Spooky Season is nearly upon us, my loves! And so in advance celebration of the air finally freaking cooling down a couple degrees, I bring you badly retold ghost stories from my home state of South Carolina!
I'd have suggested Florida, since that's where I spent my early childhood, but tbh Florida is just so...Florida...that ghosts can't upstage the shenanigans of the living.
1. The Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp
My dude starts out in 1988 with police reports about a woman's car having claw and teeth marks, with muddy footprints and hair left behind. Ah yes, lizards: famously hairy creatures. After a teenager calls the cops about a seven foot tall "green" "wet-ish" critter doing its darndest to go car surfing -- and maybe snack on some teenage drivers if he gets the munchies -- the two reports kinda get conflated and the Lizard Man was born. Very shortly thereafter, the local chamber of commerce realized they could capitalize on a local cryptid, and he’s been a regional meme ever since.
Worth noting: 2 years before our scaly friend debuted, The Swamp Thing was filmed in the same state 🤔
2. Lavinia Fisher, the Demon Barber Innkeeper of Fleet Street Charleston
Because who doesn't like beds that are secretly trap doors, right?
That's the legendary modus operandi, at least. This was the 1800s, so what we know now might be as badly retold as anything I could make up, as a disclaimer.
The story goes that John and Lavinia Fisher ran an inn called Six Mile House, which is a strange thing to name a house, except when you have built it six miles from Charleston. Nice little place, but people started noticing that it seemed to be a branch of the Hotel California: you could check in anytime you liked, but you were never going to leave. But considering the lack of a Yelp column in the newspaper, this took a while to be noticed.
Lavinia would welcome wealthy guests in, make them comfortable, make them feel at home, and then make them poisoned tea. Not enough to immediately kill, just enough to drug them.
Now, you may be wondering what I initially wondered: But Radio, wouldn't they have tasted something odd?
And now I regret to inform you of the peculiarity that is South Carolina Sweet Tea.
Sweet Tea is definitely a Southern Thing around here, but I'll say this: the sweet tea I've had in other typically southern states at least tasted like tea. The stuff we have here around the capitol? It's syrup in a cup. You could put it in a feeder and attract hummingbirds. Pour it on some decorative ivory and your knickknacks will develop cavities. Its served cold because if you drank that much sugar while hot your teeth would instantly mutiny and flee your mouth.
Lavinia could've put whatever she wanted in that stuff and it probably would've been hard to tell. And Southern Manners would mean those poor saps would just pretend not to notice the taste. Either that, or their taste buds were already so destroyed by their own preferred blends of sweet tea that they wouldn't have known the difference anyway.
Once a guest got sleepy, John and Lavinia would show them to a guest room and leave them to go to bed. But seeing as you read the beginning of this section, you already know where that bed is going: straight through the floor.
I don't know how they set that up, but I'm picturing like, the frame just opening and dropping the whole kit and caboodle down.
Supposedly, they kept a row of spikes in the basement for the guest to drop onto. Honestly though, that would tear up the mattress or pallet wouldn't it? That's not a cost effective way to mug your inn guests and still hide evidence. So unless they had an unlimited supply of replacement bedding, we can probably ignore the spikes in favor of the rather more Sweeney Todd theory: that John was waiting downstairs with an axe to finish what the blunt force trauma started.
It all had to come crashing down eventually, of course.
The scheme, not the trapdoor, mind you.
Eventually a guest with taste came along: a word here used to indicate that he could tell the difference between tea and syrup in a cup. When Lavinia made her special brew, he took a sip and had a perfectly reasonable reaction:
But he didn’t want to hurt his host's feelings. After all, we can't all be skilled in measuring an Appropriate Amount of Sweetener. So he waited until Lavinia was busy, and dumped the tea down the sink. Of course, this had the side effect of him not being sleepy when he went to his room. He was still up and puttering around when John and Lavinia pulled the lever, and saw his bed disappear into the floor.
Naturally, he beat feet and informed the authorities that Six Mile House was not, strictly speaking, up to code. As a result, John and Lavinia were arrested and charged with highway robbery and mass murder, for which both were later executed. Nobody actually knows how many people died in the inn, nor exactly how involved Lavinia actually was.
3. One more for the road: Bigfoot
Yes, I said Bigfoot.
Generally, we stick to our Lizard Man, and maybe the Catawba River Runner. But there have been just enough Bigfoot Incidents for police in 2017 to put out a warning for locals not to shoot at any Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) Lest they harm a prankster in a monkeysuit.
Aaaaaand then September arrived. And with it, a surprise cameo by the big fella himself at Hunting Island State Park. I, personally, stand by my theory that many "Bigfoot" sightings are Regular Animals In Places They Definitely Shouldn't Be (like the monkeys that live in Wekiwa Springs, FL). I personally find that explanation both technically still a cryptid, and also very entertaining. Brownish black fur, five or so feet tall, walking upright, according to witnesses.
The park superintendent says he's taking it as a "credible incident", so make of that what you will.
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.
That fact or fiction or whatever it's called show of syfy is so dumb, but they're "investigating" the South Carolina lizard man on the rerun that's on right now and even though I've lived in Savannah for 20 years (it's technically supposedly a general "Low Country" monster, which Savannah is technically a part of even though our side of the river is called "the Coastal Empire" just because we wanted a different name from SC, or something) I've never heard about this supposed cryptid from ANYONE other than Brian's family before now--and I used to be all up in that cryptid shit.
Edit: just found out Josh Gates did an episode of the Lizard Man. Any Syfy documentary show is just as bs as any of the others, but I love me some Josh Gates. At least he'd provide an interesting amount of snark for his episode, unlike fact or fiction or whatever.
