This blog is for all of you people who call and say, “Where can I get more of your work?” As if I’m not working hard enough. Anyway, this blog contains no small talk. This week we go on the road to hunt down a Lizard Man. Next week: Infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan. - tms
WANTED: LIZARD MAN
By: T.M. Shine
Height-7 feet. Race-green. Eyes-red. Distinguishing features-6 toes.
BISHOPVILLE, S.C. — The voice of Sheriff Liston Truesdale sounded weak and shaken over the phone. I had called to ask if I was too late, if everyone had lost interest in the Lizard Man. I was getting my answer.
“We found tracks yesterday. We sent the dogs out but the rain got so heavy we had to pull back.” He continued as if he were questioning himself. “What kinda dogs should we be using anyway? We’re using bloodhounds as if it’s human, but if it’s a beast, we should be using coon hounds or deer hounds. We don’t know what it is.
“The people are on edge,” he paused. “Someone’s gonna get killed.”
I was on the next plane. By going to Bishopville, S.C., I had high hopes for finding a reason for life on Earth as we know it. Or at the very least, finding the reason for creating new life in a small town with a big back yard; something new on an old tired planet.
We are attracted to the simple idea that something has eluded us all this time: While we dug for oil, blasted for gold, polluted the atmosphere and cruised the vacuum for pictures of Venus, someone or something has been hiding out in our bushes or mountains, not wanting to have anything to do with us. It is as if it knows it’s power would disappear if it were ever discovered. The biologists would come and catalog it, study it’s habitat, make it just another fact of nature. The mystery, the possibility of some unknown magic, would vanish. The world would once again be diminished, a place where only what we can see and touch with our own hands is real. A place where there is life and there is death and there is nothing before or after.
But that place is not Bishopville.
At least, not for a few weeks last summer. This is the story of a town where they stare into the darkness and see things: dollar signs, a three-toed thing with green blood, a grand discovery. It is the story of a town filled with possibilities and with questions: Why do we have aspirations of finding something that doesn’t exist when our first instinct is going to be to kill it? Why are average Americans willing to ignore the mockery, take the heat, answer the questions and, until the Lizard Man rears it’s ugly face in downtown Bishopville, breath for their creature and give him a chance at life on Earth as we know it?
First someone’s car was chewed up. Then came the story of a young man fleeing from a seven-foot lizard-like creature while changing a tire, and now the tracks. The sheriff is tired, the locals in good humor on the surface but a bit shaken when the sun goes down and the media, stuck in between conventions, is frantic for details.
When a legend comes to town the first few weeks are always the hardest.
“If it’s a beast, we’ll catch it,” the sheriff informs me. “If it’s a prankster, we’ll arrest him. We’ll charge him with ...something.”
The man is exhausted, coming off a week of hysteria brought on by the Lizard Man and fueled by Columbia radio station WCOS’ offer of $1 million reward to anyone who can bring in the Lizard Man alive, with the emphasis on “alive.”
“One guy called in saying he’d bring it in alive but it sure would be damaged,” Jerry McCracken, WCOS spokesman, said.
The station is not worried about coming up with a million. Even if it is brought in, McCracken figures, they could always sell it to Michael Jackson for two million. “We’ll end up making a profit,” McCraken boasts.
The castings they made from the tracks lie in the corridor of the sheriff’s office. Every few minutes the sheriff is putting on his sport coat and being photographed hugging one of the prints, usually the one where the three toes really stand out. They are very impressive.
When I finally saw the car with the chrome chewed off I was taken by the observation that the family’s other car seemed to be in much worse shape. As for the short hairs left on the vehicle, the biologist from the State Wildlife and Marine Resources Department said he believed a red fox was probably the culprit.
In the case of the young man, Chris Davis, who described a creature with red eyes and long fingernails chasing his car, this had happened weeks before the car chewing and had never been reported. The sheriff’s office sought him out after the rumors of his sighting seemed to tie in with the attack on his car. The boy had never come forward. Who would believe him?
About half the people would be a good guess. In a town with a population of 3,500 everyone seems to know the boy. He’s a good kid. He wouldn’t cook up something like this.
“We know he saw something,” is the general consensus.
In a basement conference room we sit at a long hardwood table with a Dictaphone that recorded Chris Davis’ original statement. A deputy sits at a desk in the corner, oblivious or just plain tired of the sound of Chris’ voice. The statement was taped weeks after the incident but you can still feel the fright in this shallow room. “I was at the edge of the field….finished changing the tire...came up behind me,” the voice speaks in fragments.
“Was it human?” the sheriff asks.
“No.”
“Was it animal?”
“No.”
“What color was it?”
“Black green.”
“Did you see its face? Can you describe its face?”
“Eyes...red eyes,” the voice quavers.
