Hey, it’s me, Vivie! I’m the inner five-year-old, and I’m here to tell you what’s happening around the Grove. A lot of our ideas started with me saying, “Hey, let’s…” so the Grown Up decided I could tell you what we did, what’s going on now, and what we might do next.
Before I tell you what we did, I should probably tell you who “we” are. Sunstone Grove has a lot of branches. Seasoned Saves was the first, our flipping shop for vintage glass and pottery. Then came Never Ending Coffee Press and Pet Care Made Simple Press, each with its own books and voice, along with the blog, the socials, and the witchy wares shop.
The Grown Up is a middle-aged pagan witch in the southern United States, a Hu-mom to three pups, and an adult-diagnosed ADHDer whose ADHD affects her significantly. She found a way to harness some of her creativity with a purple pen and a Remarkable notebook. She says it may be the best medicine she could have given herself.
Now the Grove has three published coloring books, one published Guinea Pig care book, a Beardie care book in the works, a blog, and a witchy wares shop. That is a lot of branches. I like branches.
What We Did
September was when Y’all Come Sit a Spell opened its front door. The Grown Up has been filling the blog with essays, and people have started stopping by to read. I like having company on the porch.
The witchy wares shop opened, and the Grove started showing up in more places online. Facebook and Tumblr joined the mix, and the Grown Up kept making things for TikTok. There are a lot of doors on the internet. We are still learning which ones lead to friendly people.
The glass menagerie had new adventures, and Annie the Anthurium bloomed. There is always something happening around here. Sometimes it is a very pretty piece of glass. Sometimes it is a plant. Sometimes it is me saying, “Hey, let’s…”
What’s Going On Now
October is We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know: Cryptid Edition. The October cryptids are all researched, written, and loaded to be released one a day, every day. Starting tomorrow, you’ll meet a new one each day. I’m excited to introduce you to my new friends. Some of them are very strange. I like that.
The Grown Up is still working on the Beardie care book and building the 2027 Cozy Witchy Grove Planner. She has a very large pile of herb research, and there are crystals and animals in the mix, too. The purple pen has been busy.
What We Might Do
November might be “We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know: American History.” December might be “We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know: Holiday Traditions.” The Grown Up has started mapping both, and I think there is a lot we still need to learn.
After that, there’s the Wheel of the Year. We have to decide if we want to do that whole thing, or go in another direction. I have ideas, obviously. The Grown Up says we’ll talk about it later.
Vivie’s Junction
Things that went well: The purple pen and the Remarkable notebook. A lot of ideas turned into real things because we had a place to catch them.
Things we’re looking forward to: Introducing you all to my new friends, the Cryptids. One every day in October!
Things we need to do better: Posting consistently on socials and updating the sales posts. I have brought this to management’s attention. The purple pen is right there.
Welcome to our new friends, and welcome back to the folks who have been sitting with us since the beginning. There’s room on the porch for everyone. Pull up a chair and stay awhile. October’s bringing cryptids, and I can’t wait for you to meet them.
If the creature standing in front of you looks like a hairless coyote, you may have found a coyote with mange.
You have not necessarily found the Chupacabras.
That distinction matters because the creature Puerto Rico introduced to the world in 1995 did not look like a sick dog. It did not trot along dusty Texas roads on four legs. It did not appear conveniently dead beside a fence so someone could photograph it, call the local news, and wait for a wildlife biologist to explain mites.
Puerto Rico’s Chupacabras stood upright.
Witnesses described a creature four or five feet tall with large red or dark eyes, thin limbs, strange hands or claws, and a row of spines or quills running down its back. Its skin was greenish-gray, leathery, or reptilian. Some said it moved in long, kangaroo-like leaps. Others gave it wings, an unbearable smell, or the ability to disappear into the dark before anyone could get a proper look.
It was not a coyote.
It was Chupey.
Something Was Killing the Animals
The modern story began in Puerto Rico in 1995, although the island already had experience with mysterious livestock deaths. Twenty years earlier, animals around the town of Moca had reportedly been found dead with puncture wounds, inspiring stories about El Vampiro de Moca.
Then the killings began again.
Sheep, goats, chickens, rabbits, and other animals were found dead. Owners reported small puncture wounds, often near the neck or chest, and little blood around the bodies. Some believed the animals had been drained.
Officials and veterinarians disputed that claim. One veterinarian working with Puerto Rico’s Department of Agriculture reportedly examined hundreds of supposed victims and found that the animals had not been emptied of blood. Predators can kill in ways that look strange to anyone who arrives after the struggle is over. Blood settles inside a body. Puncture wounds can be difficult to see. Fear is very good at filling whatever space evidence leaves open.
