ANDREW GABLE: The swamp monster hysteria of 1938

In February 1938 the seaside districts of Pensacola, Florida, were held in the grip of a most peculiar case of mass hysteria. This was the reign of a six-armed, six-legged, panther-headed gorilla called the Goon of Guillemard Street. The sewer monster made most of its rumoured appearances on Guillemard and Romana Streets. People were afraid to leave their homes, partly due to fear that the monster would drop off a roof or from a tree limb and attack them. On one occasion, the police were called out to St Michael's Cemetery on Alcaniz Street to investigate a sighting of the monster.

The Goon's death, though, didn't come at the hands of the police or the armed posses, which took to the streets. It came at the hand of the root of all evil: the almighty dollar.

It seemed that the merchants and businessmen of Southeast Pensacola were distressed at the loss of cash-flow inspired by the chimera. After all, if people wouldn't take to the streets from fear of something that made the man-eating clown in It look like a rank amateur of the sewer monster circuit, they certainly weren't spending any money. So the merchants got together and created an urban legend of their own; one which said the Goon tried to attack a car bound for Mobile, Alabama, and was killed.

The story may have been false but it killed the rumours. The Goon of Guillemard Street was no more.

The legend was spawned by an incident that January in (coincidentally, or were Pensacola's merchants wise to the Goon's origins?) Mobile, Alabama. Some kind of monster had slithered out from the swamps and slaughtered someone's dog. This one was christened the Frankenstein of Fisher's Alley, and once it had a catchy name the urban legends took off - it was covered in a bullet-proof shell. Its size? Some said it was cougar-sized. Some said Great-Dane-sized. Some even said Tyrannosaurus-Rex-sized. Nobody could agree. Some of the faceless experts that plague these sorts of accounts felt it was a wild dog, a wildcat, or a bear.

Then Frankenstein was caught. The swamp monster was only an otter. A big one, to be fair, but an otter.

It was thought that the stories of the Mobile monster migrated eastward, took root in Pensacola, and in good urban legend fashion were embellished. The monster was made more spectacular, and the Goon of Guillemard Street was born.