Goatman
The story I collected, entitled “Goatman,” was recounted by a nineteen year old male sophomore at the University. The person who told the story is a white male whose father is an engineer and mother stays at home. After I inquired if he knew of any local urban legends, he first told the story of Hell House; and as we both live in Ellicott City and have never actually seen this mysterious building, we decided to pay it a visit. It was a foggy night on March 21st during our school’s spring break as we slowly cruised through the back roads near the Howard and Baltimore county line. When he told me the story before we left I was not particularly nervous; however, the eerie settings added a hint of fear into the air. Unfortunately, after a long search, we were unable to locate the house and decided to return home. On our trip back he recounted another story that he had heard from a friend a few months ago, which I thought was even more exciting. The urban legend is known as “Goatman” and took place in northern Prince George’s County, the same county that University is located in:
Rumor has it that back in the early 1970s, a scientist working at an agricultural research center in central Maryland was performing an experiment with goats when something went terribly wrong. He was doing tests on manipulations of goat DNA, when one of the subjects attacked and bit him. When the saliva from the goat entered the scientist’s bloodstream he immediately began undergoing changes from the goat’s DNA combining with his own. The man began to morph into a half-man, half-goat creature and escaped the lab into the nearby surrounding woods. Following this incident there have been eye-witness accounts of Goatman causing havoc aro...
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... The story uses scare tactics to discourage premarital sex by adolescents, and also demonstrates society’s stereotype of women as in need of protection. The story may evolve to change over time, but the message the legend carries will most likely carry down from generation to generation just as the Goatman legend has for many years.
Works Cited
"Goatman (Cryptozoology)." AllExperts. 27 March 2007. http://en.allexperts.com/e/g/go/goatman_(cryptozoology).htm.
"Goatman (Maryland)." Wikipedia. 31 March 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatman_%28Maryland%29.
Lawson, John. "The Goatman Legend of Prince George’s County." ESortment. 2002. 1 April 2007. http://azaz.essortment.com/goatmanlegend_rhcn.htm.
Livingston, William L. Jr. "GoatMan Hollow...the Legend." GoatMan Hollow. 30 March 2007. http://www.goatmanhollow.com/the_legend/the_goatman_legend_1.html.
Since I come from the Eastern Shore of this state, I was surprised to hear a ghost story I was previously unaware of. The story takes place in a park in Salisbury. The person who told me the story is a 19-year-old sophomore at the University, and we spoke about it one evening after dinner. He believes it to be true, because one of his friend’s siblings has apparently experienced the ghost firsthand. I tape-recorded his narrative:
Sberna, Robert. House of Horrors: The Shocking True Story of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Strangler. Kent, Ohio: Black Squirrel Books, 2012. Print.
Carl Zimmer an evolution scientist wrote an article called” Bringing Them Back to Life”. In July 2003 a group of scientists brought back the bucardo to life. The bucardo is a wild goat that was found in the mountains of the Pyrenees. In 1989 it was found that there were only slightly over a dozen of the goats left. “Ten years later a single bucardo remained: a female nicknamed Celia.” (Zimmer, 445) Bucardos were officially extinct, however, Celia’s cells remained preserved in labs. For a few years a team of reproductive psychologists led by Jose Folch injected nuclei from Celia’s cells into goat eggs removed of their own DNA, they then implanted the eggs into surrogate mothers (Zimmer, 445) Over 57 implantations, only one was born. The clone was born with several problems and died quickly.
“Even if animal testing produced the cure for Aids, we’d be against it” This rhetoric notion was stated by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and summarizes the fanatical doctrine animal rights activists preach to their followings. These activists preach a doctrine of hate calling for the end of all meat eating, wearing of fur, use of animals in experiments regardless if they are beneficial or not, and even push for the end of all pets as we know of it. Howard Lyman author of “Mad Cowboy” has not only aligns himself with this rambunctious group of man haters, but supports their nazi like doctrine in his book. On further review of mad cowboy one must dig deep to find any useful knowledge, and when you do find it, one sees that the knowledge has been twisted to fit Lyman’s own agenda. Long dead are the days when knowledge was first gathered then conclusions derived, now statistics and data is twisted and molded to grant validity to ones own agenda.
In April I sat down with a friend at my house and asked about any urban legends or ghost stories he had encountered. After a couple legends he had seen in movies, he mentioned a haunted bridge about ten minutes away from downtown. He is a twenty-one year-old White male; his father owns an appliance store and his mother helps out with the books. He first heard this story in the ninth grade from a couple of friends. Supposedly, they had heard from kids who had actually been to the bridge and heard strange things at night. The bridge is located off of Uniontown road, between a couple old farms. He has not encountered the bridge first hand but still remembers the story surrounding it:
Instead of using the aunt as a way to warn her daughter of the consequences of having sex they may have warned her of men and the situations that girls may be in if they do not know some men’s intentions. The mother tells Kingston “Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don’t humiliate us” (Kingston 794). This statement leads us to believe that since the daughter is now considered a woman she has the possibility to shame her family, instead of a warning to protect her virtue it’s a warning to not disgrace the family. The man in the story may very likely have raped her and left her to deal with the consequences. The culture does not warn the daughter to be wary of men, but that she will most likely be the cause of her own
There’s this really small highway town in New Mexico called Cimarron, and it’s small now but in the late 19th century it was a bustling crossroads for all sorts of people – gold speculators, ranchers, oilmen, and especially those vagrant characters, like Billy the Kid, seeking refuge from whatever lawman was on his tail. In Cimarron is this hotel, the Santa Fe Hotel, and they say that this place is the most haunted hotel still in operation, in the west. The lights flicker on and off, and people, visitors just say they encounter really weird things – like if you go in this one room, you might see a woman out of the corner of your eye, sitting on the windowsill and looking out for someone. And when you turn to face her, she disappears, but all of a sudden you smell a subtle waft of strawberry-scented perfume. Weird – yet you still not sure if this is true? Sounds sketchy, I know. Oh – I should say this hotel is haunted because 23 people have been shot to death in the hotel, either from a bar-fight or card-game or something. Well I went to stay at the hotel for a night, before I headed on to a nearby Boy Scout camp. I went with my troop, and we all got our own rooms. Guess what room I got – the strawbe...
