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In 2004, while returning from a music festival, I saw a mountain lion in Kansas. I was driving down a highway when I saw two bright lights on the side of the road that I couldn't explain.

As a kid I used to count those little signs with a reflector on the side of the road to mark the increments of a mile. It was, I understand, a weird habit. But this meant that I knew I wasn't the right distance between those reflectors for it to be the shine of one of those. And they don't come in side-by-side twos.

So as I chanced upon these weird lights, I felt a kind of fear I've never really accessed. Because it ends up mountain lions are huge. A stupid realization, because lion is right in the name, but I always assumed they'd be closer to the size of maybe a yellow Labrador retriever. I was safe, but I was worried it would bolt in front of my friend's car, and what a mess that would be. I felt like we were staring at each other, but it was probably just seeing two very large lights coming at it (shared coincidence!) and staring back, like I was.

I would later (very recently) find out this was three years before the first verified mountain lion sighting in Kansas. I'd never thought to report it at the time. I didn't know I'd spotted a real-life out-of-place animal, but here we are.

Which brings us to ... my favorite cryptid. Or type of cryptid. I can't really get behind a flesh and blood bigfoot or fathom a modern day plesiosaur hiding in Scotland, and I might entertain a few others here and there (maybe the Flores Man is the ebu gogo) but the real bread-and-butter is a blurry line that falls juuuuuust over the line of science: when an animal appears where it shouldn't be.

Now, calling an invasive species a cryptid is pretty dicey. And I'm not doing that. It's wild there are freshwater invasive jellyfish in Minnesota or sea lampreys in Lake Michigan! We should also eat every invasive species that's edible as a sort of ethical meat consumption. (And the elimination of the apex predators in the United States makes deer possibly the most ethical meat out there, as the imbalance of species populations is ruining ecosystems.) Jackson Landers' Eating Aliens is a really fun read on why we should eat invasive species, and the only book I've seen honest enough to say "I burned through my advance so I couldn't pursue this next part that I wanted to."

But I'm not getting to the point: I love when an animal appears where it shouldn't be, whether a single specimen or a little enclave of far-out-of-place animals. (That's usually the name given in these circles, out-of-place animal.) Like in 2015, when backyard cameras in Milwaukee started seeing a lion. It was probably a Joe Exotic-style escapee (that was the local rumor, an escaped exotic pet of a local drug dealer).

I can remember my grandma telling me the story of a monster in our local reservoir lake to keep me entertained, describing it in detail, calling it the Lake (Blank) Monster. What a joy! What a mystery!

It ended up being true, too. But kind of embellished a little. This lake in the Great Plains was entirely artificial and meant as a reservoir for local power plants and agriculture, so the fish species in there were stocked and thus fairly well-known. And given its shallow depths, the last thing a lot of people expected was an enormous paddlefish to wash up, the victim of a boat propeller.

The paddlefish is before your eyes. You know it's there, that it's real, that it's flesh and blood. But the how is such an open ended question. Maybe it swam through connecting channels. Maybe somebody dumped off a catch or a pet. It's doubtful there would be a secret population. But swimming upstream into the reservoir isn't so out of the question. And it still is a literal big fish story, the sounds of someone pulling your leg. I assumed my grandma was trying to entertain me, which was true, but it was a true tale told with a spin.

Which brings us to the beauty of the phantom kangaroo sighting. In the 20th century, many animals were encountered by farmers or motorists that leapt like a kangaroo. Which, if you check your notes, does not have a population in North America, where our only local marsupial is the majestic possum, the true goblin king/queen/gender neutral ruler term of dumpster diving. They're elusive, and feel like finding something from another realm, but they don't hop and aren't very big.

In 1978 in the Milwaukee suburbs, a kangaroo was sighted many times. This was just four years after a rash of sightings in the Chicago area and southern Wisconsin. In 2013 in Oklahoma, one was caught on camera. But the sightings go back further. 1899 in Wisconsin. 1900 in New Jersey. 1934 in Tennessee. 1958 in Nebraska. 1949 in Ohio. 1957 to 1967 in Minnesota. 1965 in Kansas. 1967 in Washington. (There's a whole chapter in Mysterious America by Loren Coleman, which I just speed ran right there.)

A kangaroo is a real animal. That ... is not up for debate. But were these kangaroos, and if they were why were they there? The usual answer to any of these is escaped pets. The funny thing is ... in much the same way as a mountain lion might be passed off as "are you sure you didn't see a bobcat?", there have been suspicions that some phantom kangaroos are just ... wallabies on the run. It ends up that wallabies are adaptable enough that a few colonies have taken root in the UK and France. They're the descendants of escaped zoo wallabies who yearned for their freedom and took it by any means necessary.

