Larry Gwin and Steve Wilson's Altamaha-ha sighting at Smith Lake

The Altamaha River winds through McIntosh County, Georgia, and reaches the coast near Darien. Its oxbow lakes and tidal creeks have long carried stories of something large in the water. In 1830 Capt. Delano of the schooner Eagle reported an animal off St. Simons Island "about 70 feet long," with a head "shaped like an Alligator's."

December 1980. Smith Lake, an oxbow off the Altamaha upstream of Darien. Larry Gwin, a former newspaper reporter and publisher who lived on the banks of the river north of Darien, was eel fishing with his partner, Steve Wilson.

Then two humps rose out of the water. Brown, or brownish-green in one telling. About five feet apart. The animal looked snake-like, fifteen to twenty feet long. It "left behind a wake like that of a speedboat." One account remembers "a big swirl of water." Then it went under. It disappeared without resurfacing. No head was seen. No sound was reported. Nobody took a photograph.

The sighting reached print in 1981, which is why many accounts give that year. One early syndicated article appears to be Jingle Davis's "Anglers Report Close Encounter With A Creature," published in The Palm Beach Post on February 16, 1981. The tabloid Weekly World News ran its own headline that year: "Monster Serpent Lurks in Murky American River."

After the coverage, other people on the river shared what they had seen. Harvey Blackman of Brunswick described a "snake-like head" at the "Two Way" point in the 1970s. Frank Culpepper watched a massive wake, "a billow of water so big that it caused boats to bump about." One of his companions went for a rifle, but the animal was gone before anyone could shoot. Crab fisherman Ralph DeWitt called his sighting "the world's biggest eel."

Summer 1980. Near Cathead Creek, Andy Greene and Barry Prescott reportedly found an animal stranded on a mud bank. It was "dark coloured, with a rough skin," "three to four feet thick… and twenty feet long." It lay half in the water, thrashing. After about ten minutes it freed itself, submerged and disappeared.

No official investigation looked at the Smith Lake sighting, and no source accuses Gwin or Wilson of a hoax. The details have blurred with retelling, though. The same fifteen to twenty foot length turns up in accounts of other witnesses.

Researcher Dale Drinnon argued that sightings like this one are alligator gar, an idea also raised in Tulane News in 2014. Sceptic Blake Smith pointed to otters, dolphins and manatees, which can create the illusion of something bigger. A relic reptile, Smith noted, "would have to be part of a large population," with "many more sightings."

In 2018 photos and video of a carcass on Wolf Island stirred the legend again, and Georgia DNR looked at the footage. Performance artist Zardulu later claimed responsibility. The carcass was a stuffed shark and papier-mâché.

Darien has since embraced the creature it calls the Altamaha-ha, or simply Altie. There are murals, a welcome billboard and a 20-foot statue. It even appears as a boss in the video game South of Midnight. And the river still has its witnesses. "I saw a wake coming up the river," Kathleen Russell said, "and there's nothing that could make a wake like that."