Texas: The Lake Worth Monster

Fort Worth, Texas, July 1969. Six people parked in a car near Greer Island on Lake Worth drive to the police station at midnight and report that something came down out of a tree and landed on them, something with fur and scales and a face like a goat, and the next morning the Fort Worth Star-Telegram runs the headline that made the whole thing famous.

The night after that, a crowd of thirty or forty people watches the creature from the bottom of a bluff on the lake road until it throws a tire at them. For the rest of that summer the lake road filled up every night with teenagers, families, deputies, and men with deer rifles, while the newspaper that was covering it was also covering the moon landing.

On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip we leave the Nebraska Sandhills behind and come south into Texas for the Lake Worth Monster. We go through the documented record of July 1969, the Reichart sighting, Jack Harris and the tire on the bluff, the sixteen-inch tracks, the dead livestock, the police explanations, Sallie Ann Clarke’s book, Allen Plaster’s photograph, and the anonymous letter that showed up at the Fort Worth Nature Center in 2005.

Then we hear from people who were out there that summer. A sixteen-year-old girl in the back seat of an Impala who saw it leaning on a cottonwood. A young veteran with his grandfather’s rifle who caught it in a spotlight at the causeway. A newlywed couple fishing for catfish off a point south of the island. A fourteen-year-old boy who was close enough to the bluff to see its mouth.

From there we move east into the Trinity River bottoms, the Sabine, the Sam Houston National Forest, the Red River, and Caddo Lake for a run of Texas Sasquatch encounters, a game warden watching something dig for mussels across an oxbow, a nine-year-old on a screened porch watching something work her grandfather’s trotline, a dozer operator with something standing on his slash pile, a rancher whose horse wouldn’t move, and a kid in a kayak lost in the cypress at night.

Greer Island is a hiking trail inside the Fort Worth Nature Center now, and the bluff has a subdivision on top of it, and people still call the Nature Center every year or two about something they saw along the water.

If you’ve got a sighting or a stop you want added to the map, email brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.

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