I had a teacher who was also my best friend’s Mother. She once told the class a great story of her Grandfather killing an 18 foot alligator on the Choctawhatchee River around the turn of the century. No not this century, that century.
That is either a record or close. Yes I believe her due to some of the details.
"The scattered rifle shots in the pitch black swamp punctured by the screams of wounded men crushed in the jaws of huge reptiles, and the blurred worrying sound of spinning crocodiles made a cacophony of hell that has rarely been duplicated on earth. At dawn the vultures arrived to clean up what the crocodiles had left…Of about 1,000 Japanese soldiers that entered the swamps of Ramree, only about 20 were found alive.”
I could believe it. In the early days of the country, some spectacular catches were made of various beasts because they had been relatively unmolested and allowed to grow to huge sizes.