Lizard Man, Altie, Normie and the Beast: The Carolinas and Georgia

The Southeast’s best-known monsters did not produce any convincing new sightings this year. What they did produce was civic life: a festival parade in South Carolina, a roadside marker in North Carolina, a sculpture-and-mural trail in Georgia, and a lot of merchandise. Here is where the region’s four most famous legends stand in 2026, who is telling their stories, and what the skeptics say.

South Carolina: the Lizard Man stomps again

On Saturday, June 27, Bishopville held its fifth Lizard Man Stomp, the downtown festival for the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp. Organizer Margaret Copeland told The Sumter Item that the free event, always held on the last Saturday in June, would open with a parade down Main Street and feature crafts, food trucks, a car show and a costumed Lizard Man posing for photos. Its themes, she said, are “keeping the legend alive” and supporting downtown shops. Copeland recalled that when the story broke in 1988, thousands of commemorative T-shirts were sold. A follow-up story in the Item on July 1 reported that Main Street business owners called the festival a boon for business. For other monster festivals, see our 2026–27 festival calendar.

The legend dates to the summer of 1988. According to the City of Bishopville’s account, 17-year-old Chris Davis said that while he was changing a flat tire near Scape Ore Swamp in the Browntown community, a seven-foot creature with green, scaly skin, red eyes and three toes on each foot attacked his car, tearing off a side mirror and denting the roof. Davis is said to have passed a polygraph. Sheriff Liston Truesdale’s office investigated, deputies cast large three-toed footprints, and a Columbia radio station offered a $1 million reward that was never claimed.

The skeptical record is just as long. That summer, an airman from Shaw Air Force Base claimed he had shot the creature, then recanted and admitted the story was a hoax; law enforcement eventually suggested the 1988 sightings were probably a bear. In 2008, blood from a damaged vehicle near Bishopville was traced to a domestic dog. Investigator Benjamin Radford has noted that details of Davis’s story changed across retellings, and no photographs of the damage to his car exist. A flurry of photos and video in 2015, reported by CBS News, proved nothing; CBS’s own report allowed that the figure could be a person in a lizard costume. The South Carolina Cotton Museum in Bishopville keeps a permanent Lizard Man exhibit, including footprint casts.

North Carolina: a marker for Normie

Lake Norman, the reservoir north of Charlotte, has joined the roadside-marker map for its monster. The William G. Pomeroy Foundation lists a 2026 “Legends & Lore” marker for “Normie” at 1479 River Highway in Mooresville, credited jointly to the foundation and the North Carolina Folklife Institute; the grant recipient was the group Carolina Haints. We found no news coverage of an unveiling ceremony. According to the foundation’s page, the marker traces the story back to Catawba Nation accounts of snake-like creatures in the Catawba River, before Cowans Ford Dam flooded the valley to form the lake in 1963.

In a June 30 feature, Visit Lake Norman noted that many reports come from the “Hot Hole” near Cowans Ford Dam, where the McGuire Nuclear Station discharges warm water, and that witnesses disagree wildly about what they saw. “There’s never been one universally accepted description of Normie,” Matt Myers, who launched the LakeNormanMonster.com sightings site in the early 2000s, told the tourism agency. Suggested explanations include a creature mutated by the power plant’s discharge (for which the feature says there is no evidence), very large catfish glimpsed in murky water, floating logs and tricks of light; the feature points out that alligator gar, another popular suspect, do not naturally occur in the region. No one has offered physical evidence of an unknown animal. Read more in our Lake Norman Monster entry.

North Carolina: the Beast of Bladenboro

In the small Bladen County town of Bladenboro, a Pomeroy marker dedicated in October 2024 at 103 Main Street recalls the “Vampire Beast” that killed local animals in 1953. Dogs began turning up dead around the turn of 1954, and within days hundreds of armed people had joined the hunt before officials called it off for safety. On January 13, 1954, a trapped bobcat – shot by a local farmer, though some papers credited a professional hunter – was presented to the press as the culprit, though critics doubted a cat that size could have mauled the dogs, and Mayor Woodrow Fussell later said he thought the whole affair was a hoax and that “a little publicity never hurts a town.” Our Beast of Bladenboro entry has the full story.

Today the beast belongs to Beast Fest, hosted since 2008 by the community group Boost the ’Boro and traditionally held on the last weekend of October. The most recent edition we could confirm, on October 24–25, 2025, drew a crowd that county commission chair Charles Ray Peterson put at 10,000 to 15,000, the Bladen Journal reported; the organisers’ own estimate was nearer 8,000. Boost the ’Boro has posted a 2026 schedule – a Friday evening and a full Saturday, with the Swingin’ Medallions headlining – but as of this writing it had not published calendar dates, and we found no other announcement of them.

Georgia: Altie of the Altamaha

In Georgia, the Altamaha-ha – “Altie” – is said to live in the tidal creeks and old rice fields around the mouth of the Altamaha River near Darien. In a June 18 column for Appen Media, writer Steve Hudson walked the riverbank without seeing it, but pointed readers to the 20-foot Altie sculpture by artist Rick Spears at the Darien-McIntosh County Visitor Center off I-95, and to a mural of the creature beneath the north end of the U.S. 17 bridge south of town. The Brunswick News has written that the legend has roots in Muscogee tradition. The creature also appears as a boss in South of Midnight, a 2025 video game steeped in Southern folklore.

Altie’s most famous “evidence” was a fake. In March 2018, photos of decomposing remains on a beach in the Wolf Island National Wildlife Refuge spread online as a possible Altamaha-ha; Jacksonville University marine biologists said at once that it looked faked. That September, in a profile by Vice, the anonymous New York performance artist Zardulu claimed the piece, saying it was a stuffed shark dressed up with papier-mâché, made to give the old legend new life. Proposed natural explanations for genuine sightings include large sturgeon, alligator gar and pairs of dolphins swimming in tandem.