Creature Encounter: The Lake Worth Monster | The 1969 Sighting That Sparked a Monster Hunt — Ep. 64

A Scream At Lake Worth

Around midnight on July 10th, 1969, John Rikert was fishing along the shore of Lake Worth, just outside Fort Worth, Texas. His car was parked nearby, close to Greer Island, and his wife Linda had stayed behind in the passenger seat to read while he fished. Two other couples were spending the night near the lake as well, parked not far away. There wasn't anything particularly unusual about what John and Linda were doing. They'd been out there before, and up until that point, it had been an ordinary summer night. John had been fishing near the water when he heard Linda scream. When he turned toward the car, he saw a large pale figure on the hood, moving toward the passenger side where Linda was still sitting. John immediately ran back toward her, and as he got closer, he could finally see what was moving around the car. It looked perhaps seven feet tall, covered in white hair and what appeared to be horns. Its hands were long, ending in fingers that looked almost like claws, and it was trying to reach Linda through the passenger side window. With his wife still inside the car, John went after it. For a few moments he struggled with whatever was standing beside the passenger door, trying to force it away from Linda. Somehow he managed to create enough space to get into the car himself, and the moment he was behind the wheel, he got them out of there as fast as he could. The creature came after them as they escaped, lunging toward the moving car and grabbing at the side. As John raced away from Greer Island, whatever had been on that car disappeared back into the darkness. What John Reichert reported that night could have ended as a strange story shared among six people and a few police officers. But once officers had searched Greer Island, looked at the scratch along the side of his car, and the story reached the newspaper, it stopped belonging only to the people who'd been there. By the next day, people all over Fort Worth, Texas were hearing about something near Lake Worth that witnesses were having a hard time describing. And instead of staying away, a lot of them did the opposite. They went looking for it. In the summer of 1969, John Rikard went to the police with a story about something he and his wife had encountered near Greer Island on the shore of Lake Worth, Texas. Within days, other people were reporting strange encounters of their own, and crowds began gathering near the lake, hoping to see whatever was out there. What followed included police searches, possible hoaxes, a mysterious photograph, and a creature that would become part of Fort Worth folklore. This is the story of John Reichert, the Lake Worth monster, and how one frightening encounter became a mystery that people are still trying to explain more than fifty years later. And this is State of the Unknown.

Police Respond And Find Little

Greer Island sat on the north side of Lake Worth. Despite the name, you could reach it by car along a rough road, which made it an easy place to get away from the city without actually going very far. After leaving Greer Island, John and Linda met up with the other two couples who'd been nearby, and all six reported what had happened to police. James was at the center of the encounter, but the others were able to back up that something strange had happened around the car. Before long, the group was heading back toward Greer Island with four Fort Worth police units following them. The officers searched the area, but they didn't find anyone hiding in the trees, an animal, a costume, or anything else that clearly explained what Rikard and the others said they'd just experienced. What they did have was the group itself. Patrolman James McGee later said that the witnesses looked genuinely frightened, which was enough for the officers to take the report seriously, even though McGee thought they might have been the victims of a prank. Rikert also showed police the side of his car, the same side he said the creature grabbed as they escaped. Running along it was a scratch about 18 inches long. The officers could see the damage. What they couldn't tell was how it got there. There was also one detail in that first newspaper story that makes the beginning of all this a little harder to pin down. A police dispatcher said officers had actually been hearing reports about something around Greer Island for about two months. Up until Rikert came in, they'd mostly laughed those reports off as pranks. The article didn't identify those earlier witnesses or say exactly what they'd seen, so there's no way to know how closely those reports resembled Rikert's. But it does mean that when John reported what had happened that night, police had already been hearing strange things about Greer Island for weeks.