Still, something was killing animals.
That fact is sometimes lost in the rush to laugh at the people who tried to explain it.
In August 1995, Madelyne Tolentino reported seeing a creature near Canóvanas. Her description helped establish the image that would become Puerto Rico’s Chupacabras. Upright. Spined. Alien-looking. Nothing like any known predator on the island.
The reports multiplied. So did the attention.
Canóvanas mayor José “Chemo” Soto even organized searches for the creature. Reporters arrived. Television crews arrived. The rest of the world arrived carrying microphones, cameras, and the confident assumption that Puerto Rico had produced something delightfully ridiculous.
Puerto Rico had produced a monster.
The world produced a punchline.
Naming the Goat-Sucker
Puerto Rican comedian and radio personality Silverio Pérez is widely credited with popularizing the name chupacabras, formed from the Spanish words for “suck” and “goats.”
The goat-sucker.
It was a perfect name. Dramatic, funny, specific, and just ridiculous enough to travel.
And travel it did.
The Chupacabras moved quickly beyond Canóvanas. Sightings were reported across Latin America, the Caribbean, and eventually the United States. Every unexplained livestock death became a possible attack. Every unfamiliar shadow could carry red eyes. The creature appeared in newspapers, television programs, toys, T-shirts, cartoons, and movies.
Puerto Rico’s local terror became an international celebrity.
That transformation was not entirely unwelcome. Chupey became a joke Puerto Ricans could make for themselves, a cultural figure both frightening and funny. The creature was absorbed into the island’s storytelling and sold back with a wink.
There is power in claiming your own monster.
There is less power in watching someone else claim it for you.
Then Came the Coyotes
By the early 2000s, alleged Chupacabras began appearing in Texas and elsewhere in the American Southwest.
These creatures looked nothing like the one described in Puerto Rico.
They were four-legged. Doglike. Nearly hairless. Their skin was gray and rough. They had long snouts, prominent teeth, and an appearance unsettling enough to make an ordinary animal seem unnatural.
Testing repeatedly identified the bodies as coyotes, dogs, raccoons, or related animals. Many were suffering from severe mange, a miserable condition caused by mites that can strip away fur, thicken the skin, weaken the body, and alter an animal’s appearance.
The explanation made sense.
Then something peculiar happened.
The explanation for the Texas carcasses was presented as the explanation for the Chupacabras itself.
A Puerto Rican creature with spines, red eyes, and two-legged movement was quietly replaced by a North American canid with mange. The borrowed name remained while nearly every defining feature of the original creature disappeared.
The coyote did not solve the Chupacabras.
It stole its name.
A mangy coyote may explain a dead animal found in Texas. It does not explain what people reported seeing in Canóvanas. It does not explain why the Puerto Rican creature took the shape it did. It does not explain the conditions that allowed the story to grow, or why the island embraced the monster after the outside world mocked it.
It certainly does not give us permission to pretend the original story never existed.
Monsters Do Not Grow in Empty Ground
Skeptic Benjamin Radford proposed that Madelyne Tolentino’s description may have been influenced by the creature Sil in the 1995 film Species, which Tolentino had seen. There are striking visual similarities between the movie monster and the Puerto Rican Chupacabras.
That possibility deserves consideration.
Human memory is not a recording. We interpret unfamiliar things using images already stored in our minds. A frightening glimpse, a recently watched movie, and an island full of disturbing animal deaths could combine into something that felt absolutely real.
But even if a movie helped shape one description, it does not explain the entire legend.
Folklore does not form because one person sees one strange thing. It grows when a story finds ground already prepared to hold it.
Puerto Rico in 1995 was living with the daily realities of an unequal relationship with the United States. American military operations had occupied parts of the island for decades. Decisions were made elsewhere. Information was withheld. Rumors of secret experiments, contamination, and government activity did not arise in a place where power was transparent and trust had been earned.
Some versions of the Chupacabras story claimed the creature had escaped from a secret American military or genetic experiment. There is no evidence that it did.
There was, however, plenty of evidence that powerful institutions could operate in Puerto Rico without fully answering to the people who lived there.
The rumored laboratory may not have existed.
The secrecy did.
The imbalance of power did.
The feeling that Puerto Rico could be used as a testing ground while someone elsewhere controlled the information certainly did.
That does not prove the existence of a red-eyed creature. It explains why a story about one could feel possible.
Who Gets to Define the Monster?
When international reporters came to Canóvanas, residents initially welcomed the attention. Then many felt betrayed when their accounts were taken away, stripped of context, and presented as proof that rural Puerto Ricans were foolish or superstitious.