So maybe there's a wild wallaby problem here. Given a seeming lack of ecological or agricultural devastation, I'll take it for now. So long as they keep their noses clean and stick to startling farmers and causing benign mischief.

Consider the satyr

In cryptozoologist Loren Coleman's book Mothman and Other Curious Encounters, he reports, "A few years ago, near York, Nebraska, a local resident saw a satyr, a living, breathing Pan-like, goat-footed beastie." The book came out in 2002, and I've yet to find what he's talking about, even on Cryptomundo.

There is a post about goatmen/satyrs from 2009, with a retelling of stories of Louisiana sightings. But that post only says "and thirty years ago, from near Lincoln, Nebraska."

York is, of course, not that far from Lincoln, and has a water tower decorated like a bright hot air balloon. (Personally, I think Ogallala has the better water tower.)

The report is likely from the Fortean Research Journal's April 1987 issue, which includes this story:

1982, December 11- A man and his fiance were returning to Utica from a friend's wedding, at about 1:00am. While driving along the highway, they observed a creature described as being about six feet tall with the appearance of a human from the waist up, but appearing to be "goat-like" from the waist down. Both described it as looking like depictions of Pan. It was described as having long hair, and self-luminous glowing yellow eyes. After passing the creature, they stopped the car, turned around, and observed t again through the back window of the automobile. Neither individual drinks, and their credibility is above reproach."

Utica is, indeed, near York. It's about 2/3rds of the way between York and Lincoln. This is probably the encounter in question, but doesn't answer why, in 2002, Coleman wrote of it as "a few years ago." It makes me wonder ... did the goatman hang around, or is a story nearly old enough to drink "a few years ago," off-hand?

Stories of satyrs/goatmen aren't unprecedented. Jerome Clark's Strange & Unexplained Phenomena from 1997 reports that in 1969, visitors to Lake Worth (right on the outskirts of Fort Worth) reported repeated sightings of a goatman. Like an urban legend, the beast put deep gashes into the car of John Reichart and his family. There's alleged photographic evidence of the beast, but it just looks like a big blob. The Pope Lick Monster of Louisville, Kentucky has an alleged body count. "Supposedly the monster has the body of a man and the lower torso of a goat or sheep. It is also said to have short horns protruding from its forehead," Eric Grundhauser writes at that Atlas Obscura link. He also writes that most of the body count is people not realizing the train trestle is an active track, which I'm not trying to minimize so much as say ... be careful out there.

There's also a Maryland goatman alleged to be an escaped lab experiment that kills dogs. There are at least two goatmen reportedly roaming Wisconsin. This issue of Animals and Men gives a pretty good rundown.

It's a decent amount of goatmen.

But there are a couple other thoughts here. York is no stranger to the strange. In September 1974, people all over the region reported a creature over eight feet tall roaming the region. This is perhaps the most famous bigfoot case in Nebraska, though not the only rash in the state in that year. A shorter creature was spotted in York by a police officer then. Airships allegedly landed in the town during the epidemic of sightings around 1896-1897. The Old Metz Mortuary is the local haunted spot. (Mortuaries have always been popular places — people are dying to get into them.)

But there's also the weirdness of the description. There are goatman sightings, but often they're more fearsome, like Black Phillip in The VVitch (I'm aware that was just a normal goat in the movie). The goat often has an association with demons or other evil spirits. Think of the Baphomet, a figure often employed in occult circles and to some, synonymous with devil worship. But that's a goat-faced creature with some other accoutrement.

But the fawn or the satyr is different. The satyr is a little sexier. Perhaps the most famous is Pan, but another famed satyr is Osiris. "Among the ancient Greeks, as with the Celts, the horned god was associated with homosexuality. One ancient bowl shows Pan, with cock erect, chasing a young male shepherd," Arthur Evans wrote in his 1978 book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture. Pan wasn't something fearsome in most mythology — he was more of a forest spirit, associated with fertility and spring, eventually adopted by pagans. An encounter with the real Pan is more likely to be horny than horrifying.

There are other modern Pan sightings, some relayed in The Rebirth of Pan by Jim Brandon. (Real name, William Grimstad, a Nazi piece of shit. Hear all about it in season two of the phenomenal Penny Royal.) Perhaps a good source is the Nymphology Blog post on nymphs and satyrs.

But that doesn't really end up answering the question: was there a second satyr or not?

And maybe the answer is I should just stop being lazy and email Loren Coleman rather than writing a half-assed blog post. But hey, Loren, if you see this, email ryde at wyrm dot site and tell me if there was second satyr.