Florida: The Skunk Ape

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip rolls south out of the Delaware mud and doesn't stop until the asphalt runs out at the edge of the wet. This stop is Florida, and the thing waiting in the saw grass is the Skunk Ape, the South's swamp-bound cousin to Bigfoot, seven feet of reddish-brown hair that most witnesses say they smell long before they see.Rotten eggs, wet dog, sulfur, a stink that hangs in the yard for an hour after the thing is gone. We get into the encounters fast and we get into a lot of them, because that's what you came for.A night fisherman who kills his lantern and still sees two eyes burning high over the reeds. A family watching something cross the road that stands taller than a six-foot-five inch man. Hunters who could taste the smell before anything stepped out of the palmetto. A scream out of the Big Cypress dark that froze a campsite, and the thing that came to a four-year-old's bedroom window and held her gaze through the glass. Along the way we work the documented record the way you work an open case, weighing a Vietnam vet and former cop named Charles Stoeckman who slept a month with a shotgun, a tour guide and thirty passengers who watched one rock back and forth for fifteen minutes, a fire chief and a real estate agent who saw the same creature minutes apart on the same road, and the 1977 wave that got loud enough that a Florida lawmaker actually tried to make it a crime to harm one.We dig into the famous Myakka photographs, the two flash shots an anonymous grandmother mailed to the Sarasota sheriff asking if anyone was missing an orangutan, and why a quarter century later nobody's closed the case in either direction. We spend real time with Dave Shealy and his Skunk Ape Research Headquarters out on the Tamiami Trail, the man who's given fifty years and the most argued-over footage in the field to proving the thing is real.Then we do the honest part, the bears and the panthers and the genuinely-real wild monkey colonies breeding in Florida's woods, the skeptics inside the research community who put the credible-sighting rate at maybe five out of a hundred and fifty, and the one detail none of the easy answers explains: the smell.Roll the windows up for this one. Trust me. Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.