The witnesses became characters in someone else’s story.
That pattern is older than Chupey.
Outsiders arrive. They rename what they find. They decide which voices sound credible. They extract the entertaining pieces and leave the history behind. Then they explain the culture back to the people who live inside it.
Even the debunking followed the pattern.
The mainland found a mangy coyote, attached Puerto Rico’s name to it, and declared Puerto Rico’s mystery solved.
Except it had solved a different creature.
Perhaps no spined animal ever stalked the roads outside Canóvanas. Perhaps predators, disease, memory, movies, rumor, and fear built the Chupacabras together. Folklore has never required a single set of footprints. It requires a community trying to make meaning from something that official explanations have failed to settle.
Puerto Rico did more than invent a monster.
It created a modern folk figure that carried fear, humor, political suspicion, cultural pride, and the experience of being watched by the world without being heard by it.
Then Puerto Rico gave the creature a nickname.
Chupey belongs to the island that recognized him first.
The Grove Take
Do I believe a four-foot reptilian creature with glowing red eyes drained livestock across Puerto Rico?
I believe animals died.
I believe people saw things they could not explain.
I believe memory can borrow from movies and fear can give bones to a shadow.
I also believe governments create the exact conditions in which conspiracy grows when they operate behind locked doors and then act offended that no one trusts them.
Most of all, I believe finding a sick coyote in Texas does not give anyone the right to rewrite Puerto Rico’s monster.
The original Chupacabras deserves to be examined in the place and culture that created it. Not because every claim must be accepted as fact, but because the people telling the story deserve more than ridicule. Their monster carried their history long before someone pasted its name onto an unfortunate canine.
The world asked whether Chupey was real.
Puerto Rico’s story asks a better question.
Who gets to decide what he was?
Porch Policy
Chupey gets a seat.
Not the hairless coyote. That poor baby gets veterinary care, a warm meal, and its own name back.
Puerto Rico’s Chupey gets the chair at the shadowy end of the porch, where the lamplight catches the spines but does not quite reach the eyes. He may stay as long as he respects the livestock, keeps the mysterious puncture wounds to himself, and understands that glowing after bedtime is inconsiderate.
The goats have declined to attend.
Vivie has left him a snack but refuses to disclose what is in it.
No coyotes may claim his reservation.
Porch Status: Seat Approved Cultural ownership recognized Dietary disclosure still pending
On November 15, 1966, two young couples were driving near an abandoned munitions facility outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia, when they saw something, they could not explain.
It was tall and gray, shaped vaguely like a man, with enormous wings and red eyes that caught the headlights. It rose into the air and followed their car as they fled.
The next morning, the Point Pleasant Register ran one of the finest newspaper headlines ever written:
Couples See Man-Sized Bird… Creature… Something
“Something” may be the most honest word in the entire Mothman story.
More sightings followed.
For thirteen months, people around Point Pleasant reported strange lights, unusual sounds, and encounters with a large winged creature, many of them near the abandoned TNT plant. Witnesses described something fast, powerful, and deeply unsettling.
Skeptics suggested a sandhill crane, a large heron, or an owl caught in the glare of headlights. Any of those explanations are possible. An owl appearing suddenly in the dark is impressive enough before fear, distance, and adrenaline have their turn with it.
But whatever those witnesses saw, Point Pleasant had itself a monster.
Then, on December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge collapsed during evening rush hour.
Cars plunged into the Ohio River.
Forty-six people died.
The bridge did not fall because of Mothman.
Investigators eventually traced the collapse to a tiny crack in a single eyebar. Corrosion allowed the crack to grow until the component failed. Because the bridge’s design lacked sufficient redundancy, the failure of that one piece triggered the collapse of the entire structure.
A fraction of an inch in a piece of steel brought down a bridge.
The disaster ultimately changed bridge-inspection practices across the United States. That matters. The cause was identified. Engineering learned from it. Future lives were protected because investigators looked at the evidence and found what had failed.
But a hidden crack does not stare at you from the darkness.
It does not have wings.
It cannot become a warning.
Years later, writer John Keel connected the Mothman sightings to the Silver Bridge collapse in his 1975 book, The Mothman Prophecies. In the story that followed, the creature became an omen. Its appearance had been a warning of the catastrophe to come.
That version traveled.
Books repeated it. Movies dramatized it. The world came to know Mothman as the red-eyed figure who appeared before the bridge fell.
But the prophecy was assembled after the tragedy.
There was no useful warning naming the bridge, the date, or the danger before forty-six people died. Mothman did not tell engineers where to look. He did not expose the corroded steel. The catastrophe gave the earlier sightings a meaning they had not carried clearly enough to save anyone.
