Everyone loves a great story, especially when it's accompanied by a good scare. And nothing is more frightening than when the object of these stories is right in your backyard.

The Pacific Northwest is home to Bigfoot sightings, New Jersey is the birthplace of the Jersey Devil, West Virginia has Mothman and its so-called prophecies, but here in Ventura County, we've got our very own legend.

The Beast of Billiwhack.

Half man, half sheep — or goat — with white fur and giant ram's horns, the Beast of Billiwhack — also spelled Billiwack and also called the Billiwhack Monster — was said to hang out at Santa Paula's now-defunct Billiwhack Dairy, where its first recorded sighting was sometime during the 1950s.

It's alleged that a 9-year-old boy came home with scratches across his arms and back and told his parents he was attacked by this strange beast — but maybe, just maybe, because he didn't want to tell Mom and Dad what he was really doing on private property.

After that, the sightings continued — mostly by children and teenagers — and, according to a 1964 Los Angeles Times article, deputies found one young trespasser holding a sword, intending to "slay the beast."

Another youth said he'd come across a "snarling, hairy man in a hole."

The article also says that a woman who leased the property once had to hold a group of 43 monster-seeking children at bay with a shotgun until the authorities arrived.

The stories about the beast and its supposed origins became more elaborate, just like the old-fashioned game of telephone, except on a much more sinister level.

It all started innocently and innovatively enough, when Swiss immigrant and Harvard graduate August Rübel established Santa Paula's Billiwhack Dairy in the 1920s as part of a bigger operation that included gold mining, oil drilling and a stock farm.

Dairy didn't last long

The dairy portion of the farm, built around 1924, was at that time state-of-the-art, but it foundered and soon went out of business.

Rübel and his wife then purchased historic Rancho Camulos in nearby Piru, and that's where they raised their five children.

Rübel's two surviving daughters, Nathalie Trefzger, 80, and Shirley Lorenz, 81, had little knowledge of the Billiwhack legend.

Lorenz, of Palos Verdes, knew there had been talk of some sort of ghost at the dairy long after their family left, but Trefzger, of Auburn, hadn't heard about it at all.

Both women have fond memories of Rancho Camulos, originally part of a 48,612-acre Mexican land grant given to the del Valle family. The remaining 1,800 acres is still owned by Rübel's descendents, with 40 acres designated as a historic landmark.

According to his children and the employees of the Rancho Camulos Museum, August Rübel made it his goal to preserve and maintain the integrity of the land and its rich history.

Rübel died in 1943 while serving in the American Field Service in Tunisia during World War II, when the ambulance he was driving hit a German land mine.

Lorenz and Trefzger were at an East Coast boarding school when they got the news of his death; more than 50 years later, they speak of him with an abiding love and admiration.

"Dad did so many wonderful things in such a short time," Trefzger said.

Monster tale grows

Still, if no good deed goes unpunished, that might explain how Rübel's European roots and military service somehow got twisted by local storytellers into a fantasy that became the monster.

Eventually, the child's story of the Billiwhack Beast evolved into a fictional tale of how agents of the OSS — Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the CIA — kidnapped Nazi scientists and stuffed them into secret, underground rooms at the dairy, where they were ordered to create a super-soldier.

The legend — attributed by historians and Internet sites to the local rumor mill — has the Nazis, unwilling to aid the OSS, instead deciding to undermine them by developing a monstrous being — half man, half sheep, and capable of incredible evil.

The story continues that the Nazi scientists, realizing their mistake, ended up destroying this race of mutants, except for one — the big, angry sheeplike dude that escaped and became the Beast of Billiwhack.

Certainly the stuff of low-rent horror flicks and not what you'd call the real deal, but there are some believers — or want-to-believers.

"The monster is an old yarn," said Oak View resident Richard Senate. "Whether it's true or not, I don't know."

Senate is a folklorist, author and ghost hunter who keeps an archive of the Billiwhack Monster's reported sightings.

"It's 8 or 9 feet tall and covered with white fur," Senate said. "It's got the head of a goat, with the horns of a ram, which gives it a bad attitude."

This bad attitude, Senate says, has caused it to scare folks by picking up boulders or wielding tree limbs. It is alleged to dine on rabbits — and the occasional family pet.

The monster also has been the object of teenagers' tales of brazen bravado.

"A fellow told me he tackled it and it was like a refrigerator with white fur," Senate said. "It picked him up and threw him into a tree."

AWOL beast

Apparently, the Billiwhack Monster has gone missing, as Senate's most recent notification of a sighting was in 1992. According to Senate, the spiky-haired young man who reported it then "said he heard something in the brush and saw its cloven hooves, and then it reared up its head," Senate said.

Senate had doubts about the youth's veracity, though he said most of the stories were told to him quite convincingly. Still, he said, he'd have to see it himself to believe its existence.

"It sounds very much like a Bigfoot critter, or it might be a mutant or someone in a costume," Senate said. "Whatever it is, it's certainly part of our folklore."

Indeed, the Beast of Billiwhack was featured several years ago in Santa Paula's annual Ghostwalk, a theater fundraiser, with longtime Santa Paula resident Louie Hengehold portraying a sheepherder who comes to a sad end at the hands — or, rather, hooves — of the monster.

The Ghostwalk's fictionalized tale of something that's certainly already fiction is just part of what makes a myth endure the test of time.

"Ghost legends like that depend on who's telling the story," Hengehold said. "They're going to fit it to where you're at."

Warning signs

Hengehold, 50, who grew up in the close-knit community of Santa Paula, heard the monster tale from a cousin long ago but maintains a sort of cheerful skepticism.

And Hengehold's not the only one who thinks the beast is more bull than sheep.

Marsh Meyers of the Tucson, Ariz.-based paranormal travelogue Outcast Earth (http://www.outcastearth.com) approaches this story and similar legends with what he and his team call a "jaundiced eye."

"Outcast Earth's issue with the Billiwhack Monster tale was that there was little to no traceable documentation about the monster," Meyers said in an e-mail interview.

"Most published sources, including very popular guide books to haunted places, said it all began in the 1950s' when a little boy claimed he was attacked by the monster," he said. "That genesis story' is repeated over and over, but no one ever cites who this boy was or even gives a precise date. That's a warning sign right there."

Meyers also says the connection to August Rübel is a "strange melding of historical fact, urban legend and outright fiction," particularly because Rübel hadn't even owned the dairy for about 25 years and had been dead at least a decade before the first alleged attack.

"Since most of the attacks' were reported by children and teenagers, we felt that this was probably an urban legend spread by kids hoping to scare each other," Meyers said. "Due to the similarity of the story to the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur,' it's possible that if children were spreading this tale that they were borrowing portions of the story from a very old legend they could have easily heard in school.

"Of course, Outcast Earth has no proof of that."

Perhaps the only thing that can be proved about the Billiwhack Monster is the distinct relationship between ancient Greeks and modern Americans. We all get a thrill from our scariest legends, whether the beasts come from the traditional mythology of Mount Olympus or urban folklore direct from the hills of Ventura County.