In conclusion, Gilman shared her story through a work of fiction, showing how women were really seen in society. The stereotypical man did not see women as an equal, but more as a puppet. Women would go along with whatever their husbands or male family members would say, because they were not allowed to voice their opinions and the men would not listen to them.
Many of the attitudes, beliefs, and mistaken ideas about rape have been with us for centuries. By looking at myths, such as “women ask for it,” and “it would do some women good to get raped,” from a historical perspective, lead us for better understanding how they evolved. Women are still seen as the property of men, are protected as such. Men and women are still taught to occupy very different roles in today’s world. Men are usually more aggressive, and women are seen as passive. (Vogelman) This socialization process is changing, but slowly.
The sparsely populated towns and countryside of the Pine Barrens of Southern New Jersey have often been the ideal setting of various ghost stories, including the infamous tale of the Jersey Devil, that are told in the more heavily populated Northern New Jersey and Philadelphia metropolitan regions. One of those “Piney” towns is home to a lesser-known, but equally interesting, tale of a street that is haunted by the ghost of a young boy. The story is set in the town of Atco, within Waterford Township, and is located approximately half-way between Philadelphia and Atlantic City, right in the heart of the Wharton State Forest section of the Pine Barrens National Reserve.
...demonstrates the oppression that women had to face in society during the nineteenth century. The nursery room, the yellow wallpaper, and the windows, all symbolize in some way the oppression of women done by men. She bases the story on one of her life experiences. Charlotte Gilman wrote the story because she believed that men and women should be treated equally.
Many people on this earth will commit a sin, they find they wish they had not, and 1 in every 5 Americans suffer from a mental illness. In a story named “Young Goodman Brown” by the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, the people in his story have all sinned and meet with the Devil. Then in another story named “The Yellow Wallpaper” by the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman the main character is suffering from a mental illness while her husband, a psychiatrist, tries to help her, but in doing so only makes her condition worse. Throughout both literary texts of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Young Goodman Brown,” the authors show numerous entries of Gothic Literature. And although “Young Goodman Brown” and the “Yellow Wallpaper” share similar Gothic elements, the two stories are very much different.
The subject of this report focuses on the phenomenon known as Urban Legend. Urban Legend, henceforth referred to as UL, is well known in the arena of folklore and other sorts of stories passed down through generations; however, it is relatively new to the world of literary composition as a legitimate genre to be analyzed and studied in texts by experts of literature. In fact, if it had to be labeled, UL would be considered a sub-genre of folklore by many of the experts. These stories are known as "modern oral folklore - typically a tall tale with a frisson of comeuppance of horror, related as having actually happened to a 'friend of a friend'" (Clute & Grant, 1997). UL is also considered to be very similar to myth and fantasy.
...ble to see that it actually incorporates themes of women’s rights. Gilman mainly used the setting to support her themes. This short story was written in 1892, at that time, there was only one women's suffrage law. Now, because of many determinant feminists, speakers, teachers, and writers, the women’s rights movement has grown increasing large and is still in progress today. This quite recent movement took over more then a century to grant women the rights they deserve to allow them to be seen as equals to men. This story was a creative and moving way to really show how life may have been as a woman in the nineteenth century.
Gay reminds us that, “womanhood feels more strange and terrible now because progress has not served women as well as it has served men” (Gay 2011, 132). In other words, women have been portrayed as degrading and inferior to men due to the inevitable consequence of patriarchal western societies, in which women have traditionally been correlated with a less status than men. Women’s Realities, Women’s Choices demonstrates this theory as a conventional view of sex and gender by emphasizing that “women have been associated with the body and nature and men with ‘self, ’soul,’ and culture, profoundly affecting how women have been valued, treated, and constrained in their opportunities and choices” (Hunter College Women 's Studies Collective 2014, 152). In addition, an origin myth for Christians is that Eve was made as a companion to Adam, and by defying God, eating the fruit from the forbidden tree of knowledge and convincing Adam to do the same, she brought evil into the world. This suggests that “it is men, not women, who engage in productive labor and that women deserve the pain of childbirth” (Hunter College Women 's Studies Collective 2014, 28).This myth originated from Christianity is generally held to be acceptable at the expense of individuality and has had influence on society, which has lead the authors to question views of sex and gender. Therefore, in the film Coffy, men played a role of dominance in demanding women to satisfy their sexual