My personal relationship with the Lizard Man

The reptilian humanoid that seemed to introduce my childhood home to the world has surfaced again, according to two unidentified people who emailed a Charleston television station.

I’m still ready to believe.

Of course, for the record, my family profited with dozens of dollars and immeasurable delight when my old Bishopville High School classmate Chris Davis came forward about an alleged sighting of the creature called the Lizard Man in 1988.

It was reported all over the world.

I was 14, uneducated by the internet and untouched by Hurricane Hugo. As far as I knew cotton was still king.

My father, brother and I sold souvenir baseball caps, T-shirts and green-tinted lemonade my mother called Lizard Juice from the bed of a pickup truck along the side of the road.

There’d never been such traffic in the Browntown community of Lee County, and there hasn’t been since. People who didn’t know that forest, fields and a few sharecropper homes dominated as far as the eye could see called to ask about hotels and international airports.

I met a man from England.

How could we not have fun?

Swamp things always seemed more likely than international tourists in Lee County. I grew up and my parents remain less than a mile from where water always stands in Scape Ore Swamp. The reported Lizard Man sightings have happened several miles south of there.

One woman reportedly took a photograph of a Lizard Man-like thing running along a tree line as the church she was visiting let out on Sunday morning. One man reportedly videoed such a creature while he was raccoon hunting earlier this year, and the woman’s recent report emboldened him to come forward, too.

Davis, an old baseball teammate who was murdered in 2009, claimed he’d stopped to change a flat tire around 2 a.m. one night 27 years ago when a 7-foot-tall, bipedal, scaly creature with red eyes and three long fingers on each hand rushed to attack him, damaging his car.

His father pushed him, then 16, to report the incident to police. Others came forward to describe their own encounters. Liston Truesdale, the sheriff then, was initially skeptical but documented evidence: scratched paint, dented metal, chewed chrome, tracks in the mud.

Some of the reports proved to be false, but over the decades Truesdale has refused to dismiss them all as hoaxes.

“I just don’t know,” Truesdale said. “I can’t prove it was a Sasquatch, and I doggone can’t prove it wasn’t. There are some things that just can’t be explained away. Too many people saw something. This stuff wasn’t made up. It might have even been a bear. I don’t know.”

I don’t know, either, so how dare I say? I do know the people there are generally kind, good-hearted and not given to lie and deceive. I do know the most significant economic development to hit town since then are a prison and a landfill. I do know I’m not the only one from Lee County who can spot a good time.

And I know I’m not the only one who remains ready to believe.

- Follow Michael Burns on Twitter @MikeNearGreer