A Headline Turns Into A Crowd

John Rikert's encounter might have remained little more than a strange police report if a young Fort Worth Star Telegram reporter named Jim Mars hadn't picked up the story. Mars was still early in his journalism career at the time, years before he became known for writing about UFOs and conspiracy theories. The headline was hard to ignore. Fish mangoat terrifies couples parked at Lake Worth. And people didn't ignore it. Local radio stations began talking about the story, and word spread quickly around Fort Worth. Before long, people who had never been part of what happened to John and Linda were driving out to Greer Island hoping to see whatever they had encountered for themselves. Some were curious. Some wanted to find out whether anything was really there. Others came ready to search for it. A few brought guns. Among the people who came to Greer Island was Jack Harris from nearby Sansome Park. Harris had heard the reports, and unlike John Rickert, he went there knowing exactly what people claimed was somewhere around the lake. He wanted to see if he could find it for himself. Harris wasn't alone when he went looking for it. He was driving around the area with at least one other person when they heard something somewhere in the darkness, a strange squalling sound. Harris said they heard it before they ever saw what was making it. As they continued along the road, a figure crossed in front of them. Harris had brought a camera, and with the figure still close enough to see, he tried to take a picture. The flash didn't go off. He tried again, although by that point he was also busy rolling up his window, and afterward he wasn't sure whether he'd managed to photograph anything at all. What he had seen was large, whitish gray and covered in hair. Harris thought it stood around seven feet tall and might have weighed close to 300 pounds. It walked upright like a person, although Harris was certain that whatever he'd seen didn't look like one. The figure didn't disappear after crossing the road. Harris could still see it moving back and forth along a nearby bluff. And by now, Harris wasn't the only person who'd come looking. A local radio station had broadcast the story, sending carloads of curious people towards Lake Worth. And as Harris watched the figure on the bluff, more of those cars began arriving. Before long, Harris estimated that 30 or 40 people had gathered there, all watching the same figure moving above them. By now, 30 or 40 people were gathered near the old gravel pit area, with their cars below a bluff that rose roughly 30 feet above them. Harris and the others could still see the figure moving around up there, and some people in the crowd were apparently starting to think about going after it. Before they had the chance, something came down from above. It was an automobile tire, still attached to its wheel, coming from the direction of the figure on the bluff and heading toward the cars below. Harris believed he'd just watched the creature throw at more than 500 feet, and whatever its actual path had been, it was coming toward the crowd

The Night The Tire Came Down

fast enough to end the idea of anybody going after anything. People scrambled back into their cars and started getting out of there. Even the sheriff's deputies who'd been talking with Harris earlier weren't hanging around. Harris remembered one of them laughing about the whole thing until the strange cries came out of the darkness. After that, as Harris put it, the deputy didn't seem to find it quite so funny. Police searched the area again, but they still couldn't find anything they could identify as a source of what everyone had been watching. By the following night, though, people were already coming back. And over the next several nights, Greer Island became a gathering place. Rick Pratt, who was connected with the Greer Island Nature Center at the time, later remembered traffic, drinking, small fires, and people milling around because everybody wanted to be part of what was happening. Some people came to search. Others came to watch the people searching. And some were probably there because for a few nights in July, Greer Island was simply the place everybody else seemed to be. The guns were what worried police most. Sergeant A.J. Hudson publicly warned that somebody could end up shooting a person by mistake. Once people were walking around in the dark expecting to see a seven-foot creature, whatever danger existed out there didn't necessarily have to come from the thing they were looking for. And as the crowds grew, so did the stories. People talked about large tracks, damaged property, broken tree limbs, livestock, and more sightings. Some of those stories are hard to trace now to a specific witness or a solid contemporary record, and over time they became mixed in with later versions of the legend. But in the moment, each new story gave people another reason to go back. For a couple of weeks, Lake Worth had turned into a monster hunt, and by then, the hunt was creating its own momentum. That doesn't mean the reports that followed were false, but the conditions around them were completely different from the quiet night when Reichert first encountered something near his car. Now people were arriving already expecting to see a monster. They were watching every movement, listening for every unusual sound, and in at least some cases, actively trying to find it. And that makes the later reports harder to separate from everything happening

Monster Hunt Momentum And Danger

around them. Eventually, the crowds began to thin. People stopped coming in the same numbers. The police concern eased. And Greer Island gradually went back to being a place beside the lake instead of the center of a nightly monster hunt. The reports didn't disappear completely, though. In November, a man named Charles Buchanan said he'd had an encounter near Greer Island with a large gorilla-like figure. According to the version that survived, Buchanan was near his truck when the figure knocked or pulled him down. He said he got away after distracting it with a bag that had leftover chicken inside. Buchanan's story isn't documented as strongly as the reports from July, and most of the details survive through later retellings. But even months after the crowds had faded, people were still reporting encounters around Greer Island. A few months later, on November 19th, 22-year-old Alan Plaster was driving west along Shoreline Road with two friends at around 1.35 in the morning when they noticed a large light-colored shape in the grass on the side of the road. As they passed, Plaster saw the figure stand up. He had a Polaroid camera with him and managed to get a picture. The photograph isn't clear. It shows a pale, upright-looking shape at a distance, without enough detail to make out a face, fur, scales, or really any of the features people had been describing over the summer. But unlike Harris, Plaster had come away from his encounter with a photograph, and that Polaroid would remain connected to the Lake Worth monster story for decades. Plaster gave the Polaroid to Sally Ann Clark, a local woman who'd become deeply interested in what was happening around Lake Worth. Clark began collecting witness accounts and talking to people connected to the sightings. And before 1969 was over, she self-published a book called The Lake Worth

