The Outcast Earth team’s search for California-based monsters began with the strangest one of all: The Beast of Billiwhack. The beast is said to inhabit an abandoned dairy in Ventura County and is a strange conglomeration of human and non-human features. Eyewitnesses claim that the beast walks upright like a man or other primates, but has the head and horns of a ram, long claws on its five-fingered hands and is completely covered in grey fur. The animal’s alleged appearance is not nearly as strange as its genesis, however.

The story actually begins with the dairy the creature is said to stalk. The expansive facility was built over eighty years ago by a Swiss immigrant named August A. Rubel. Rubel was a bit of a celebrity in Ventura County and his name appears frequently in the local newspapers, usually in connection with the establishment of a new business venture which included gold mining, livestock and dairy production and oil drilling. On Friday, November 13, 1925, a newspaper article entitled “Establishment of Billiwhack Stock Farm Great Undertaking by A. Rubel” provided glowing coverage of the entrepreneur’s great stock farm, a sprawling complex that would include a dairy. (Many online sources refer to the facility as the Billiwhack Dairy, although it was much more than that. Contemporary sources referred to it as the Billiwhack Farm, which may be more descriptive of its complete function.)

But by early April of the following year, the Billiwhack Farm, with its ultra modern facilities and immense stock yards, had come to a screeching halt.

“All activity at Billiwhack farm in Aliso canyon above Saticoy has ceased,” read the front page announcement in the local paper. “Where many hundreds of thousands of dollars has been spent on construction of a model stock farm, and where several hundred men have been at work for many months, is quiet today. A small crew of men continuing the drilling of a water well are the only workers on the scene, according to a report from the ranch this afternoon. Many wild rumors were circulated about Oxnard concerning the reason for the halt in activity, but no one knew for certain...”

Although contemporary reports do not specify what led to the Billiwhack’s shut down, it could be assumed that Rubel over-extended himself financially. He never seemed to comment on why the farm operations ceased, other than to say he was taking a “breathing period.” By September 1926, Rubel had sold the farm to creamery business out of Los Angeles.

Many of the online reports of the Billiwhack Monster describe Rubel as being an “eccentric genius” which further heightens the mystique around the creature legend. It was doubtful, however, that Rubel was either. What he was was an innovative entrepreneur and many people of Ventura County looked to him as a source of jobs during the Great Depression.

Some published sources attempt to add even more mystery to the story by claiming that Rubel disappeared inexplicably during the World War II years. There was speculation that he was recruited by the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) and died during a secret mission, but the truth was less sensational. He was actually killed during the Allied invasion of North Africa where he had volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver. While in Tunisia, his ambulance hit a German land-mine and that was that.

Some sources state that Rubel continued to own the dairy up until 1943 when he finally had to declare bankruptcy, but there seems to be a problem with that timeline. By 1943, Rubel was already serving with the U.S. military overseas. He was killed on April 23rd of that year so it is doubtful that he could have been overseeing day-to-day operations of an dairy during that time. Additionally, newspaper reports state that Rubel actually sold off the Billiwhack to the Los Angeles Creamery in 1926, less than a year after it was constructed and after several months of being out of operation completely. A newspaper announcement from September 2nd read as follows:

BILLIWHACK SELLS DAIRY BUSINESS TO LA. CREAMERY CO.
The Los Angeles Creamery is the new owner of the Billiwhack dairy in this county. The information, while officially unconfirmed because neither Mgr. J. W. Snodgrass of the Billiwhack Dairy, nor August A. Rubel, owner, could be reached.. Mr. Snodgrass' was in Los Angeles today, The Courier was told, and Mr. Rubel was also out of the city. The deal is supposed to have been concluded yesterday. It involves only the milk routes in Oxnard and Ventura county, and does not affect the herd part or all of which is to be sold at auction. Delivery of milk today is made the name of the new company.

Bankruptcy notices related to Billiwhack and paid for by Rubel also appear in the Oxnard newspapers starting in late September of ’26. There seem to be few mentions of the Billiwhack Farm or Rubel after the facility was sold. In light of these documentable facts, the rest of the Beast of Billiwhack legend is dubious to say the least.