Perhaps that is why the story endured.
A monster gives dread a face.
Corrosion does not.
It is easier to imagine a winged creature watching from the riverbank than to accept that something enormous can fail because of something almost too small to see. It is easier to believe there was a warning than to live with the possibility that disaster can arrive quietly, hidden inside a structure people trust every day.
The world took Point Pleasant’s loss and made it a prophecy.
Point Pleasant did something else.
The town kept Mothman.
They gave him a museum. They built him a gleaming twelve-foot statue with red eyes, enormous wings, and an anatomy that has inspired more than a few memorable tourist photographs. Every year, thousands of people come to Point Pleasant for the Mothman Festival.
There are costumes, vendors, speakers, art, stories, and people delighted to stand beside a cryptid who once terrified drivers on a dark West Virginia road.
From the outside, that can look like a town profiting from tragedy.
From inside, it may be something much more human.
Point Pleasant did not create the connection between Mothman and the bridge collapse. The world did that. Writers, filmmakers, paranormal investigators, and generations of fascinated strangers carried the story far beyond West Virginia.
The town could not stop the world from telling it.
So Point Pleasant claimed the creature.
The Grove Take
I do not believe Mothman brought down the Silver Bridge.
A damaged eyebar did that.
The distinction matters because forty-six real people died, and their deaths should not become scenery behind a better monster story. Engineers found the physical failure. The investigation changed bridge inspection across the country. Understanding the actual cause helped prevent other families from experiencing the same loss.
Mothman did not provide that answer.
The world gave him the job afterward.
A winged creature with red eyes is easier to fear than a crack hidden inside steel. A monster gives dread a body. Corrosion does not.
So the sightings became warnings. The warnings became prophecy. The prophecy became books and movies. Point Pleasant’s tragedy traveled around the world attached to a creature that had never named the bridge, the date, or the danger.
Then the town did something remarkable.
It took Mothman back.
Point Pleasant gave him a statue, a museum, and a festival. The creature stopped belonging only to writers, filmmakers, and strangers fascinated by catastrophe. He became local art, local humor, local business, and a reason for people to gather.
That does not erase the bridge.
It does not diminish the dead.
It means the world did not get the final word about what Mothman would represent.
The world turned a town’s tragedy into a prophecy.
Point Pleasant turned the monster into community.
Porch Policy
The invitation is approved.
Mothman is Appalachian. Technically, he could probably reach the Grove without stopping for gas.
His chair has been placed near the edge of the porch where he can see the road. The lamp will remain low. Reflective red eyes are not a character flaw, and nobody will accuse him of predicting a catastrophe simply because he appears before something unfortunate happens.
That standard would make every relative who arrives before Thanksgiving an omen.
He is not responsible for bridge maintenance.
He is not required to deliver prophecies.
He may sit quietly, watch the tree line, and attend the festival planning committee if Point Pleasant has not already booked him for the season.
PORCH STATUS:
SEAT APPROVED NO BLAME ASSIGNED APPALACHIAN RESIDENCY RECOGNIZED
What’s one thing you own that holds deep sentimental value?
Come sit a spell with your coffee, tea, or whatever warm drink is keeping you company this morning. It’s a glorious morning here, and today’s question asks what I own that holds deep sentimental value. I didn’t have to think long about my answer: my grandmother’s tea jug.
My grandparents had an old brownware set of dishes, and my grandmother used this jug for iced tea. Brownware has always had a place in my heart. I started collecting pieces myself, drawn to their familiar, earthy look. But this jug has a meaning that goes beyond collecting. It was part of my grandparents’ home, part of my grandmother’s kitchen, and part of the everyday world she made warm just by being there.
When my grandmother passed away, my mom asked what I wanted. The answer came easily: the jug was the only thing I wanted. Mom told me she had already put it aside for me. She just wanted to know if there was anything else I wanted, too.
That little exchange means a lot to me. Before I said a word, Mom had looked at the jug and thought of me. She knew I would treasure it. And when she asked, I knew there wasn’t another piece I wanted more. Somehow, we had reached the same answer from opposite sides of the conversation.
Now the jug sits on top of my cabinets, with other pieces of brownware around it. Its dark brown top and handle rise above the creamy body, and I can spot it whenever I look up. I don’t see it and recall one particular afternoon or a conversation I can repeat. What I feel is less like a single memory and more like stepping into the atmosphere of my grandmother’s kitchen: love, warmth, and the comfort of being there.