The Polaroid And A Name Takes Hold

Monster of Greer Island. Clark also said she'd encountered the creature herself, and her book would play a big role in shaping how people came to picture the Lake Worth monster. As the years went on, the thing people talked about at Lake Worth became less like a group of conflicting descriptions and more like one recognizable creature, the goat man. The earliest accounts hadn't described exactly the same thing. Some people talked about hair. Others mentioned scales. Others focused more on the size of the figure or the way that it moved. But once there was a book, a photograph, and a name people could keep repeating, one version gradually became more familiar than the others. Greer Island eventually became part of the Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge, and the monster became part of the place's identity. Kids who hadn't been alive in 1969 were showing up already knowing the story. The Nature Center eventually embraced it with community events like the Lake Worth Monster Bash. By then, the story had moved far beyond the people who first called police. But the people who were actually there in 1969 didn't all carry the story forward the same way. Years later, Alan Plaster was asked about the photograph that had become one of the best known pieces of the case. By then, he no longer believed he'd photographed a mysterious creature. Plaster thought someone had been waiting beside the road specifically to be seen. In other words, he believed the figure in his photograph was probably part of a prank.

Pranks, Hoaxes, And Ordinary Explanations

Rick Pratt later offered another explanation, this time for the tire incident. Pratt said a local teenager privately admitted that he and his brother had been responsible for what people saw on the bluff that night. According to Pratt, the boys were up on the hill waving their arms for the crowd below. And the tire hadn't been picked up and thrown hundreds of feet. He said they'd rolled it down the slope, and from there it kept going downhill before coming off a drop near the old gravel pit area and landing near the cars. There were other prank stories, too. One later account that circulated around the police department involved local high school students using an old gorilla suit and an unusual mask. No official case file is surfaced showing the police proved that account or charged anybody, and the people supposedly involved were never clearly identified in the version that survived. Still, by then, two of the most memorable parts of the Lake Worth monster story, the tire and the photograph, had ordinary explanations being offered by people directly connected to those events. And that changes the way you look at everything that happened around Greer Island after the story became public. But neither explanation takes us back to the night it started, when John Rikert heard his wife scream and ran toward the car. So if we want to know how much of the Lake Worth monster story we can actually explain, that's where we have to go back. Once you strip away everything the Lake Worth Monster became over the years, the case really comes back to John Rikert. There were six people around Greer Island that night. They reported what happened to police. Four Fort Worth police units responded, and patrolman James McGee said the witnesses appeared genuinely frightened. Officers also saw the scratch along the side of Rikert's car. Those are the parts we can document. What we can't establish is what caused that damage or what the group actually encountered. There's no known photograph of the scratch, no hair sample, no track tied directly to Rikert's encounter, and police didn't find a person, animal, costume, or anything else that explained what the witnesses said they'd seen. Even at the time, police were considering much more ordinary possibilities. McGee wondered whether someone in a costume might have been involved, or whether pranksters could have thrown some kind of dummy onto the car. So the officers could believe Rikert and the others were genuinely frightened without necessarily believing they'd correctly understood what frightened them. The descriptions also make the case harder to simplify. Rikert described something large and pale with hair, possible horns, and long claw-like hands. Jack Harris later described a whitish-gray, hairy figure walking upright. Other details became more specific as the story was repeated, especially once Sally Ann Clark's book helped shape the creature people eventually came to know as the goat man. The Lakeworth monster we remember today is more consistent than the original witness descriptions were. And once the story became public, there's good reason to think at least some people started feeding it. The tire incident is probably the clearest example. People at Greer Island believed they'd watched a figure on the bluff throw a tire hundreds of feet towards the cars below. Years later, Rick Pratt said a local teenager privately admitted that he and his brother had been responsible. According to Pratt, they rolled the tire downhill and the slope and drop near the old gravel pit carried it toward the crowd. If Pratt was right, that turns one of the creature's most extraordinary displays of strength into a prank helped along by gravity. The problem is that the supposed prankster was never publicly identified, so Pratt's story isn't the same thing as having a documented confession that we can independently verify. Alan Plaster's photograph has a similar problem. The photograph is real, and there's a light-colored upright figure in it. But the image doesn't contain enough detail to tell us what the figure actually was. More importantly, Plaster himself eventually came to believe the encounter. Had probably been staged. That matters because Plaster wasn't simply a skeptic looking at the photograph decades later. He was the person who took it, and based on his own memory of what had happened, he thought someone may have been waiting beside the road specifically to be seen. There were other prank stories too, including later claims that local teenagers had used a gorilla suit and an unusual mask. That story was never clearly proven, but by then, the idea that some of the later sightings had been staged was hardly unreasonable. So there's a pretty good case that portions of the Lake Worth monster story were manufactured after the publicity began. The tire may have been a prank. Plaster's photograph may have been staged. And once crowds were wandering around Greer Island at night expecting to find a monster, ordinary animals, people moving through the brush, unfamiliar sounds, and simple mistakes could easily have been pulled into the same story. But that still leaves the problem we started with. None of those explanations has ever been tied directly to Rikert's encounter. They don't explain why Linda screamed, what John believed he fought beside the car, or what caused the scratch police saw afterwards. That doesn't mean a monster attacked them. It means the known

