This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

On the border of Virginia and North Carolina near the eastern shoreline

stretches a great dismal swamp, the great dismal swamp actually. That's the name

British colonists had given it by the early 1700s. The swamp covers about 190

square miles today.

But at its peak, before parts of it were drained and developed,

it was around 10 times bigger,

spanning roughly 2,000 square miles of Virginia and North Carolina. That's our own Sharif usif usif.

And it's understandable why people call the swamp dismal.

Temperatures can reach over 100 degrees.

It's humid and soggy, filled with thorns and thickets.

Oh yes, it is quite dismal.

They named it, I think, somewhat appropriately.

That's Eric Shepard.

He leaves in Carrollton, Virginia, and he runs a company that leads

tourists to the Great Dismal Swamp, which is teeming with all sorts of dangerous and

unpleasant wildlife.

You still have Black Bear and some of the poisonous snakes and yellow flies and mosquitoes.

I mean, you still have the hazards there in the swamp.

And even if you go in with a compass and a map, it's easy to get lost.

But hundreds of years ago, before the Civil War, the dangers of the swamp and its seeming impenetrability actually attracted a lot of people,

including one of Shepard's ancestors, who was enslaved in the region.

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