As the story goes, the Goat Riders were a gang of ruthless robbers who made the Overmaas region (the current Limburgs) an unsafe place to live from the 1730s to the 1780s. It was said that the members had made a pact with Satan and rode through the sky on the backs of goats.
Recent historical research seems to discard the truthfulness of that story entirely. The gang of the Goat Riders would appear to be a myth, deliberately made up by the law enforcers of those days, as a pretext for torturing suspects while investigating some ten burglaries. Suspects would be tortured to the extent that they would release new names of the 'members' of the gang. This would lead to hundreds of people receiving the death penalty for only a few thefts in total.
Interesting would be to learn the reason of the law enforcers and judges to take these extreme measures in fighting so few and petty crimes.
Other story tellers see the Goat Riders primarily as a sort of Robin Hood of the Low Countries.
There are two periods in which the Goat Riders were said to be active, around the 1740s and the 1780s.