It’s been 35 years since the reports of a strange creature damaging vehicles near Scape Ore Swamp, but the legend lives on in the Pee Dee.
By Jodi Helmer
The car parked on the banks of Scape Ore Swamp near Bishopville was riddled with deep scratches and teeth marks; hair and muddy footprints were also discovered in the area. When Sheriff Liston Truesdale arrived at the site to investigate, locals had gathered and shared their suspicion that the Lizard Man had caused the damage to the vehicle.
“Sheriff Truesdale said, ‘What do you mean a lizard man?’” says Lyle Blackburn, cryptic researcher and author of Lizard Man: The True Story of the Bishopville Monster.
The evening of July 14, 1988, was the first time the sheriff had heard about local sightings of an upright brown or green creature covered in scales—and the reporter riding along with Truesdale thought it would make a sensational article.
After the article was published, local teenager Chris Davis showed up at the sheriff’s department to file a report. His car had been damaged, too, and he claimed to have seen the lizard-like monster that was the perpetrator.
“[Chris’] incident had happened a couple of weeks prior…and his dad suggested he just keep quiet about it,” says Blackburn. “When they saw [the article] they thought, ‘Maybe there is something to this…’”
Davis told Truesdale that he was driving home from work late at night and pulled over to repair a flat tire. He was on the side of the road when he saw an amphibious creature that stood seven feet tall and had three fingers, red eyes and green lizard-like skin walking toward him. Davis said he got back in the car and tried to drive off when something terrifying happened.
“He tells this very dramatic, somewhat cinematic description of seeing the creature and getting in his car and zooming off and he thinks the creature is gone but all of a sudden there's a thump on [the roof of his car] and he looks up and he sees the creature,” says Benjamin Radford, folklorist, author of Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries and editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine.
Radford calls the sighting “the most dramatic and sensational version” of an encounter with the creature, and it captured national attention.
Spawning a media frenzy
News of the swamp creature, who was also dubbed the Bishopville Monster and the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp, captured widespread media attention. An August 1988 edition of the Washington Post had the headline, ‘Lizard Man’ Claims a Casualty and The Sunday Times reported, Sightings of a monster lizard from the swamp has struck terror into a small community in South Carolina. WCOS, a radio station in Columbia, South Carolina offered a $1 million reward for the live capture of the Lizard Man. Blackburn notes that Good Morning America even did a live interview from the swamp.
In August 1988, Davis passed a polygraph test, and the results were shared with the public. Radford speculates that the test was part of a publicity stunt to help garner more media attention and enable the teenager to capitalize on invitations for personal appearances.
“They made a big deal [in the media] about how he passed the lie detector test [but]…if Chris Davis genuinely believed that he saw [and] what he said, then he would pass a lie detector—and if he hadn't passed, you can guarantee that we wouldn't have heard about it,” Radford says.
The fact that Davis passed a lie detector test and Sheriff Truesdale vouched for him lent credibility to the story—and the media frenzy surrounding it fueled additional reports of Lizard Man sightings: The creature was spotted near Scape Ore bridge, on McDuffy Road and Springdale Road, and running across the runway of a local airstrip.
On August 5, 1988, Kenneth Orr, an airman from Shaw Air Force Base, claimed he shot the Lizard Man on Highway 15. He later admitted that it was a hoax designed to keep people talking about the creature (he was charged with filing a false police report).
“It was 1988 and it was like a Creature from the Black Lagoon had come to life in modern times and it had all of these interesting aspects too it from the swampy area where the creature had been seen to other sightings; the Lizard Man was probably our closest real-life counterpart,” Blackburn says. “It was something that swept the town into a frenzy and got a lot of news coverage that made it something beyond the small town.”
The Bigfoot connection
The legend of the Lizard Man has a lot in common with other monster folklore. For starters, there is often one main sighting that becomes iconic.
Radford points to the 1967 Patterson/Gimlin film showing an unidentified creature walking across the screen as the most familiar sighting of Bigfoot and the photo that Sandra Mansi shot at Lake Champlain in 1977 that shows swamp monster known as Champ as common “reference sightings” of famous monsters. In Lee County, the late-night encounter between Chris Davis and the Lizard Man became the centerpiece of the legend.
Sightings continued into the 1990s (with an additional documented sighting in October 2008) but there are no known photos or videos of the Lizard Man.
The fact that there were few sightings and zero evidence of the existence of the swamp creature didn’t stop the residents of Lee County from coming up with sensational stories that are the hallmark of monster legends.
“The bulk of the evidence alleged for Bigfoot are footprints…[and] when people talk about Chupacabra, they're not talking about seeing some terrifying spiky-backed or hairless creature; they're talking about finding a dead chicken or dead goat that seems to have their blood sucked out and saying, ‘What could have done this?’” says Radford. “So, they’re finding ‘evidence’ of visitations from these monsters when, in fact, there are mundane explanations.”
The legend that stayed local
Despite multiple reports of unexplained vehicle damage and sightings of the Lizard Man in the summer of 1988, the fascination with the swamp creature was short-lived.
“If someone had made a hit horror film [about Lizard Man] right off the bat, he would be way more famous but there wasn’t enough to make it became part of
general cultural knowledge, like Bigfoot who was made into a pop culture icon,” says Blackburn. “But even though it was confined to a small window of time, it affected the town forever.”
Take local dive Harry and Harry Too, just off Interstate 20 heading into Bishopville. The Lizard Man themed restaurant is packed most weekdays with visitors heading down I-20 and locals alike. Menu items include the popular Lizard Man burger, featuring Harry’s pimento cheese, applewood bacon and “house sauce.” The Scape Ore hoagie features grilled chicken, caramelized onions and provolone. With an ode to the Lizard Man, the rustic restaurant is a fun place to check out memorabilia.
In other places, monster folklore has sparked waves of tourism. In Inverness, Scotland, home of the Loch Ness monster, there are “Nessie” t-shirts, hats and mugs; Kelowna, British Columba, home of Ogopogo, the monster that lives in Lake Okanagan, erected statues honoring the folklore; and Point Pleasant, West Virginia, built a museum that honors their local monster, Mothman.
The Lizard Man did bring Bishopville some attention. The South Carolina Cotton Museum hosts a Lizard Man exhibit complete with newspaper clippings, t-shirts and other paraphernalia related to the swamp creature.
“There are a lot of these strange stories and these strange creatures that have been seen around small-town America, and some of the towns have embraced it and really benefited,” Blackburn says.
Museum director Eddie Grant told South Carolina Public Radio that the exhibit was a popular local attraction, adding, “We have people here from Texas, Oklahoma, North Carolina, New Jersey. People are just fascinated by it. We actually had a film crew from Japan come in not long ago, just to interview and take pictures for a documentary.”
In 2018, the museum hosted the first annual Lizard Man Festival and Comic Con to mark the 30th anniversary of the initial sightings. The event, which ran until 2020, attracted reptiles, costumed attendees and panel discussions about the origins of the Lizard Man.
But the decades-old monster sightings failed to spawn a solid tourism industry in Lee County.
“It's not surprising that the story has waned a bit,” Radford says. “It was this weird one-off sighting in 1988 [and] there weren’t repeated sightings to fuel it or keep it up…The Lizard Man is a bit of an ossified mystery that is sort of frozen in time; there was a huge splash and then it faded away.”
If You Go
Harry and Harry Too
719 Sumter Hwy.
Bishopville, SC 29010
South Carolina Cotton Museum
121 W. Cedar Lane
Bishopville, SC 29010
sccotton.org