Hot damn, Lizard Man is back!

Once upon a time, I worked for a daily newspaper in a smallish South Carolina town. I happened to work there when the Lizard Man sensation hit back in 1988. Lizard Man was, I guess, South Carolina's version of the Legend of Boggy Creek, Arkansas' very own Bigfoot. In the summer of 1988, a resident of Bishopville in Lee County, South Carolina, claimed he saw a 7-foot-tall lizard-like creature, birthing the Lizard Man legend. As a South Carolina newsman at the time, I can tell you that we had a blast with Lizard Man that summer.

Well, Lizard Man apparently is back:

LEE COUNTY -- Lizard Man, South Carolina’s own rural legend, seems to have crawled back out of the murky waters of Scape Ore Swamp near Bishopville, where it first was spotted in 1988, after a man reportedly saw the scaly creature Saturday.
Jim Wilson said he was traveling toward Camden on S.C. 34 when “something came out of the woods and ran across the Scape Ore Bridge.” As any good South Carolinian who potentially spots Lizard Man would do, Wilson got out of his car and began taking pictures.
“It was a tall, dark figure that had a tail and appeared to have scales,” Wilson said. “It was almost like an alligator with a short nose and long legs.”

Oddly enough, even though the witness supposedly took pictures, plural, none of them seem to have made the newspaper, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or any other place where someone might see them. I'm sure there were a bunch of good pictures and The State, the daily newspaper in Columbia, S.C., simply chose not to publish any of them to avoid sensationalism. Mrs. Wolves worked as an editor and reporter at The State for eight years, and I can tell you that avoiding sensationalism was not a driving motive there -- they loved the fuck out of Lizard Man the first time around, and have embraced it this time. Not running photos probably means the witness said something along the lines of, "Damn, none of them came out cuz it was dark, but I saw that sumbitch." Hey, whatevs. Just glad to see Lizard Man is doing OK. I'll bet my old newspaper in Orangeburg put in on 1A. After all, it's not everyday you can say this:

Yeah, baby. Break out the popcorn. I bet there'll be more.