“What else can you tell me about what you saw?”
There is no outpour. The voice struggles. “Huge clawed hands, wet like, seven feet tall, pushed the car forward with the emergency brake on.”
He speaks quietly about the thing chasing him after he took off in his car. The sheriff asks him how fast he was going when the thing caught up with him. The kid may be nervous but he’s not stupid. He doesn’t want the chief slapping a speeding ticket on him now ex post facto. Is that what this is all about? He must be thinking. Without missing a beat he says, 35. All right. I make a note: Sheriff, how fast would you be going if the Lizard Man was chasing you?
The media, which created at least half of the monster, is taking the big city attitude, snickering under their questions and talking about the typical backwoods South Carolina mentality from a hot, sleepy, little town. “It’s a hoot,” a reporter told me.
Jean Alexander, the office receptionist and secretary, is accumulating a pile of apology letters from area newspapers. “If they get nasty, I can get nasty too,” she says. Jean doesn’t care to be ridiculed. One infamous incident involved a reporter’s description of her bobby-pinned spit curls fighting the humidity.
Back in the sheriff’s office, Channel 4 from Greenville is beginning an interview. With the light in his face and the microphone on his lapel, the sheriff waters down his smile with a swipe of his tongue and the lady reporter starts with a snide question. “About this Davis kid, he sounds kind of slow on the telephone, is he all there?”
Tthe sheriff ignores the remark.
“This picture is ridiculous,” she says, holding up a drawing of what Chris Davis saw. “It looks like a scarecrow without a hat except for the distinctive characteristic of three fingers on each hand.
“It’s what the boy saw,” Truesdale says calmly.
“Isn’t there something preposterous,” her back stiffens, this is the big one, “about the sheriff’s office chasing a Lizard Man through the swamps of Lee County?”
“Crimes have been committed,” the sheriff says. “We can’t ignore that. We have to investigate. If I wasn’t doing anything, you’d be saying, ‘Sheriff, you’ve got these tracks here, what are you gonna do about them?’”
“Sheriff, I’ve asked you this in several different ways and haven’t got an answer yet [She’s playing hardball now]. Let me put it more simply. Do you think this is good for Lee County?”
The sheriff looks cross-eyed down at this microphone and smiles that sweet smile again. “I think it gives us the opportunity to show what a friendly town we’ve got here and how well we handle the media.”
Later on, out on the front steps of the courthouse, this same newswoman is fighting with a photographer about who got there first. Their noses are almost touching and then the sheriff laughs and steps out to handle the big city mentality.
A town employee named Billy Moore, who wears a sheriff’s baseball hat and mans the phones, handling the PR, says, “If the media gets cute with me, I get cute with them. I tell ‘em it’s a disgruntled delegate who got lost on his way back from the convention or it’s Tammy Faye without her makeup. I give it right back to them. But if they take it serious, then I take it serious.”
They are getting up to 200 calls a day from as far away as Australia and London. Some people are taking it very seriously. “Mostly from the West Coast, California,” Billy laughs. “One expert calls us every day, wants us to fly him out here. He ain’t got no funds.”
Eric Beckjord, founder of the National Cryptozoological Society records, looks into sightings of creatures whose existence is questioned by scientists. From his home base in Malibu, Calif., he says Davis’ description coincides with other Bigfoot descriptions except for the green skin and the claws. “You’re dealing with a skunk ape,” he insists. “They like to run alongside cars and look at you. They usually travel in pairs and stink.”
At Rook’s gun and bicycle shop on mainstreet they have a turntable with an AK47 semi-automatic spinning around on it with a sign that says, “Lizard Getter.”
“We just participatin’. Don’t mean nothin’ by it,” they say. By participating they mean they are joining every other shop owner in town with some kind of display. Up and down the street there is everything from huge inflatable lizards to toy Godzillas.
Down the road at Kelly’s Exxon, gas has taken a backseat to T-shirts, hats and “Lizard Man for President” buttons. “They just keep selling and I keep more,” the station manager said. “I don’t what’s out there. I don’t care.”
The mechanic on duty simply says, “It’s for real.”
In Discount Video there are big signs and pictures of the Lizard Man. “It’s really the children who are scared to death,” the clerk tells me. “They won’t even come in here because of the pictures and stuff.”
You have to wonder what it would be like to be a child in Bishopville. Your parents are talking about it, it’s on the radio, in the newspapers, on TV. The credibility factor is enormous.
“Most of the people that come in here aren’t laughing it off,” the clerk tells me. “I’m taking it dead serious. I was out there while the tracks were still fresh. I saw where he knocked down trees. There was a woman out there dressed from head to toe in aluminum foil. She claimed he was attracted to shiny things and she was gonna draw him out. She nearly cooked herself. This is serious.”
