Delaware: The Selbyville Swamp Monster

The smaller the state, the closer the monster feels. On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Roadtrip we drive all the way down to the bottom of Delaware, the second smallest state in the country, where there's nowhere for a monster to hide and so the monster lives right at the end of your road. Our destination is Selbyville and the Great Cypress Swamp, fifty square miles of black tannin water, standing cypress, and ground so confusing that people still go missing in it.

We dig into the land that water made, the colonial isolation that let these stories concentrate and grow stranger with every telling, and the peat fires that burned underground for months and earned the place its other name, the Burnt Swamp.

Then we get to what people have actually seen. Hunters in the 1920's who heard something scream and come at them through the dark water. A bowhunter who smelled it before the footsteps passed under his stand. Fishermen cutting their lines when the splashes coming down the gut were too heavy and too deliberate to be anything that's supposed to be out there. Kids chased off the wooded path. A tall, hairy figure stepping out of the cypress and crossing Route 54 in the headlights. We also tell the true part, because that's the deal on this show.

In 1964 a struggling newspaper editor named Ralph Grapperhaus lit a match under the old legend to sell papers, and a Selbyville man named Fred Stevens became the monster in his aunt's raccoon coat and a rubber mask, jumping out at cars until armed hunting parties made it too dangerous to keep going.

A young reporter cracked the whole thing open in 1998. But the mask doesn't explain the sightings that came forty years before it, and it doesn't explain why the people who live at the edge of that swamp still won't rule it out.

The man in the mask was only the part we could catch.

Keep your eyes on the tree line, and if something tall steps into your headlights down there in the dark, don't stop to feed it.

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Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

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