The Goat Man of Pope Lick

Every town has it's urban legends... this is one of ours.

There's a road out in Jeffersontown that has something of an unpleasant history... from satanic cults & vengeful ghosts to strange creatures that haunt and terrorize the surrounding wilderness, if you ask the right people, you'd get a nice assortment of varying stories about the area. One story in particular is likely to stand out amongst the rest, however... the story of an old hermit who lived under a trestle just off the road of Pope Lick.

No one really knows the history of the hermit, only that if you got too close to his shack in the woods, he would come out screaming & flailing and invoking the devil to keep people away.

People being inherently cruel, many teenagers would sneak up to his shack at night and terrorize the man... until one day a couple of kids who had been out drinking supposedly found the old man dead in his shack... rumor has it that there were dismembered goats strewn about the room, and it smelled as though many an animal had died there.

Not much is known about where they buried him, though many believe he is buried on the same site as his shack, because he had no family or friends to place him in hallowed ground.

Not long after, reports of strange sounds and lights coming from the shack got people interested in checking the place out again... and kids began disappearing... local residents claimed that they would be awoken in the middle of the night by the sounds of screams echoing up the wooded valley.

After searching the woods and coming up with nothing, family of one of the missing boys decided to check out the shack beneath the trestle... they found the boy about a hundred yards away, nailed high up in a tree with railroad spikes... his body was disemboweled, his eyes removed. Though he had been missing for several days, he looked as though he had only recently been butchered.

His father and brother, burning with rage, swore vengeance... for several nights after discovering the boy's body, they searched the woods around Pope Lick for signs of his murderer.

After hours of futility, they finally spot a small man a few yards from the trestle... they approach cautiously, and just as they are about to reach him, he turns and glares at them... laughter so evil it seems to curse the air around it, peals like thunder about them... and though every fiber in their being tells them to run, they are rooted to the spot.

The laughter stops, and the air goes stale around them... the man holds his gaze upon them, and they realize who he is... "the g-g-g-goat man?" the son manages to stammer out, and the words appear to hurt the creature... his gaze weakens on the boy, and the boy turns and runs.

He realizes almost instantly that they were being led across the trestle above the Goat Man's shack, and as he turns to yell for his father, he sees the two of them standing in the middle of trestle... and then he hears it... what sounds like the scream of a thousand tortured souls, coming from further down the track. He blacks out... he feels like he's falling... and he wakes up in the hospital the next day.

Though he asks for his father, no one will speak of him in front of the boy... not even his mother and sisters.

A week goes by, and the police finally come and question the boy... after telling him his story, the police leave... but a day later they return and question the boy about his father again...

"I don't understand why you keep asking me about my father..." he says; "I told you I saw him get hit by a train."...

"That's impossible son," replies one of the detectives. "We found you on the ground about 20 feet from where you and you father found your brother."

He looks uneasily at one of his fellow officers and continues; "Your father was nailed to the same tree, at the exact same place your brother was, and in the same condition we found your brother in... we just need to know one thing..." he turns and looks at the boy, all concern gone from his eyes, and asks; "How did you get them up there?"