An elderly man in a hurry approaches and sends the girl into the back room for an X-rated video. “Any one,” he says waving his hand. It doesn’t matter. “Let him set foot on my property,” he yells. “I don’t care ‘bout no reward. Let him set foot on my property and he’ll be beggin’ for mercy,” he says, clinching my arm.
When the radio station promoted its Lizard Hunt, they dubbed it “a romp in the swamp” after Scape-Or-Swamp, presumed to be the creature’s true home. But all the incidents actually took place in a community called Browntown about four miles outside Bishopville. Billy Moore, the record keeper, drove me out the long, narrow, winding road to visit the damaged car, the flat tire scene, the spot where the tracks were found. It’s all part of the packaged tour. Of course all the residents in the area are black and said to be keeping their doors bolted at night. “They’re awfully superstitious you know,” I was told more than once. This is still the south.
In a one-room shack just before the bridge leading to Scape-Or-Swamp a woman and two children sit by a blazing fire in the broad daylight. The temperature is 94 degrees.
Before visiting the swamp we go by the location where Davis had been changing his tire. It is a wide open area with a soybean field on one side and cotton on the other. Right nearby is Elmore’s bean farm and Billy confides that he wonders if old Elmore didn’t have something to do with this. Elmore had his air conditioner stole twice and some other things taken.
“I asked him if he didn’t put on some headgear to scare people off and he just laughed,” Billy says.
He tells me there used to be drunks out wandering these roads late at night all the time, but since this happened no one’s been out. “We don’t have no more problems with drunks,” he says.
Scape-Or-Swamp has a nice bridge, a stream and an artesian well spouting fresh drinking water. It’s a good place to hang out, I guess, and that’s what people have been doing there since it became infamous. It was on the bridge where the mob of hunters gathered over the weekend to go after the Lizard Man with a bounty on his head.
At night the swamp is crowded with people, thoughts and schemes. “What I want to do,” a man is brainstorming, “is get a couple of bushels of produce and a goat. We put the lettuce and tomatoes out and hang up the goat and see what he goes for. Is he a vegetarian or carnivorous?”
“I’m sure he drinks from the well,” another fella says.
“If he eats cars, what makes you think he drinks water?” a young boy questions him.
“I been hunting these woods for 15 years.” a grizzly character mentions, “and sometimes the hollering and screaming you hear coming out of that swamp, you just can’t explain.”
Another thinker wants to know: “This swamp is awfully close to the interstate, who’s to say something didn’t jump out of one those circus trucks.”
“I know one thing,” a man speaks up. “It wasn’t the rain that stopped those dogs from going into the woods the other night. I saw them. They wouldn’t budge. Something was out there.”
“Ain’t nothin’ in the universe that ain’t afraid of a pack of dogs,” Grizzly says.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” the man shakes his head.
Three young girls with a deck of cards are playing War on the hood of the T-shirt wagon under the moonlight as the adults’ imaginations wander into the night. Is there a Lizard Man? They shrug. “Daddy brings us here every night and we ain’t seen nothing but mosquitoes.”
Good Morning America from Elmore’s butterbean shed. The satellite dish is set up and the sheriff is standing motionless before the swamp. It is 7:30 in the morning and the dawn is perfect–fog is rolling off the fields. You can barely see in front of you. The sight of the sheriff in the clearing, alone, surrounded by the mechanics of wires, lights and cables as he stares into the Teleprompter with one hand on his ear plug, is a work of art, a tribute to the American landscape. I am mesmerized by its consequences.
After standing as a pillar of the community for 45 minutes, the sheriff gets his prompt from the prop man: “Thirty seconds and we’re live.”
We can hear the questions and the answers are barely audible. The sheriff’s head is nodding and smiling to the beauty of it all. He knows what he’s doing. He says something about the weather and you all come visit and get some of these T-shirts.
It’s a wrap and the sheriff is shaking hands and shaking off the fact that he’s just gone national. Mrs. Truesdale is on hand and I ask her what she thinks of all this. She just smiles and straightens her husband’s tie.
By Elmore’s barn I spot Chris Davis leaning up against a post wearing an Eagle Snacks T-shirt. I guess he didn’t pass the Good Morning America screen test.
“Have you seen the movie Alien vs. Predator?” I ask him.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Was it before or after the incident?”
He only smiles.
The sheriff rushes over and puts his arm around Chris so everyone can get a picture of them together. You can see the boy feels awkward. Then sheriff Liston Truesdale does something magnificent. He begins interviewing Christopher Davis himself, right in front of all of us as we huddle around. He has been on live and the adrenaline is flowing.
“You don’t take drugs or alcohol, do you Chris?” he asks.
Chris shakes his head.
