SeegarsInSC

There are things out there in the dark that most of us ignore.

It doesn’t have to be completely dark. It could be out there in the woods, the shadows between the trees.

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SeegarsInSC Podcast: Things In The Dark

I’m not big on Bigfoot, although I don’t dismiss that there’s something to all the stories.

You’ve seen a gorilla. I’ve seen a gorilla. But until recent history they were no more than a myth. Explorers would come back with stories from African jungles about ill-tempered hairy, giant beasts with incredible strength and they were dismissed by scientists as nonsense.

Legend has it that the first report of gorillas come from the Greek explorer Hanno in the fifth century.

Hanno traveled to the western coasts of Africa, Sierra Leone and the Gulf of Guinea, and reported an island filled with savage people covered in hair.

Andrew Batell, a British explorer, told tales of seeing “monsters covered with hair except for their face and hands that slept in trees and fed on fruit. According to him, they looked like giant hair covered men.

In 1847 Dr. Thomas Savage (Doc Savage?!) managed to obtain several gorilla bones including a skull in Liberia, and published the very first formal description of the great ape.

Paul du Chaillu became the first modern European to see a live gorilla during his expeditions to equatorial Africa.

And mountain gorillas were believed a myth until 1902.

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From Weird Carolinas:

Woollyboogers, Boojums, or Skunk Apes have been seen by scores of Carolinians. Including law enforcement officers, librarians, schoolteachers, and members of the clergy-by people, in other words, who usually tell the truth.

A guy from Mechanicsville, SC, named Cal is among the many people who have been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of one of them in the Carolina swamps, back in the mid-1980s. As he told us, “Me, my cousin, and my father were idling up the Great Pee Dee River in a small boat. I was shooting a .22 pistol at some things and while I was looking toward the left bank I saw something that did not look right, but could not tell what it was. Then all in a split second it stood up and dove into the river with his arms stretched out, just like a man would dive, and it never was seen again. We went over and looked for track on the hard muddy surface…when I first saw it, it was on its feet with its knees bent, kneeling down like it was doing something between his legs. As I said, ‘Look!’ It was already going into the water. My father saw it as it was going in, but it all happened in about two seconds. I don’t ‘think’ I saw a Skunk Ape, I know I saw one.”

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Now, here’s the thing, I know Cal. I have spent time around him. I know him to be a good man and a good father. I know him to be very straight forward. I haven’t seen him in years, we used to run in the same circles of geocachers. But that’s one account I cannot dismiss. And with that, I can’t dismiss all the rest.

Yes, there are things out there in the dark. Things you may not want to see.

But they’re still there. And they see you.

That’s it. That’s the post.

Seegars.