One of my hobbies is boring my accommodating wife to baby towns to abstraction behavior and practices accompanying to cryptozoology – the coursing for creatures, from Bigfoot to the Loch Ness Monster, whose actuality hasn’t been scientifically proven.
This year, our summer “vacation” included a stop in Bishopville, South Carolina, to appear the aboriginal anniversary Lizard Man festival.The Lizard Man of Scape Ore swamp abashed Lee County in 1988 – and, according to some, continues to do so today.
Bishopville isn’t the alone boondocks to about-face bounded letters of alarming abstruse encounters into anniversary festivals.Point Pleasant, West Virginia, has the Mothman festival, while Flatwoods, West Virginia, has a anniversary anniversary the Braxton County monster.And every year, you can go to Fouke, Arkansas, to bless the Beast of Boggy Creek.
Cryptozoology isn’t a religion.But in his book “Haunted Ground: Journeys Through Abstruse America,” Darryl Caterine argues that assertive “paranormal hot spots” action like American angelic spaces – at least, for assertive people.
As a assistant of religious studies, I am absorbed by the humans who appointment these baby communities in seek of aberrant creatures, and why abounding of these baby towns accept appear to embrace their roles as crusade sites.
The fable of Lizard Man
Cryptid researcher Lyle Blackburn allegedly gives the best annual of the Lizard Man adventure in his book “Lizard Man: The True Adventure of the Bishopville Monster.”
In July 1988, the Lee County Sheriff’s Appointment accustomed a alarm from a citizen in a baby association declared Browntown accusatory that their car had been “mauled” overnight, allegedly by an animal.
When Sheriff Liston Truesdale began interviewing Browntown residents, several declared seeing a 7-foot alpine animal with red eyes – what anyone eventually referred to as “the Lizard Man.” Truesdale put the chat out that if anyone knew annihilation about the damaged car or a aberrant animal that they should acquaintance him.
On July 16, citizen Tommy Davis brought his 17-year-old son, Chris, to the sheriff’s office.Chris Davis explained that if he was branch home from his night about-face at McDonald’s, he took a adjustment down a rural alley and got a collapsed tire.After he accomplished alteration it, he saw a 7-foot tall, blooming creature, with three fingers on anniversary duke and red eyes.When Davis approved to drive away, it leaped assimilate the roof of his ’76 Celica.By swerving aback and forth, Davis dislodged it and escaped.Truesdale – who had afterwards all asked the association for advice about aberrant creatures – believed Davis was cogent the truth.Chris even took a polygraph analysis and passed.
The columnist on the alley area Chris Davis claims he had his appointment with the Lizard Man. (Joseph P.Laycock, Columnist provided)
After Davis’ adventure went public, added sightings were reported, some plausible, some acutely fabrications.Soon armed parties were exploring forth the swamp.The media descended on Bishopville.Locals began affairs Lizard Man t-shirts and added merchandise.Sheriff Truesdale was interviewed by Good Morning America and CBS’ Dan Rather, and newspapers as far abroad as South Korea ran Lizard Man headlines.
To this day, the abstruseness hasn’t been solved, with declared sightings as afresh as 2015.But the alternation of contest – a aberrant sighting, media attention, added sightings, followed by visits from analytical tourists and monster hunters – accept played out in towns beyond the country, from Point Pleasant to Roswell, New Mexico.
A abstruseness that terrifies and fascinates
If you believed a monster was real, why would you biking to its declared lair?
Many acquisition legends like the Lizard Man enthralling.But some become obsessed, anxious to apperceive added about something both abstruse and frightening.In these monster hunters, I see elements of religion.
The theologian Rudolf Otto believed there was an aspect to adoration he declared “the numinous.”
Otto claimed that adoration is best accepted by celebratory limited cultures area “its age-old superior of actuation and instinct” charcoal intact.To Otto, the abstract is accomplished as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans – a abstruseness that terrifies and fascinates.This activity arises from an appointment with “the wholly other,” or that which we cannot understand.
While alert to a address in Bishopville from Matthew Delph of the Mountain Empire Cryptid Analysis Organization, I anticipation of Otto.Delph declared his appointment with a Bigfoot while hunting in Indiana, if the animal hurled a log that almost absent his head.(Some anticipate Lizard Man was a misidentified Bigfoot.)
Delph recalled, “I was seeing something that’s not declared to exist.” He was abashed but aswell apparitional by the experience.He explained that his analysis isn’t so abundant about proving Bigfoot’s actuality but rather a claimed charge to “face that fear.”
Other festival-goers were gluttonous beneath absolute access to the mysterium application actual altar and ritual.One researcher explained why he took some artery and copse from a acclaimed “butterbean shed” abreast Davis’ declared encounter, adding, “You wish to yield something actual with you because the abstruseness is intangible.”
While touring the Scape Ore swamp, I heard one chestnut about the Boggy Creek anniversary in Fouke.Someone said they were such a fan of the fable of Boggy Creek they capital to be “baptized” in the swamp.The animadversion was facetious, but it betrayed a admiration to something to become added carefully intertwined to the mystery.
Cryptozoology ability not be a religion, but the aboriginal stages of age-old religions may not accept looked abundant altered from the practices that anatomy about these cryptid legends.
Misfits and locals mix
To me, what makes monster festivals aberrant are not the creatures they celebrate, but rather the way they facilitate the intermingling of cultures that accept commonly authentic themselves in action to anniversary other.
The accepted acumen is that disturbing baby towns should address to a cornball time if America was added conservative, added Christian and simpler – not stranger.To be sure, monster festivals consistently allure bounded families with animated children.But to accompany in tourism dollars, they accept to draw added elements not calmly accommodated with what architectonics assistant Kirin J.Maker calls “the allegory of capital street.”
There absolutely exists what ability be declared a “cryptozoology tribe” that turns out for these festivals – cryptid fan ability has abundant overlap with abhorrence cine fans, cabal theorists and a “psychobilly” aesthetic.Black T-shirts, tattoos and patches for “The Misfits” abound.
These aberrant tastes may be allotment of the acumen baby towns usually don’t advance in monster festivals until they accept to.The alteration of monsters from camp badge letters into emblems of the association seems to go duke in duke with the abolition of baby boondocks economies by the armament of globalization and urbanization.
Plaster Lizard Man prints and T-shirts on affectation at the South Carolina Cotton Museum. (Joseph P.Laycock, Columnist provided)
John Stamey, the administrator abaft the Lizard Man festival, modeled it anon on the Mothman Anniversary in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.Like Point Pleasant, Bishopville has a disturbing Capital Artery with abandoned storefronts.
Here I see addition affiliation to religious traditions.Pilgrimage has consistently been an bread-and-butter phenomenon, and abounding medieval towns depended on belief of bounded miracles to draw pilgrims.By agreeable in the cryptozoology tribe, today’s baby towns are adulatory aspects of bounded ability that were already pushed to the ambit or mocked.But like the medieval towns of the past, their bounded economies are accepting a nice little boost, too.
At the aforementioned time, these festivals draw common urbanites like myself who wish to apprentice added about places that abounding Americans accept abandoned about or abort to understand.
Surely, some in Bishopville would rather overlook about the Lizard Man, while some Americans ability not accept any admiration to apprentice about Bishopville.But America’s aberrant pilgrims accumulate cartoon our absorption to the edges.
This commodity was originally appear on The Conversation.
Joseph P.Laycock, Assistant Assistant of Religious Studies, Texas State University
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