That is what makes the jug precious to me. It doesn’t have to hold iced tea anymore to hold something of hers. It brings a little of that kitchen into my home and reminds me that love can live in the familiar things we keep close.
Thanks for sitting a spell with me. I hope your day holds something that brings you a little warmth, too.
In 1921, a British expedition exploring Mount Everest found large footprints in the snow.
The men had theories. Perhaps the tracks belonged to a wolf. Perhaps the snow had melted and distorted them. Their Sherpa guides offered an explanation rooted in generations of knowledge about the mountains.
They described something closer to a man-bear, a wild being of the snow.
Then a journalist mistranslated the name, added a little flair, and introduced the Western world to the Abominable Snowman.
Because apparently arriving in someone else’s mountains, misunderstanding what they tell you, and then renaming it is a time-honored tradition.
The Yeti was not new to the people of the Himalayas. Stories of wild mountain beings had existed for generations across Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, and surrounding regions. The descriptions varied, as folklore tends to do. Some were enormous. Some were smaller. Some were dangerous. Others were spiritual beings or guardians of wild places.
They did not fit neatly into one Western monster-shaped box.
We put them there anyway.
Once the Abominable Snowman had a catchy name, outsiders began searching for him. Expeditions marched into the Himalayas carrying cameras, plaster for footprint casts, and the extraordinary confidence of men who believed that if they had not documented something, it had not yet been properly discovered.
In 1951, British mountaineer Eric Shipton photographed a trail of large footprints on the Menlung Glacier. One image, taken beside an ice axe for scale, became the photograph everyone knew. The print appeared enormous, strangely human, and perfectly suited for newspaper pages.
The hunt intensified.
There were more footprints, more sightings, and more expeditions. Hairs were collected. Bones were examined. Monasteries were asked to surrender sacred relics for testing. At Khumjung Monastery in Nepal, a supposed Yeti scalp became an international curiosity rather than simply being allowed to remain what it had long been to the people who kept it.
Western explorers wanted proof.
Not understanding. Proof.
Decades later, science finally arrived with DNA testing. Researchers examined nine specimens said to have come from Yetis, including hair, bone, skin, and other remains collected across the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau.
Eight came from local bears.
The ninth came from a dog.
Apparently, the Himalayas chose the bear too.
The headlines practically wrote themselves. The mystery was solved. The Yeti had been debunked. Everyone could go home.
It was only bears.
Only bears.
In the Himalayas.
The Himalayan brown bear belongs to an ancient and isolated lineage. These animals are rare, elusive, powerful, and capable of standing upright. They live in some of the most remote and unforgiving terrain on Earth. A brief encounter through blowing snow, fading light, or sheer terror could easily become something larger in the retelling.
That does not mean the people of the Himalayas were foolish.
It may mean they knew exactly what they were talking about.
Perhaps the creature described as a man-bear was, in fact, connected to bears. Perhaps generations of observation, warning, spiritual belief, and storytelling preserved the presence of a rare animal in a form that made sense within the cultures that shared its mountains.
Then Western explorers arrived, mistranslated the description, transformed it into a giant ape, and spent a century searching for the creature they had invented.
When the evidence led back to bears, they congratulated themselves for proving everyone else wrong.
That may be the most remarkable part of the Yeti story.
We listened just long enough to borrow the legend, but not long enough to understand it.
We wanted an undiscovered monster because an undiscovered monster would belong to the person who found it. A mountain guardian already known to generations of local people offered no such prize.
Science has given us a convincing explanation for many Yeti relics and sightings. It has not found an unknown Himalayan ape. It has found bears.
But that does not make the old stories meaningless.
It makes them worth hearing again without the noise we added.
Perhaps the Yeti was never disproved. Perhaps we simply asked the wrong question.
We asked whether an Abominable Snowman existed.
We should have asked what the people who lived beneath those mountains had been trying to tell us all along.
The Yeti may have been a bear.
We were simply too busy looking for a monster to listen.
The Grove Take
I think people in the Himalayas encountered something real.
That does not require an undiscovered ape to be wandering above the snow line.
The genetic evidence points overwhelmingly toward local bears. The language used in older traditions often pointed toward bears too. Somewhere between those two facts, Western explorers managed to invent an Abominable Snowman, spend a century searching for him, and declare the mystery solved when science led them back to the answer they had originally been given.
Only bears.
In the Himalayas.
Apparently, the Himalayas chose the bear too.
That does not make every footprint genuine or every story literally true. Snow melts. Tracks widen. Memory changes. Relics acquire histories more dramatic than their DNA.
But dismissing the Yeti as “just a bear” misses the most interesting part.
