Bowie

The Goatman of Maryland

A half-goat, half-man with an axe, told of in Prince George's County outside Washington. The legend took shape in 1971, when a local paper ran a piece about a missing dog and rumours of a creature near Fletchertown Road; the article was picked up, and within a couple of years the story had acquired an escaped experiment from the agricultural research centre next door. The centre is real and still operating, which has helped the legend considerably — it has a building you can point at.