The first reported encounter with the beast was in the late 1950s, when a nine-year old boy returned home with deep scratches on his arms and back. He told his parents that he had been attacked by the monster after he and several friends snuck into the abandoned dairy. Although the police dismissed his story for what it obviously was – the fantasy of a young child who probably didn’t want to tell his parents the real source of his injuries – the rumor spread throughout the valley and became an entrenched urban legend. For years after, children and teenagers would fan the Billiwhack fires by daring each other to sneak onto the property in search of the elusive animal. According to some books, the most terrifying incident occurred in 1964 when the beast chased a group of young hikers through the canyon. Although the same book claimed that this incident “made headlines all over California,” OCE’s research couldn’t produce a single contemporary article or report on this sighting. It is telling, however, that once again the “witnesses” were children and teenagers.

Since you can’t have a rampaging monster without an outrageous origin story, the local rumor mill produced one. It was said that the animal was a mutant produced by August Rubel, working in secret on behalf of the U.S. government, to construct a super soldier to battle the Nazis. Whoever invented this fanciful history probably had little knowledge about Rubel himself other than he was the prominent businessman who had built the Billiwhack Farm. Forgotten over time was that Rubel lost the property within a year of building it and wasn’t even stateside during the war years. Both circumstances would have given him little time to engineer a combat-ready ram-man on the Billiwhack property.

In a strange footnote to the prominent family’s recurring bad luck, on September 26, 1959, Rubel’s 22-year old son, Peter, killed himself while playing a game of Russian roulette with three friends in front of a Ventura area cafe. “His companions... reportedly told police Rubel often played the game ‘for thrills,’” the article reported. There was no reported involvement by ram-headed men in this final family tragedy.


CIPHER: Legendary Progenitors for the Billiwhack Beast
Human beings have been creating hybrid monster-men as far back as recorded history and the Beast of Billiwhack appears to be an interesting link in that cultural chain. Keep in mind that he has plenty of relatives, starting with the oldest known man-beast, Endiku. For those of you not up on your world mythology, Endiku was a hairy wild-man who was beaten and then befriended by the great Babylonian hero, Gilgamesh. There were others though, including the Anglo-Saxon monster Grendel, Greek satyrs and a ten-foot man-beast the Chinese called feifei. No matter what you call them, humans seem predisposed to seeing man-like creatures creeping through the forests. Perhaps it’s some inherent memory we all carry of a time when we WERE the creatures creeping through the forests. Or perhaps they are just uncomfortable reminders of how narrow the differences between we and other animals actually are. Or in the case of the Beast of Billiwhack, maybe they all started out as a wild story told by a child. In any case, there’s no credible evidence that the Beast of Billiwhack ever existed except in the imagination. Outcast Earth couldn’t even independently confirm any of the published sightings on the creature and considering most of them were forty or fifty years ago, the ram-man is probably really showing his age by now. The old Billiwhack Farm complex is still intact near the end of Aliso Canyon Road outside of Saticoy, California, if you are interested in making the trip. Frankly, there’s not much to see unless you are really fascinated by old farm buildings and orchards. We never saw the Beast of Billiwhack. But then again, we never expected to.


POLARIS: The Minotaur By Any Other Name?
Cipher’s interesting comparison of the Billiwhack Beast to other legendary monsters had one glaring omission – the Greek legend of the Minotaur. The more I thought about it, the more the Billiwhack story sounded like classical myth. Think about it. A half-man, half-ram (or bull) is created through some kind of surreptitious shenanigans. In the Billiwhack tale it’s a secret government project designed to create a super warrior, whereas the Minotaur is created because King Minos’s wife likes livestock in a carnal way. The results, be them Minotaur or Billiwhack, are left to roam through the mazes of an underground lair and abandoned dairy, respectively, waiting for the odd stranger to show up so they can eat them. Coincidentally, the Billiwhack's victims appear to be primarily children and teenagers. The Minotaur fed on Greek maidens and youths. See? It’s the same story. I say that the hayseeds of the area just put their own spin on it, drawing on what they knew which was farm life and dairy production. Granted, that spin makes it kind of boring, but there’s probably not much to entertain a person in the desolate hills of Ventura anyway.