April Edwards, the Maryland Goatman and the headless puppy Ginger

The Goatman was already old by 1971. The first reported sightings came from Forestville and Upper Marlboro in 1957. In May 1971, University of Maryland student George Lizama added a folklore project containing eight legends collected in Clinton to the Maryland Folklife Archives. Then, on 27 October 1971, reporter Karen Hosler wrote about those archives in the Prince George's County News. In the telling, the legend moved from Tucker Road in Fort Washington to Fletchertown Road in Bowie.

Early November 1971. By one account, the 3rd. Old Bowie, the historic railroad town in Prince George's County. Sixteen-year-old April Edwards and teenage friends heard strange noises behind the Edwards house.

John Hayden and Willie Gheen were there. Hayden later described what was out there. "About six feet tall, walked on two feet, and was hairy." It made a "high-pitched sound, like a squeal." The local paper reported that the teenagers had heard strange noises and seen a large creature on the night the dog disappeared.

The next morning, ten-month-old Ginger was missing. The family searched. Young men went out, by one account with baseball bats. Near Fletchertown Road, by the Penn Central railroad tracks, they found Ginger's severed head. Several yards further on lay the rest of her.

Hosler wrote a follow-up: "Residents Fear Goatman Lives: Dog Found Decapitated in Old Bowie." On 30 November 1971 the Washington Post ran "A Legendary Figure Haunts Remote Pr. George's Woods," by Ivan G. Goldman. Prince George's County Police told the paper that "the legend just gets passed on from generation to generation." They had been getting more calls about Goatman sightings.

In 1994, researcher Mark Opsasnick spoke with April Edwards again for Strange Magazine. "People came here and called it folklore and the papers made us out to be ignorant hillbillies who didn't know any better, but what I saw was real and I know I'm not crazy…. Whatever it was, I believed it killed my dog."

Then came 1998. Raymond Hayden, John's older brother and one of the young men named as finding the dog, reportedly told the Washington City Paper that Ginger had been hit by a train. By one account, Raymond Hayden was "worn down by nearly thirty years of people asking." The remains fit that account: the head near the tracks, the body several yards on. Dog deaths in the county in the late 1930s may also have been the work of passing trains.

Others point to timing, since the legend was in print about a week before the noises. Folklorist Barry Pearson of the University of Maryland credited the legend's persistence to "bored teenagers." Yet no source accuses Edwards, Hayden or Gheen of a hoax. And no source names an animal Hayden might have seen.

The horns, hooves and axe belong to the wider legend, not Hayden's account. Over the years the Goatman became a Beltsville scientist named Dr. Stephen Fletcher whose goat experiment went wrong, an old hermit on Fletchertown Road, or an axe-wielding attacker of couples and cars. Opsasnick, who went hunting the Goatman on Crybaby Bridge with friends in 1980, stayed cautious. "I can't believe in something until I see it with my own eyes." The researcher still accepted that the witnesses believed what they experienced.

For April Edwards, it was never just folklore. Whatever it was, April Edwards believed it killed Ginger.