Florida: The Skunk Ape

About this episode

The episode explores various encounters with the Skunk Ape in Florida, detailing eyewitness accounts and historical records.

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…

Topics covered

• Skunk Ape
• Bigfoot encounters
• Florida cryptids
• sightings
• documented records

Keywords

• Skunk Ape
• Florida
• Bigfoot
• sightings
• cryptids
• Myakka photographs
• 1977 wave

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Florida lawmaker

Places: Florida, Big Cypress, Myakka

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