THREE teenagers found giant footprints after hearing a scream ring out through a South Carolina forest in 1977.
Residents of Saluda County were terrified upon the discovery of footprints measuring 14 inches long and seven inches wide on a local farm. The community said that they were left by the "Saludasquatch" — the county's own version of the legendary Bigfoot creature.
The shocking discovery coincidentally occurred just a week after the 1976 film Sasquatch played in a local movie theater.
The three teenage boys who found the prints were creeped out not only by the large tracks but by the eerie scream that preceded the find.
"The scream was real loud, " said Mark Berry, one of the boys who found the footprints on D.W. Berry's farm. "It echoed all over the woods. It was like a big truck braking."
But it wasn't the first time that the chilling sound had been heard in those woods.
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Many residents had heard the sound before and most assumed that the shriek came from an animal or a bird, according to the Augusta Chronicle.
The number of coincidences led the Saluda County Sheriff's Office to consider the prints a hoax, but that didn't stop over 300 curious people from stopping by the forest to see the tracks for themselves.
The local event followed another mysteriously giant set of footprints that had been found nearby in Fort Mill just a month earlier.
Two kids found the 12-inch prints in the garden while they were playing football in their yard.
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Though the Fort Mill prints didn't cause any real panic in the community, the York County Nature Museum made a plaster cast in case identification was possible.
People's obsession with the unknown Bigfoot has sparked conspiracy theories, search parties, and even museums.
Years after the sasquatch mania cooled down in South Carolina, lizard mania began with horrifying sightings of the Lizard Man of Lee County.
The first report of a Lizard Man attack was in 1988, when a teenage boy changing a flat tire was chased by the 7-foot-tall lizard.
"I could see him from the neck down-the three big fingers, long black nails and green rough skin," 17-year-old Christopher Davis was recorded saying.
"It was strong and angry."
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The state's Lizard Man started a similar sensation to the Saludasquatch's.
Joseph Laycock, a professor of religious studies, told the Smithsonian Magazine that the event was a standard "chain of events – a strange sighting, media attention, more sightings, followed by visits from curious tourists and monster hunters."
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