The Himalayan brown bear is rare, ancient, powerful, and capable of standing upright. It survives in terrain where humans require specialized equipment and extremely expensive jackets simply to remain alive. A creature does not have to be unknown to be extraordinary.
Perhaps the Yeti is not one animal.
Perhaps it is the place where real bears, dangerous mountains, spiritual belief, inherited warnings, and human imagination meet.
That is not a failed monster story.
It is a reminder that folklore may preserve observation in a language outsiders do not immediately understand.
The Yeti may have been a bear.
We were simply too busy looking for a monster to listen.
Porch Policy
The invitation is approved.
We are not addressing it to the Abominable Snowman. That name arrived through misunderstanding, theatrical translation, and the confidence of men who believed everything required their terminology.
The invitation is extended to the being the mountain people described before outsiders improved the story.
A wide chair has been placed at the far end of the porch. The steps have been reinforced. A heavy blanket has been provided, although the guest will almost certainly consider South Carolina weather an act of violence.
There will be no plaster footprint casts.
There will be no hair collection.
There will be no DNA swabs, expedition sponsors, or journalists waiting behind the hydrangeas.
If a bear arrives, the bear gets the chair.
If something else arrives, we will listen before naming it.
What’s the worst travel experience you’ve ever had?
Come sit a spell and enjoy a warm beverage while I tell you about two high school trips that still stay with me. I can’t name just one worst travel experience. One trip frightened me with something I witnessed; the other brought news and events that were hard to face while we were far from home.
On a beach trip, I saw a little boy get hit by a car. He was the same age as my little brother, John, and I was so shaken that all I wanted was to go back to the hotel and call home. I told my mom I just needed to talk to John and hear his voice. I know it scared my parents, but I needed that connection. I needed to know my brother was safe at home.
My high school graduation trip was difficult in a different way. While we were away, our classmate Sheri, who had been kidnapped, was found dead about a week later. I don’t think any of us had really believed she wouldn’t be found alive. We were stunned that she was gone. During the trip, while we were in port, a gentleman fell off the pier and drowned beside our ship. I can’t remember which news came first, and it doesn’t matter at this point. That trip just felt wrong on many levels.
We were away from home and our usual support system, trying to navigate situations that felt much too adult for us. Our chaperones weren’t our parents or the trusted adults we would usually turn to. I remember that we asked to use a closed bar or club area so we could meet and talk together. I don’t remember many other details, but I remember we were there for one another. Most of us are still in touch.
Maybe the hardest part of both trips was feeling far from the people I needed. On the beach trip, I called home to hear my brother’s voice. On the graduation trip, my classmates and I found a place to gather and face the news together. Those memories are still difficult, but I’m grateful we had each other and the bonds we forged during that trip.
I Went Looking for the Lizard Man. I Found the Hunters.
I knew the roads around Scape Ore Swamp before anybody started calling something out there the Lizard Man.
I graduated high school in 1985. I had good friends in Bishopville, South Carolina, and I ran those roads before, during, and after the years when the town became famous for a seven-foot creature with scales and red eyes.
I knew what to watch for. Snakes. An occasional gator. Wild hogs sometimes. The ordinary wildlife was reason enough to pay attention.
Then, in 1988, the Lizard Man arrived.
Or the story of him did.
Christopher Davis, a teenager driving near the swamp, reported that a creature approached him after he stopped to change a tire. Reports of damage to cars helped send the story beyond Bishopville. TIME was writing about it by August of that year. What began as local reports became a name, a creature people could picture, and a reason for strangers to come looking.
I was close enough to see what happened next.
My friends and I used to go down to people-watch the “Hunters.” The hysteria was insane. Insane.
There’s a difference between wondering what might be in the woods and arriving convinced that the woods owe you a confrontation. I wondered, too. I drove with the windows down and the radio off, hoping to hear the holler. I looked deep into the forest.
I never heard him.
I never saw him.
That silence didn’t make the roads less interesting. It gave me more room to notice the place I already knew. Scape Ore Swamp existed before the first Lizard Man report, and it kept existing while everyone argued over what might have happened there.
That is easy to forget once a story gets big enough. People who have never been somewhere can become very sure of what lives there. A scratch on a car becomes a claw mark. A sound from the trees becomes a call. Each new person arrives carrying a picture of the thing they hope to find, and the picture gets harder to question.
Meanwhile, the actual swamp is right there.
I don’t think there’s a Lizard Man in it. That isn’t a verdict I reached from my desk after reading old headlines. I knew those roads as a teenager. I drove them while the story was growing. I drove them after. What I remember most vividly from the Lizard Man years isn’t a creature stepping out of the trees. It’s the human commotion around the possibility that one might.