Back To The First Night’s Mystery

prank explanations work much better on the story after it became famous than they do on the event that made it famous in the first place. So maybe the question isn't whether the Lake Worth monster was real. We know that at least some of what happened around Greer Island may have been staged, exaggerated, or misunderstood. The harder question is whether any of that tells us what happened before the crowds arrived, before the photograph, before anyone had reason to put on a costume or become part of the story. Because by the time we explain everything that came later, we're still left with John and Linda beside the lake on July 10th, 1969. What stayed with me about this story was John and Linda Reichert. Because when you hear the Lake Worth monster story now, it's easy to picture everything that came later. The goat man, the photograph, the tire flying toward the crowd of people, hundreds of curious people showing up at Greer Island hoping they'd be the next ones to see it. But none of that existed when John went fishing that night. Linda was sitting in the car reading. John was down by the water, and whatever happened over the next few minutes belonged entirely to them. John heard his wife scream, ran back toward her, and found something beside the car that frightened them badly enough that their first instinct was to get away. A short time later, they were talking to police. And from that point forward, the story started belonging to everybody else. The newspaper gave people something to call it. Radio stations spread the story around Fort Worth. Strangers began driving to Greer Island hoping to see whatever John and Linda had seen. Some brought cameras, some brought guns. And apparently, at least a few people may have decided to become part of the story themselves. That's one of the strangest things about cases like this. Once enough people are paying attention, the original experience can almost disappear underneath everything that comes afterward. A frightened couple becomes a monster hunt. Conflicting descriptions become a goat man. A blurry photograph becomes an artifact. And eventually something that happened to a handful of people on an ordinary summer night becomes part of the identity of a place. More than 50 years later, we can pull all of that apart. We can find plausible explanations for the tire. We can question the photograph. We can trace how the creature changed as the story was repeated, and we can see all the places where pranks, expectation, and folklore probably became mixed together. But none of that takes us back into the car with John and Linda. And I think that's why their part of the story stays with me. Because underneath all the mythology is a much smaller question. What happened to them? Maybe they encountered an elaborate prank that nobody ever admitted to. Maybe in the confusion and darkness, something ordinary became something much stranger. Or maybe there was something around Greer Island that night that we've simply never identified. I don't know. And after everything that happened, the crowds, the police searches, the newspaper stories, the photograph, the book, and the more than 50 years of people retelling it, I'm not sure John Rikert ever knew either. Sometimes a story can grow large enough that everyone knows what to call the thing you saw. That doesn't mean anyone ever figured out what it was. This has been State of the Unknown. More than 50 years later, Greer Island still carries the Lake Worth monster

Closing Thoughts And Listener Support

story. The photograph, the newspaper headlines, and the goat man legend all came later. But the first physical thing police documented was much smaller, an 18-inch scratch along the side of John Rikert's car, with no agreed answer for how it got there. If you've been enjoying these stories, leaving a rating or review in your podcast app really does help more people find the show. On Spotify, it's just a tap of the stars. On Apple Podcasts, you can even leave a short written review. And I really want to thank those of you who've taken a few minutes out of your day to leave a rating, a review, or a comment. It means a lot to me and I appreciate every one of them. And if you want to make sure you don't miss the next story, just hit follow or subscribe in your podcast app so it shows up automatically when it drops. Until next time, stay curious. Because you never know when the strange story everyone else is talking about just might start with you.