![\"This](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/PHi_j0096.JPG\" "\\"PHi_j0096.JPG\\"")
This is believed to be the original photo taken when a Fort Worth man, Allen Plaster, spotted a large white shape in the tall grass near Greer Island around 1:35 a.m. on Nov. 19, 1969. He took a photo with his Polaroid camera. Years later Plaster said he thought the creature he photographed was just somebody playing a prank. Allen Plaster Courtesy of Allen Plaster <\/p>\n
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 \u201cpitiful cry like something was hurting him,\u201d then grabbed a spare tire \u2014 rim and all \u2014 and heaved it more than 500 feet at their cars.<\/p>\n
Three hundred pounds, they said. Squalling and howling in the dark by Shoreline Road. That was enough. Fort Worth was hooked.<\/p>\n
Goatmania hits town<\/p>\n
By the middle of July, people were driving out to Lake Worth every single night. Not a few \u2014 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\u2019t so much worried about a monster as he was about all the people wandering around out there with guns.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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 \u201ca cryptid Kardashian\u201d \u2014 famous for being famous, and getting more famous by the week.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/IMG_3492.jpg\" "\\"IMG_3492.jpg\\"")
A carved representation of the Lake Worth monster by artist Joe Pack. This is similar to descriptions in Sallie Ann Clarke\u2019s book. Ralph Lauer Star-Telegram archives <\/p>\n
A local sculptor carved his likeness. A Benbrook woman named Sallie Ann Clarke sat down and wrote a whole book about him, \u201cThe Lake Worth Monster of Greer Island, Ft. Worth, Texas.\u201d She later admitted she hadn\u2019t actually seen the creature when she wrote it \u2014 but said she\u2019d seen him four times afterward.<\/p>\n
The Polaroid<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
That blurry instant print \u2014 a giant white furball, somebody once called it a \u201cmonster labradoodle\u201d \u2014 is just about the only physical evidence we\u2019ve got. Plaster gave the Polaroid to Sallie Ann Clarke, and it lives on in her book.<\/p>\n
Plaster himself lived a full Fort Worth life. He owned the House of Allen shops and later ran a pet store called Allen\u2019s Ark, managed hotels, started a furniture company and worked as a bail bond agent. He passed in 2019.<\/p>\n
But long before that, in a 2006 interview, he told the Star-Telegram what he\u2019d come to believe. \u201cWhen we drove by, it stood up,\u201d he said. \u201cWhatever it was, it wanted to be seen. That was a prank. That was somebody out there waiting for people to drive by. I don\u2019t think an animal would have acted that way.\u201d<\/p>\n
The idea of a real monster, he said, was \u201csilly.\u201d<\/p>\n
A clue hiding in the archives<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the part that ought to make a longtime Star-Telegram reader smile. As Bud Kennedy laid out in his columns revisiting the legend<\/a>, front-page columnist George Dolan had already tipped his hand \u2014 months before the Goatman ever showed up.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe excitement went on for days,\u201d Dolan wrote, before somebody finally spilled the beans. And even after the joke came out, he added, \u201csome of them might still think there\u2019s a monster in Lake Worth.\u201d<\/p>\n Six months later, on a slow news week in a UFO-crazed summer, along came Officer James S. McGee taking down John Reichert\u2019s report of a Goat-Man scratching his fender and grabbing at his wife. And off we went again.<\/p>\n So what was it, really?<\/p>\n You\u2019ll 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n Fort Worth police investigator Dale Hinz had his own idea. Down near Greer Island sat the New Liberty Mission Rehabilitation Center, known as \u201cthe Goat Farm\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Hinz said Foots used to sneak off at night wrapped in goat skins to spook the couples parked at the lake.<\/p>\n The sightings tailed off sharply in September. Right about the time school started back up. Draw your own conclusions.<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on this topic? Tell us! <\/p>\n We love to hear from Texans with opinions on the news \u2014 and to publish those views in the Opinion section.<\/p>\n \u2022 Letters should be no more than 150 words. <\/p>\n \u2022 Writers should submit letters only once every 30 days. <\/p>\n \u2022 Include your name, address (including city of residence), phone number and email address, so we can contact you if we have questions. <\/p>\n You can submit a letter to the editor two ways: <\/p>\n \u2022 Email letters@star-telegram.com<\/a> (preferred).<\/p>\n