“Tell everyone about the size of those hands again,” the sheriff laughs, turns toward Chris’ ear and whispers and then turns to the small group of reporters on the scene. “For those of you in the media, Chris has just agreed to take a polygraph and get hypnotized. Right, Chris?”
Chris nods.
The woman besides me, who smells like a mixture of gasoline and honey and is dressed like it is Sunday, says to me, “I know how he feels because of what I saw.”
“You saw a Lizard Man or something?” I ask, intrigued.
“No, a flying saucer. You might remember a group of us saw it in North Carolina. That’s how I got involved with Chris.” Seems she’s become Chris’ guardian angel, helping him through this crisis period.
“I was working on some low-profile ghost stuff for Oprah when this broke,” she goes on, pulling out a glossy of her and Oprah Winfrey standing next to a soda machine. She has the same dress on.
It was in the early morning hours when Deputy Wayne Atkinson and state trooper Mike Hodge found themselves on a dirt road not more than a quarter mile from where the car was eaten. They got out of their car to turn it around and saw that something had walked over their tire tracks. Thus the discovery of fresh prints by two law men. Fourteen-by-seven inch paw prints with three toes that dug into the ground in six foot strides.
“I’m convinced there is something out there,” Hodge said. “If a joker were out there and the law pulled up, they would have gotten out of there.”
Most legends aren’t this lucky, getting the stamp of approval from two well-respected officers. The footprints gave the Lizard Man a second wind and a new identity. He became a Bigfoot. Not because anyone got a better look at him or came up with a better description, but because he had a big foot.
“We thought it was dead until the prints,” WCOS said. “We’re putting our promo back on the air and we’ll be playing The Ballad of the Lizard Man.”
Their reward spot was revised slightly to include any discovery of a new species between five and seven feet tall. It’s wide open now
Up on Main Street, U.S.A., where the signs read, “Lizard Man Phone Home,” “Lizard Man Slept Here” and “Lizard Man’s Entering the Big Butt Contest at Lisa Moses Disco,” you can actually drive down the street and see people up on ladders and the signs changing before your eyes. Lizard wing specials are turning into Bigfoot burgers.
The sheriff is out on the courthouse still flying that twinkle in his eye. He’s giving them everything they want. He’s starting to remind me of Monk. I can’t keep up with his mental strategy. One minute he’s telling me he can’t believe how blown out of proportion this hoax has gotten and the next thing he’s out in the sunlight telling the reporters that it could be the drought or the greenhouse effect forcing these creatures into the area.
The greenhouse effect. Oh, baby.
He says they’re going to set up an information center up at the truck stop on Interstate 20 to take some of the load off his office, sort of a Lizard central with a toll free number.
Word is, a talk show in Seattle (Sasquatch country) has offered to fly the sheriff up, all expenses paid, and he’s mulling it over. “I might go just for a rest,” he says.
They have three mysteries: the car eating, the sighting and the prints. And if we could add a fourth it would have to be: Is this good for Lee County? I thought this over by the swamp as the media tried to get to the bottom of this by focusing on the surface. I watched as a camera man from Augusta news station stood with his lens and head aimed into the murky water for over an hour to capture a three-second log-in-the-swamp shot for the six o’clock news. When he packed up I noticed the tripod left these tremendous tracks with three toes.
Late at night I took a final ride out to where Chris Davis had changed his tire on that fateful night at 2 in the morning. He doesn’t drink or take drugs but he drives around at 2 in the morning. The area is desolate, without sound, but more overwhelming than scary. The fields are below your knees and you can see for what appears to be miles on a moonlit night. It’s an expansive place for the imagination, with the swamp looming down the road, supposedly filled with wild hogs, dogs, panthers, rattlers, maybe a circus bear or two and a million places to hide or get lost. But even with it’s openness I don’t know if it’s recent use is much different that the way we use the confines of our own bedroom closets to conjure up creatures.
The only difference is if you notified the police and had them come to search the house it would only take a few minutes to shine the flashlight in your closet and tell you to go back to bed. But out here in the local jungle they could search every day and still never be sure.
One fella I spoke to said, “It’s half human and half alien. It can disappear and reappear whenever it wants.” That would be an awful trick to play on a people who have to know what exists and what doesn’t.
Of course there’s still those darn tracks. But they weren’t even necessary, were they? The tracks of our own imaginations run much deeper. Neither the small town or big city mentality can control the imagination. All we have to do is give our monsters room to grow and they become legends for generations to come. Those tracks will hang in the town hall and Chris Davis will never be more that the boy who was chased by the Lizard Man.
After the initial hysteria quiets down the legend will belong only to the town of Bishopville, S.C. They gave birth to it. They gave it life. The fact that the Lizard Man can live in their swamps forever whether he exists or not is the beauty of it.
And if it keeps the drunks off the streets, that’s all the better.