Coleman, Nick Redfern, Ken Gerhard, and Chad Lewis. And of course, who could forget the legendary host, William Shatner?
If you missed it, check local listings of visit Amazon.com. We discuss Goatman, Mothman, the Chupacabra, the Mongolian Death Worm, and lots of other highly strange entities.
Check out that screen shot of yours truly in the upper left. Now maybe everyone will stop asking me why I always wear a hat.
J. Nathan Couch is In Search of Monsters
Hello all,
You’ve likely noticed I’ve been quiet for a long time. Even though the silence here has been deafening, I have not been idle.
I hope some of you had the opportunity to see me on Travel Channel’s new series In Search of Monsters. I appeared in episode #5, which was all about a terrifying creature called the Wendigo.
A huge part of this particular episode was Mindy Rossette’s bizarre encounter near Holy Hill back in 2014. Below is here sketch of the creature she and her daughter witnessed dart in front of them.
Was it a Wendigo? Was it Goatman? I couldn’t say, but hopefully now that the incident is one again in the media, another encounter will occur and provide some compelling evidence.
If you missed the episode, check your local listings or visit Amazon.com.
LouisvilleHalloween.com Interview
I recently had the pleasure to be interviewed by the amazing folks at LouisvilleHalloween.com. We discuss Goatman, Ches McCarthy, and Waverly Hills Sanatorium. CLICK HERE to read it.
LouisvilleHalloween.com, in addition to having a wonderful website, also manages a Goatman related haunted attraction. If you plan to be in the Louisville Area (or if you’re as big a Halloween freak as I am and like to road trip), consider visiting the Legend at Pope Lick Haunted Attraction.
The Thanksgiving Goatman Trend Debunked
So, unless you were completely offline for Thanksgiving weekend, you probably noticed that Goatman was all over the Internet, even becoming a top trend on Facebook and Twitter for the duration of the weekend. Within a few hours many of the articles about my favorite caprine cryptid were claiming that there was an outbreak of sightings in three different states! Not quite.
I followed this all VERY closely (hey, I had a 4 day weekend, and it’s rare Goaty gets this much publicity) so I can map this whole thing out for you with a good deal of accuracy.
The whole mess started when, for no apparent reason, MoviePilot.com posted an article on November 27th suggesting that someone should make a horror film based on the monster (oblivious to the fact that several have already been made). That article linked to a CultOfWeird.com article about my 2014 book Goatman: Flesh or Folklore, which stated that the creature has been historically seen in Kentucky, Texas, and Wisconsin.
By the time Uproxx.com posted about it on the morning of November 28th, various websites with little-to-no journalistic integrity had worded their MoviePilot.com plagiarisms to make it all sound as if a sudden outbreak of sightings had just occurred in three different states within a short amount of time, completely misrepresenting the situation. With each new article, the phrasing changed ever so slightly until it seemed as if a heard of man-goats were roaming America’s heartland! This is no slight against Uproxx, mind you. Their article was the best out of the whole bunch, and provided a nice snapshot of Goatman-mania as it swept the Internet.
Not a single article provided any information about these apparently fictitious sightings. No times, dates, locations, or witnesses. As best as I can tell, there has not been one new sighting. At least none that have been reported, anyways. The most recent sighting I’m aware of took place in September, 2014, and this photograph of a strange hoof print from Oak Creek, Wisconsin, was just sent to WPI Hunts the Truth.
Of course, what truly caused all this trending was that MoviePilot.com introduced a new, strange concept to what I can only call the main stream, people whose only normal exposure to unexplainable phenomena is seeing a cardboard Bigfoot at a gas station beef jerky display. Most only shared the story because of how odd it was, or to mock the very idea of these legitimate, but puzzling encounters. None of them stopped to look and see if anything was actually happening. Please people, question everything. Don’t just assume something happened because you read a news story about it. Especially on the Internet.
