Christopher Davis was driving home from work on at 2:00 AM in 1988 down the road bordering the edge of old Scape Ore Swamp. It was a balmy June night, the kind when the wildlife around the swamp would howl at the moon. It had been a long day. Davis heard a popping sound, felt the weight of the car shift as one of the tires beneath him blew out. As he finished changing the tire, he heard a thumping sound behind him, like something running on bare feet. He spun around and immediately was confronted by a two-foot tall creature, muscular in build, covered in scales, with three toes on each foot. As Christopher leapt back into the car, the creature climbed quickly on top of the roof, digging its long claws into the roof and clinging on. Davis swerved the car repeatedly in an effort to remove the creature, but it held fast, clawing at the roof. He could see its claws through the front windshield as it tried to gain entry. At first Davis’ story was met with skepticism when he returned home to Bishopville. Then the reports started pouring in to the local constabulary. Frantic people all told stories of bizarre lizard-people attacking cars and causing general mischief in the area. The Bishopville police department was decidedly skeptical, but didn’t want to discount the testimony of so many people. People were most certainly seeing something, but what?
Two weeks after Davis’ frightening encounter, the police discovered tracks around the swamp that appeared to belong to a creature similar to the one described by witnesses. They were 14 inches in length, three toed and completely unidentifiable by any experts. Johnny Evans declared that the prints were unlike anything he had ever seen before, and could definitely not have been from some sort of mutated creature.
Tourists and hunters began showing up to the small town, egged on by their own curiosity and a $1 million reward for the creature’s capture offered by radio station WCOS. By the end of the summer the reports slowed to a trickle and eventually stopped.
Then, twenty years later in 2005 the creatures came back. A woman in Newberry South Carolina, nearby Bishopville reported two strange creatures, two feet tall with scaly skin stalking the yard outside her home. Amused, Michael Kennedy, the deputy on duty told her that the lizard-men liked to check on humans from time to time. Amusement soon turned to horror, however, when two years later the token vehicular damage with telltale claw-marks appeared in February of 2008 on a car belonging to Bob and Dixie Rawson in Bishopville. Blood samples were also found at the vehicle. Nearby, a cow and coyote lay dead in a field soon after this incident. Perhaps the cow was mauled by a coyote, but what mauled the coyote? The blood samples were sent to a lab, but were found to be inconclusive. What was the creature these people saw? Were there more than one, as the woman in Newberry reported? It seems possible that if this wasn’t a case of mass hysteria, there could be something hiding in the swamps of Scape Ore Swamp. And unlike many other cryptids, this one appears to be aggressive and unafraid of humans.