The Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp: Christopher Davis's encounter

Scape Ore Swamp runs through Lee County, South Carolina, four miles south of Bishopville. Browntown Road crosses it on a bridge. Local lore says Revolutionary-era volunteers named the place. In the summer of 1988 it earned a stranger reputation.

Christopher Davis was 17. He played on the high school basketball team and worked nights at McDonald's. Early on June 29, 1988, around 2 a.m., he was driving home along Browntown Road when a tire went flat. "I had just put the tire in the trunk when I see this thing coming from those trees," he told the Sumter Item. It was about fifty yards away, kicking up dust as it ran.

He described it as "green, wetlike, about 7 feet tall and had three fingers, red eyes, skin like a lizard, snakelike scales." Davis got into the car and later said, "I looked in the rear-view mirror and I saw something, and heard a crash on the roof," he said. "I thought I heard a grunt, and then I could see his fingers through the front windshield, where they curled around on the roof. I sped up and swerved to shake the creature off." It fell away. Later, Davis and his father found a twisted side mirror and scratches on the roof.

Davis did not go public at once, but his father insisted he report it to Sheriff Liston Truesdale. In mid-July the sheriff's office investigated a car damaged overnight at a Browntown home. It had toothmarks and scratches with hair and muddy footprints. Davis's account was linked to it, and The State broke the story on July 19. Two men told Deputy Chester Lighty that a creature had chased them out of the swamp while they drew water from a spring.

The story ran in more than 100 newspapers. Good Morning America broadcast live from the swamp. Radio station WCOS offered a $1 million reward for live capture. It was never claimed. The sheriff's office took hundreds of calls, some from Japan and New Zealand.

The Lee County Sheriff's Office made plaster casts of large three-toed footprints. In August 1988 Davis passed a polygraph. On August 5, Kenneth Orr, an airman from Shaw Air Force Base, reported wounding the creature on Highway 15 and handed over "scales" and blood. Two days later he recanted. He said he made it up "to keep stories about the Lizard Man in circulation." No formal conclusion was issued. "I can't prove it's real, and I can't prove it's not real," Truesdale said.

Benjamin Radford, writing in the Skeptical Inquirer, pointed to shifts from scales to mud and from twenty-five yards to fifty. He also noted that no photographs of the car damage exist and that Southern Marketing Inc., which managed Davis's paid appearances, arranged the polygraph privately. Radford called the account "quite literally incredible, riddled with both implausibilities and impossibilities." Alicia Lutz suggested Davis had met Lucius Elmore, a butterbean farmer guarding his shed, whose glasses reflected the taillights. Joe Nickell proposed a barred owl, with red eyeshine and splayed feathers read as fingers.

Davis kept to his story, though he said the fame hurt his basketball career and earned him about $3,000 from interviews. After he was killed on June 17, 2009, the legend lived on. A 2008 van attack turned out to involve dog blood, and a photo and a video surfaced in 2015. Bishopville now holds the Lizard Man Stomp and has put statues around town. Author Lyle Blackburn put it simply: "whatever it was, or whomever it was … moved on or disappeared."