Swampman: This Monster Is Not What You Think!

The swamp monster, often observed as an instance of strange archetypes that emerge out of the realm cryptozoology, are are a deceptively insidious element of modern folklore, particularly in the Americas. Comic portrayals of characters like “Swamp Thing” and “Man Thing” have brought an almost tragic element to the presence of the man-beast that exists within the bog.

Meanwhile, stories of Bigfoot-like creatures the likes of the Fouke Monster, which became something of a “star” following the success of Charles Pierce’s film The Legend of Boggy Creek, bring what some hold to be a real-life counterpart to the popular swamp beast of myth and popular culture.

Legends of “swamp beasts” seem to emanate from all corners of the globe, including notable instances such as the Australian creature known as the “bunyip,” as well as Africa’s mokele m’bembe, both of which are more likely considered among saurian monstrosities than man-monsters. But so far as swamp beasts of the anthropomorphic variety go, in addition to the folklore surrounding Arkansas’ Fouke Monster, South Carolina also boasted tales of a legendary “Lizard Man” that was said to haunt locales near Scape Ore Swamp, near the town of Bishopville, in the 1980s.

The link between the proposed Swamp Monster archetype and Forteana is indeed one that becomes clear and evident upon examination such as this; it even begs the question as to whether popular culture inspired such modern mysteries of Lizard Louts and Fouke Fiends that we now find in cryptozoological mythos. But relatively unbeknownst to the crypto-crowd is a very different kind of “swamp-man” that presents a bizarre and ponderous problem for philosophers and physicists alike; what if you were, in fact, such a swamp-man, and the “real you” had been replaced by such an entity, which had now carried forth with wandering around and representing you falsely, before all your friends, family, and co-workers?

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