BRUNSWICK, Ga. -- Deep within the swampy-depths of a southeast Georgia river floats a legend as murky as the waters that have concealed it for centuries.
There's something big floating in the Altamaha River. It's not a catfish and centuries of explorers of the thick woods and wetlands swear it's no alligator.
The creature has become known as the Altamaha-ha - or Altie to many generations of locals. But what Altie is - or if it exists - has remained one of the great unanswered questions of the Okefenokee metropolitan area.
It's a question that has followed Taylor Brown through his youth into adulthood and now manifests itself as the creature itself in his new book "River of Kings."
Brown told Garden & Gun Magazine that he wants to believe and that there's plenty of reason to. To him, the Altamaha River is its own "Little Amazon" and there's plenty of room for unsolved mysteries.
"Le Moyne wasn’t here to draw maps filled with imaginary monsters or warnings like ‘Here be Dragons;’ he was sent to catalog the flora and fauna of the region,” he told the magazine. “His alligators are misshapen and dinosaur-like, more like the descriptions of the Altamaha-ha than any alligator I’ve seen.”
He was referring to Jacques Le Moyne who the magazine described as the first European artist to illustrate the new lands that became known as North America in the 1500s.
Brown said that was the first known sighting of what may have been the creature but far from the last. Other encounters have been reported in the centuries since - a creature as long as 70 feet that's unlike anything even sailors had ever seen lurking in the river or near the nearby barrier islands.
Now, in 2018, the great debate over Altie has reappeared in the age of social media. And Brown has found himself right in the middle of it.
A bizarre photo from Wolf Island off the Georgia coast made its way onto a popular Facebook group and soon spread across the country through other mediums like the evening news.
Could it have been the mysterious creature? Answers to that question ended up being about as hard to find as who exactly posted it. That person seemingly disappeared leaving others to suspect it was a hoax.
Officials with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources appear to have come to the same conclusion finding signs of photo editing paper mache in the now infamous image.
Still, Brown told Garden & Gun he wants to know why someone would go to such lengths to fake it. He wants to believe this new sighting was real, but he's not sure if he can.
Still, Brown searches for the truth behind the legend and waits for the day that the dark waters finally provide some sort of clarity.
Do you believe?
