Claim:
A video authentically showed an alligator swimming in a mall fountain in December 2025.
Rating:
In December 2025, a video of what appeared to be an alligator hanging out in a coin-filled fountain at a mall spread across Facebook (archived). The post that accompanied the video claimed the video was from Dec. 13 and that the full-grown alligator was apparently found in the central wishing fountain of a “popular outdoor mall.” The post gave no details on the location of the mall beyond its name, Lakeside Outdoor Mall.
The text of the post began:
Shoppers expecting a quiet afternoon of browsing were instead met with disbelief when a full-grown alligator was spotted cruising lazily through the central wishing fountain at a popular outdoor mall. The bizarre sight, captured on a shopper’s phone, shows the alligator gliding through the shallow water as startled onlookers gather at a cautious distance.
A Snopes reader reached out by email to ask if the video and story were real.
Neither the video nor the story was authentic. They were generated by artificial intelligence tools, so we’ve rated this claim fake.
The last sentence in the Facebook post that accompanied the video read: “This video is created using AI, and the story is for your entertainment.”
The page that posted the video, Jackson’s World, had the tagline “Where human imagination meets AI creation” in both its intro section and as part of its header image. Its profile picture included the text “AI VIDEOS.”
The video itself had some clues that the video was AI-generated and the story that went with it was fabricated. For example, while the low quality of the video made it difficult to discern exactly what was on the red poster in the background, the white characters appearedto be gibberish rather than any real letters — a common hallmark of AI generation. A ceiling was visible was in the video, even though the incident supposedly took place at an outdoor mall.
As for the story, it claimed that authorities speculated “heavy rains the previous night may have flooded storm drains, allowing the alligator to wander into the mall’s water system before surfacing in the fountain.” Because the location of the mall wasn’t named, there was no way to confirm whether the mall’s locale really experienced heavy rains the night before. However, the speculation regarding the storm drains was improbable, considering alligators are too big to move through whatever piping may potentially connect a fountain to the rest of the water system, if the fountain is connected to a wider system at all. And because the fountain was in an outdoor mall, a simpler explanation for how it got there would have been that the alligator simply walked into it.
But just in case, Snopes still attempted to find malls that could potentially match the one described in the post. The best potential match was Lakeside Village in Lakeside, Florida, an outdoor mall that, according to images on Google Maps, at one time had a central fountain, although it more recently featured a small circle of green space where the fountain once stood. There was no roof above or near the fountain, and the brick around the space both when it was a fountain and when it was green space differed from the tiling seen in the video.
Two malls that may have fit the description, Lakeland Square Mall, also in Lakeland, Florida, and Lakeside Shopping Center near New Orleans, were both indoor malls. One possibility was Oasis Texas-Lakeside Outdoor Mall, but this was not a traditional mall and it appeared to lack any fountains.
There have been real incidents of alligators finding their way into mall properties and becoming social media hits, such as this alligator found and captured outside a Florida mall in 2023. However, Snopes could not find an instance in which an alligator was found in a mall fountain.
Snopes has previously fact-checked many other claims that began with AI-generated photos and videos.
