The afternoon of May 19, three women were standing at the front counter of A Maker's Post — the home goods shop on Sullivan's Island — when a coyote casually trotted in through the open front door.
Amanda Woodward, a sales rep for the wine and beverage distributor Advintage, was on a routine sales call to store manager Vaughn Connolly and employee Ashlynn Moseley. She saw the animal first.
She thought it was a dog.
"I really, wholeheartedly just thought it was a dog," Woodward told the Post & Courier.
The security camera caught what came next: the moment of realization, the shriek, the three women yelling and bolting for the back of the store while the coyote scrambled across the counter and knocked over Moseley's water bottle. They locked the back door. Connolly looped around to the front and bolted that one too. The coyote, now trapped inside the shop, stopped panicking, located a large decorative pot in the back, and curled up in it.
It stayed there for two hours.
Wildlife trappers eventually arrived to collect the animal. By state law it was likely euthanized — South Carolina prohibits trapped coyotes from being relocated or translocated. So the most viral wildlife encounter on the islands this year ends in a fashion that is, on second thought, not actually funny.
The bigger picture.
Coyotes are an invasive species in South Carolina, not native, and they live in all 46 counties. They're typically active at dawn and dusk and tend to avoid people. Walking into a shop on Middle Street in broad daylight is rare enough that it counts as an incident — but it isn't unheard of. Sullivan's Island Police Chief Glenn Meadows told town council on May 19 that the island has seen an uptick in encounters, including a woman who said a coyote stalked her on the beach near Station 26 while she was walking her dog.
The historical archive of Lowcountry coyote stories is now long enough to be its own genre. In 2017, a coyote followed a Mount Pleasant doctor into his Southeastern Spine Institute office and growled at him in the stairwell. In 2024, a Mount Pleasant homeowner went viral for tossing a coyote into a dumpster after it tried to attack his chihuahua in his own backyard.
Common factor on the island: open doors.
Open garages. Propped front entries on warm afternoons. The Maker's Post incident is a reminder that "we'll just leave it open, it's so nice out" carries an unexpected line item in the Lowcountry.
The store, for what it's worth, has reopened. The pot survived. Moseley's water bottle did not. And there is now a permanent piece of footage on the internet of three women calmly chatting with a vendor when the animal they assumed was a friendly dog turns into Sullivan's Island's most charismatic intruder of 2026.
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