Radio Explains Folklore/Fairytales/Cryptids Badly IV (we’re up to four now, right?)!
As always, I present this after just barely glancing over source material, because the idea is “how much do I remember off the top of my head, and how accurate is it?”
Ok, here we go:
The South Carolina Lizard Man. Also known as the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp, or The Lizard Man of Lee County. (Cryptids count as folklore, right? Sort of home-grown folklore, anyway.) Actually, I want to say this is the give-or-take 29th anniversary of the darn thing’s “origin story”, so...happy anniversary, Lizard Man, I guess?
So to start out, we have to go back to the eighties. I think I saw something that said it was 1988, so late-eighties. And there’s this teenaged boy driving his car out near the Scape Ore Swamp in Lee County. At night, mind you. This whole thing happens with no more light than however bright headlights were in the 80s. And according to the kid, a big, scaly, something ran across the road in front of his car. If I’m remembering correctly, he may have hit it. Possibly it scratched up his vehicle?
I wanna say it jumped onto the roof of his car, or somebody’s car, but I may be thinking of a different monster tbh.
So apparently what he saw was like...six, seven feet tall, scaly, and had red eyes. Or red eyeshine, I guess, since whatever he actually saw would’ve been caught in the glow of the headlights. Like an alligator with a short snout and standing on its back legs, he said. And if I’m remembering the right monster story, they went back and interviewed the fella years later, and he stuck to that story. But to be fair, that could also have been the story of the Loveland Frog or the Dover Demon. They all sort of got muddled in my head after ten+ years. (When I was like, 12, I was really into cryptids and figuring out what was plausibly real, what was Definitely Fake, and what was Probably Misidentified.)
Y’know what, I would be interested to know if anybody had any good Godzilla costumes in the late 80s. I mean, that would beg the question of why someone would be running into a swamp at night in a Godzilla costume, but I personally find that idea far more entertaining than “temporarily bipedal Reptile Of Unusual Size”.
So supposedly this giant lizard humanoid thing runs across the road and into the Scape Ore Swamp, and this teenage boy goes and he tells the police. Which, I suppose, would be a responsible thing to do in the circumstances. Like if you see a large animal that is Very Much Not In It’s Rightful Habitat, you should definitely contact someone about that. But, ah, “a gator went jogging on its back legs and messed up my car” isn’t...isn’t really going to sound credible to most people, I suspect.
Well the story spreads after this. I mean, it’s the eighties, and people around here were apparently like “Ah, we’ve got our local answer to Bigfoot now!” And so people start making a Thing out of this Lizard Man business. We’re talking t-shirts, merchandise, etc. And the chamber of commerce was actually like “yeah, this will probably bring tourists. Carry on, folks.” So he became the sort of Lee County and Bishopville cryptid.
Ok, full disclosure here, I have actually been down to Bishopville, just because I wanted to see if I could find like, some Lizard Man signs or merchandise. But I went down on a Sunday, and like everywhere we went was closed. Pretty much everything was closed except like this CVS and some gas stations lol. The most we ended up seeing in the area we were in was some interesting topiary and this one barbecue place that had the Lizard Man working a grill painted on the wall. (And let’s be honest: that kind of thing was exactly why we’d gone down there in the first place). We didn’t actually go into the swamp though.
So there have been a handful of reported sightings over the years since the eighties. Some happened in the years after I moved here, so I actually remember them. People made kind of a big deal out of at least one of them, so I’ll tell you the ones I remember.
This was about ten years ago, give or take. So like, 2007-2008. This couple reports some kind of animal attack on one of their vehicles. General consensus seemed to be that whatever did it was going after one of the cats that lived on their porch, which had probably taken shelter up in the engine area of the car. I think they said like the cat beds and fur were all over the yard? (The cat, as I recall, got out unscathed.) And the front end of the car was just shredded. Like, the whole edge of the hood looked like it had been munched, there were deep tooth and claw marks in the body, it was a mess.
And for some reason, this was attributed to the Lizard Man.
I don’t know why. Like, if the thing was real, it has hands. Why would it just bite the car when it could probably pry the hood up?
And I remember, there was at least one cryptid-type show where an “expert” claimed that what people were actually seeing was a Bigfoot covered in algae.
I wish I was kidding.
I’m not kidding.
But anyway, they actually did do some lab tests on the blood and the damage to the car and it came back canine. So yeah, not Lizard Man. Just a dog that had enough bite force to really mess up a car. (Which is probably several breeds, come to think of it.) Either way, somebody’s dog needs to work on their impulse control, apparently.
So after that, there was a “Sighting” in 2015. First of all, some guy said he’d shot and possibly killed a Lizard Man. And the police were like “...you shot a guy that looked like a lizard? Do you...do you have a license for a firearm in this area, first of all? And where’s this body?”
And then the guy recanted his story and admitted that he’d made it up to “keep the legend alive” or whatever. Beats jailtime, I guess.
So that same year someone did this article about “Lizard Man sighting!” and I remember, I clicked it out of sheer curiosity, and there was footage of someone running around in a Godzilla costume. So that was pretty funny.
And then came the Eclipse.
During the Total Eclipse of 2017, some news station or other put out a tweet joking about the eclipse possibly drawing out the Lizard Man. Apparently some people took that seriously? Or they were pretending to in order to drum up tourism, either one is possible tbh.
So now the thing has its own festival. I wanna say it’s in April? And people evidently go and do scifi and fantasy cosplay there.
And that’s it, that’s what I remember about the SC Lizard Man right now. It’s not a whole lot, but the thing hasn’t been “sighted” that much since the 80s, I think.