I understand the appeal. Of course I do. I listened with my radio off.
But listening and hunting are different things. Curiosity can keep you alert to what’s around you. Hysteria can make every ordinary animal, every noise, and every person on a quiet road part of a story they never agreed to join.
The City of Bishopville still tells the Lizard Man legend. I’m glad the story has a place in the town’s history. The reports happened. The attention happened. The “Hunters” happened. My friends and I were there to watch that last part unfold.
We can tell the story without declaring the creature real. We can also tell it without forgetting that Bishopville was somebody’s home long before it became somebody else’s monster hunt.
The Grove Take
I knew Scape Ore Swamp before, during, and after the Lizard Man years. I went looking and listening. I do not believe a Lizard Man lives there.
What I did see was how quickly uncertainty turned into spectacle. That is the part I can speak to firsthand. The old reports belong in the record, but a report of a strange encounter is not proof of a new creature. And a crowd of excited “Hunters” does not make the swamp any safer for the people and animals already there.
Porch Policy
No invitation issued.
The Lizard Man has plenty of room in South Carolina folklore. I am not setting a place for him in the Grove.
The real animals get the usual respect: room to live without being chased, cornered, or made to stand in for somebody’s legend. The people who live near the swamp get that respect, too.
And if you drive those roads, you can roll down your windows and turn off the radio. Listen all you want. Just remember that you are passing through a living place, not arriving at a stage set for a monster to appear.
What’s one piece of travel advice you always follow?
Good morning, y’all. Pull up a chair and sit a spell. Today’s prompt asks for one piece of travel advice I always follow. Mine is simple: pack patience. That sounds easy enough when you’re making lists at home. Put the patience right alongside the chargers and travel documents, and you’re all set. But travel has a way of testing whether you really brought it. This trip tested mine with spades. My boyfriend was sent back home from Madrid. There were delayed flights, luggage trouble, and no chance to sightsee in Barcelona. I was without my medication, CPAP machine, and toiletries. The trip I had planned was suddenly a string of problems to sort through, one after another. I was stressed. I was frustrated. Patience didn’t make any of that disappear, and it didn’t mean I had to pretend everything was fine. It meant trying to keep my cool long enough to work out what came next. When one thing went wrong, I had to deal with that thing, then the next one. Losing my temper wouldn’t have found my luggage or changed the flights. It would only have made an already hard situation harder. I kept coming back to the thought, If this is the worst thing that happens, it could be worse. And in some ways, it could. I was healthy. I was uninjured. I still had my vacation, even if it wasn’t unfolding the way I’d pictured. Remembering that didn’t make the hassles small. It helped me hold onto the parts of the trip that were still mine. So I don’t think of patience as something I pack once and forget about. I check on it several times, especially when the plans start falling apart. I need patience with the people trying to help, with the situation I can’t control, and with myself while I figure out what to do. That’s the advice I’ll keep taking with me: pack patience, and check on it along the way. You never know how much you’ll need. Thanks for sitting with me a spell. I’ll save you a porch chair for next time.
Come on into the Grove, pour yourself a cup of coffee, and let’s take a little trip down memory lane. Today’s question is about the first video game I ever played, and goodness, does that open up a whole box of memories!
Technically, my first video game was Pong. Two little paddles, a bouncing square, and the thrilling challenge of keeping that square from sailing past you. Looking back at today’s gaming technology, it’s almost comical how entertained we were by something so simple. But at the time? It was revolutionary!
Of course, my gaming adventures actually started with something a little more mechanical. We had a pinball machine in our house when I was growing up, and I absolutely loved it.
There’s just something magical about a good pinball machine. The flashing lights, the bells, the clatter of that little silver ball ricocheting around the playing field, and the satisfying smack of the flipper buttons beneath your fingers. And let’s not forget the delicate art of giving the machine just enough encouragement without committing the cardinal sin of TILT!
From there, we moved into the wonderful world of home video games. We had an Atari 2600 and eventually a Commodore 64. Those were exciting times, watching technology evolve right before our eyes and discovering all the new ways we could entertain ourselves.
And I wasn’t just a casual gamer, either.
I spent plenty of time immersed in computer games. DOOM, Silent Hill, and Phantasmagoria were among my favorites. Apparently, somewhere along the way, I decided that being chased by monsters, navigating creepy environments, and occasionally scaring myself half to death qualified as a perfectly reasonable form of relaxation.
Then there was Neverwinter Nights, where gaming became an opportunity to step into another world, create characters, explore, strategize, and share adventures with other players.
I enjoyed all of it.