But should any of you actually encounter Goatman. I’m right here waiting to hear from you.
A Strange Hike Near Hartford, Wisconsin
Last Sunday I was hiking the Ice Age Trail near Hartford, when I found these peculiar marks on a tree limb. This area has a history of strange creature sightings ranging from Goatman, Bigfoot, and canine/bruin hybrids.
The second photograph shows how high in the tree the markings are. There were no other strange markings on or near the tree. My hand barely reaches the first marking and I’m 5’8″. And before anyone asks, the critter on my tee shirt is Mr. T (Rex). He pittys the fool.
Earlier in the day, a mile or two farther down the trail, I heard a repetitive tapping, it sounded like two large logs being slapped together, in a continuous, repeating pattern close to the trail, across a kettle, but I couldn’t find the source despite their being no leaves on the trees. After about two minutes the sound stopped and never returned. A peculiar day in the Kettle Moraine Forest!
An Encounter with a Ghostly Hookman
In my latest book Goatman: Flesh or Folklore? I make note of a peculiar link between American Goatman legends, and the Hookman urban legend. In most areas where high school students tell stories of the legendary half-man, half-goat creature, a different clique of students will often claim the area is haunted by a crazed killer with a hook for a hand! This own link is apparent right here in Washington County, Wisconsin, where I first began my Goatman research. Some 1970s high schoolers say Goatman lived in a particular dilapidated house on Hogsback Road, while others said that was were the Hookman hung his hat.
While Goatman legends are an odd blend of urban legends and actual eyewitness sightings, Hookman is firmly established as a perennial Lover’s Lane urban legend. Where kids park to make out, you’ll hear stories of a crazy hook-handed killer lurking just beyond the treeline. I’d never heard from anyone who’d actually encountered Hookman, that is of course, until this past October when I received the following message from a reader here in Washington County, Wisconsin.
Back in the early 1980s we had an urban legend [on Hogsback Road] called the Hookman. Now deceased, his small cottage was at the end of a narrow gravel driveway thickly lined with trees on both sides. My friends and I were pretty freewheeling back then and loved to drive about with beer in the car. One night our friend Mark wanted to show off his new Buick so we bought a couple of six packs and the six of us decided to park the car by Hookman’s old cottage.
It was a blustery night with a full moon. Each time the wind would blow we’d lose the moonlight. We could hear the wind whistling through the trees even with window up. We were laughing and talking about nothing in particular when I heard a loud “screeee” noise scraping against the left rear window that I was sitting next to. In the light I could see a distinct 4 inch gouge in the window that was clearly visible in the moonlight. We all just totally freaked! Mark almost had an accident as his wheels spun in the gravel getting out of the place. A really strange thing about that gouge? It seemed to gradually fade out of the window the same way a scratch heals itself on someone’s arm. That was over 30 years ago and I believe it still affects me to this day.
An impressive, unsettling story! Has anyone else had an experience similar to this?
Goatman Hoof-Print Caught on Camera?
While writing Goatman: Flesh or Folklore? I quickly learned physical evidence of these strange, hoofed bipedal creatures is almost non-existent. No alleged hair samples, scat, or footprints of the animals have been collected, that I’m aware, unlike other anomalous creatures like Bigfoot. Because of this–and their strange ability to occasionally disappear in a blinding flash–I’ve always assumed they were more closely related to paranormal entities than some undiscovered animal.
Imagine my surprise when a local investigation group called WPI Hunts the Truth sent me the following photograph from an anonymous source in Oak Creek, Wisconsin!
This photograph is impressive for various reasons. Notice how extremely large the print is– the size of a grown man’s hand. But more interesting is the back half of the print. It almost resembles an enormous human being’s heel. I’m at a loss to explain it. While it doesn’t prove a Goatman is wandering around Oak Creek, I can’t explain precisely what could have made such a puzzling impression in the autumn muck. Have any of you witnessed tracks like these before?
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