Spooky (and stinky) stories abound in Old Florida lore
“You better be good this Halloween or the goblins will be after you,” a father wrote on a postcard to his young son in 1910. The image on the card features a pumpkin-headed goblin wearing red plaid pants.
Somehow, it seems scarier to me than a Harry Potter-chasing Dementor; I hope poor Charles was not plagued by a lifelong fear of pumpkins or red pants.
The card shows that commercial Halloween cards have been around for decades, although in 1910 we were far from the estimated $8.8 billion in Halloween spending the National Retail Federation predicts for 2019.
The federation also reports that about 5 million adults are planning witch costumes, while 2 million aim to dress as vampires, 1.8 million as superheroes, 1.5 million as pirates and 1.4 million as zombies.
My childhood Halloween scheme was to borrow my mother’s hoop earrings and a scarf to transform a skirt and blouse and become a dashing gypsy.
Off I would go with friends on crisp October nights to the Hillcrest Elementary School carnival, where apple bobbing was about as wild and crazy as it got. No chainsaw-wielding zombies.
An awful aroma
When it comes to costume inspiration, though, Floridians have our own homegrown spooky legends, fueled by dark Sunshine State lore. For example, it’s hard to beat the story of the Skunk Ape — Florida’s version of Bigfoot — both for longevity and varied appearances around the state.
But a Skunk Ape costume does present some challenges: They’ve been described as smelling like rotten eggs and moldy cheese.
“It smelled awful,” a trucker told a reporter, describing how a hairy creature “came right out of the dark” and grabbed him at a rest stop on Interstate
75. He wrestled his way free and scared the creature away with blasts from his air horn, the trucker said.
Stories of big, hairy, stinky creatures may be related to early American Indian legends about giants called the “Mangrove People” and the “Sand People,” the late Seminole County historian Charlie Carlson wrote in “Weird Florida: Your Travel Guide to Florida’s Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets” (2009).
The Skunk Ape stories seem to have taken off in the late 1950s. Carlson describes how three Boy Scouts “emerged in a panic from the Ocala National Forest with a wild tale of having been routed from their camp by a big, hairy monster” with a human face and the body of an ape.
The Scouts’ story would be easy to dismiss as a boyish yarn, Carlson noted, if not for the many similar stories that have popped up over the years.
He quotes several in “Weird Florida,” including one describing “one of these ape things” that would show up around Orlando’s Fairvilla Shopping Center in 1968. Folks dubbed it “the Fairvilla Gorilla,” Carlson wrote.
Surfeit of spooky
Other spooky tales collected by Carlson included the Phantom Horse of Celery Avenue in Sanford, the St. Johns River Monster (“it looked like a brontosaurus but not nearly as large”), the so-called “dead zone” on Interstate 4, the Oviedo Lights, stingrays in local lakes and a moonshine still on wheels.
Some stories in Carlson’s “Weird Florida” involve the stuff of legend; others discuss real folks, such as Harry Wise of Sanford, a very real master magician and “ghostmaster” who once entertained thousands on theater stages across the United States and Canada.
As for the Skunk Ape, like other Bigfoot legends, it has long inspired varied explanations. Escaped monkeys? Overactive imaginations?
Whatever our odiferous beastie is or has been over the decades, the Skunk Ape is fun to contemplate around the spooky season.
If you google “Skunk Ape and Florida,” you’ll find lots of lore, and even a 2014 “Smithsonian” magazine article about the Skunk Ape Research Center in Ochopee, about 75 miles east of Miami, led by Dave Shealy, who describes himself as “the Jane Goodall of the Florida Everglades.”