These days, though, my gaming habits have changed. I’m much more likely to sit down with friends for a board game or a good game of cards than spend hours in front of a computer screen.
And I love every bit of it.
I love the strategy, figuring out my next move, anticipating what someone else might do, and occasionally discovering that my brilliant plan wasn’t quite as brilliant as I’d imagined. I love the friendly competition, the laughter, the conversation, and the simple pleasure of spending time with people I enjoy.
There’s something special about gathering around a table for an evening of games. The technology might have changed over the years, but the joy of playing hasn’t gone anywhere.
And while I may have traded my computer games for cards and board games, there’s one thing I haven’t outgrown.
Pinball.
Put a good pinball machine in front of me, and I am absolutely going to slap some quarters down and give it a go.
Because some pleasures never get old.
And neither does the girl who still knows exactly how hard she can bump that machine before it hollers TILT!
Until next time, y’all, keep playing, keep laughing, and don’t forget to sit a spell.
I thought I knew what a sea snail was. A little shell. A little foot. A creature going about its business while the rest of us fail to appreciate how strange the ocean already is.
Then somebody introduced me to the Sarmatian Sea Snail.
In 1575, André Thevet described a creature said to live in the waters near Denmark, in the sea we now call the Baltic. It was the size of a barrel. It had branching antlers like a stag, with rounded tips that shone like pearls. Its eyes glowed like candles. It had a whiskered, catlike nose, four clawed legs, and a long, mottled tail.
Thevet called it a snail.
I have questions.
First, where do the legs go when it retreats into its shell? Second, does it retreat into its shell? Third, are the pearl-like antler tips there from birth, or does one wake up one morning and discover that one has entered one’s bejeweled phase?
We do not know its life cycle. We do not even know whether it has a life cycle. But that is not going to stop me from wondering.
The description traveled through natural-history books. Ulisse Aldrovandi included the Sarmatian Sea Snail in a volume published in 1642, along with an illustration. That is the part of the story I find nearly as fascinating as the creature itself. A man describes an extraordinary animal. Other people copy the description, draw it, and put it among the creatures they are trying to understand. Before long, it has a paper trail.
A paper trail is not a set of footprints. No one has produced the barrel-sized snail for inspection. Its antlers have not been measured. The picture tells us what people imagined from the description; it does not tell us what swam past Denmark.
And some of the people passing the story along had doubts. The snail survived in their books anyway. A later study of its history calls it a “marvelous, monstrous, mythical” mollusk. That phrase is rather devastating to its case for zoological recognition.
It is also a magnificent reason to keep reading.
I want to know how an improbable creature became part of a serious attempt to describe nature. What did one writer believe? What did the next writer question? At what point did an illustration make the story feel more solid than the evidence beneath it?
There may have been a real animal somewhere behind the account, described badly, remembered imperfectly, or assembled from several things someone had heard about. There may have been no animal at all. The surviving description cannot settle that for us.
My hopes, meanwhile, are making themselves comfortable.
I would love to meet a large, whiskered sea creature with pearl-tipped branching antlers. I would love to see it emerge from the water and immediately complicate everything I thought I knew about snails. I would even accept ruby tips, emerald tips, or plain antlers if it was still growing into its formal look.
That last part is speculation. Vivie has been informed that any drawings of possible antler development must be labeled accordingly.
I know wanting an animal to exist does not make it exist. Still, wanting to meet it can send me back to the old books with a question worth asking. Sometimes the creature turns out to be real. Sometimes the story shows us how people looked at the world, what they feared, and what they hoped might be hiding just beyond their view.
Either way, I have learned something I did not know when I sat down.
The Grove Take
I am withholding judgment on the snail and refusing to withhold delight.
Thevet’s animal is not verified. Its four legs, glowing eyes, and pearl-bright antlers are details in an old account, not features we have observed in a living species. But I am glad somebody preserved the description. We can examine how it traveled without pretending that every stop along the way confirmed it.
And if a barrel-sized creature with branching antlers ever does appear at the edge of the Grove, I expect everyone to remain calm enough to let it introduce itself. I cannot promise that I will.
Porch Policy
The invitation has been issued: “Sarmatian Sea Snail, if you’re out there.”
The lagoon is available if our visitor chooses to come. So is a quiet place to rest, should it turn out to have feet after all. We will ask what it needs before making assumptions about salt water, snacks, antlers, or preferred forms of address.
Vivie may decorate the invitation with pearl-tipped antlers. They are illustrations, not evidence.
To the snail, or to whatever creature inspired the story: you are welcome to answer in your own time. We would be very excited to meet you. We will try not to make that your problem.
