Eerie Florida

Chilling Tales from the Panhandle to the Keys

Mark Muncy, Kari Schultz

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781625859853
• eBook ISBN: 9781439662311
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Shiver with these eerie stories of the Sunshine State after dark.

Surrounded by golden beaches, sparkling Atlantic waters, and palm trees as far as the eye can sea, Florida can give the appearance of a tropical paradise, but the Sunshine State is home to numerous eerie legends and mysterious creatures. From reports of an elusive Skunk Ape skulking around the Everglades, to an uncanny doll said to be cursed with a life of its own sits inside a glass case in the Florida Keys to welcome any tourists brave enough to come near, and even the tale of a man in South Florida who constructed his own castle by ways still unknown. Join Mark Muncy and Kari Schultz as they uncover the history behind the state's creepies stories and unusual locations.

THE SUNSHINE SKYWAY BRIDGE

Tampa Bay

In the early 1950s, there was a great plan to build a giant bridge from southern St. Petersburg in Pinellas County to Terra Ceia in Manatee County. This grand bridge would cross the southern mouth of Tampa Bay and thus go through yet a third county, since the waters belong to Hillsborough County. When the bridge opened in 1954, it was not the first bridge to cross Tampa Bay, but it was the first bridge to cross the southern gap of the bay. The span helped cut the usual drive time of several hours from Bradenton to St. Petersburg to less than an hour. It was a wonder of engineering, but it was to be marked by several tragedies for years to come. This has led to so many ghost stories and legends surrounding the bridge that many call it cursed.

On May 9, 1980, the large cargo ship Summit Venture was coming into the port of Tampa. It was in the early hours of the day, and Bruce Atkins was assisting harbor pilot John Lerro. The harbor pilot was nearing the turn that would guide them under the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, which rose to over 150 feet above the bay, when suddenly the wind changed direction and a sudden tropical storm appeared out of nowhere. Tropical rains and sudden storms are common in Florida and can seemingly spring up on a moment’s notice. When this storm came, there was a sudden blinding rain and gusts that were likely greater than seventy miles an hour. The boat began to turn sideways.

As the sunlight started to come back through the clouds, Lerro realized how off course the boat was and ordered the anchors dropped and the engines full astern, but it was far too late. The twenty-thousand-ton vessel was drifting toward the bridge. It scraped the second pier of the bridge, and the whole middle span collapsed. Lerro was five hundred feet away in the wheelhouse of the Venture and could do nothing.

A private photo of the wreckage of the collapsed span of the bridge taken by a rescue boat. Note how far the vehicles would have fallen before hitting the water. Courtesy of the St. Petersburg Museum of History.

Within moments, a Greyhound bus drove off the collapsed span and plummeted through the steel and girders into the waters of Tampa Bay below. Car after car continued off the bridge as the rain made it nearly impossible to see ahead.

Lerro placed a distress call, which can be heard at the archives of the St. Petersburg History Museum. It is a frantic call, John Lerro is trying desperately to get the Skyway to close to traffic: “The bridge is down. Get all emergency equipment onto the Skyway Bridge. The Skyway Bridge is down. This is a major emergency situation. Stop the traffic on that Skyway Bridge.”

In all, thirty-five people lost their lives that day. The Summit Venture picked up the only survivor, who landed on the deck of the ship. Up on the bridge, Richard Hornbuckle in his 1976 Buick was able to stop as he saw the lights of a car in front of him fall off the bridge just as the squall died down. He and his passengers, though dazed and in shock, walked down the bridge and alerted other drivers to stop any others from driving at seventy miles an hour off the 150-foot drop into the bay below.

A photo of the bow of the Summit Venture with some of the wreckage of the Skyway Bridge still on it shortly after the disaster. Courtesy of the St. Petersburg Museum of History.

When work began on the replacement bridge, it was built to prevent just such a disaster from ever occurring again. Not only did they raise the height and widen the channel underneath, but construction also included barrier bumpers that could withstand nearly thirty million pounds of force. Rock islands were secured around the center piers, and the whole bridge was moved farther away from the sharp turn so that ships would have much more room to maneuver. All of this was in the wake of the Summit Venture disaster.

While this was by far the worst disaster and most infamous involving the bridge, just a few months prior in January 1980, the worst peacetime disaster in coast guard history occurred just two miles south of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. The high volume of the shipping lanes and the notoriously difficult, narrow navigation were well known at the time. The U.S. Coast Guard buoy tender Blackthorn was replacing navigational markers when it was blinded by the bright lights of the Russian cruise ship Kazakhstan. This caused the vessel to collide with the oil tanker Capricorn, carrying nearly 152,000 barrels of oil. There was initially only minor damage, but the Capricorn’s anchor, which alone weighed nearly seven tons, hooked the Blackthorn. Once the line became taut, the small coast guard cutter was pulled over and capsized within minutes in forty-foot-deep water.

Of a crew of nearly fifty sailors, twenty-three died. The heroic actions and sacrifice of a young sailor named Seaman Apprentice Billy Flores helped save so many of his fellow crew mates. He climbed onto the deck of the quickly sinking Blackthorn and started throwing life vests to his fellow crew. He then used his belt to tie open the storage locker where the vests were as the boat capsized, hoping that life vests would float out and be able to be used by his fellows. Sadly, this was his last act of bravery, as he was pulled under the capsizing boat. For his actions, he was posthumously awarded the Coast Guard Medal in September 2000.

Thankfully, the waters of Tampa Bay were mildly warm, as is common in January in Tampa Bay. No storms hindered rescue efforts, or else more lives might have been lost. The Blackthorn itself was stripped of all useful metals and today lies around twenty miles off Clearwater Beach as an artificial reef. Each year, the coast guard holds a memorial service there.

The dark history of the Skyway Bridge doesn’t stop there. At the time of the writing of this book, at least 220 people have committed suicide by jumping from the center span since the new bridge opened in 1987. Over 30 other lost souls have tried to end their lives by jumping off the bridge but have survived. From 1954 all the way to 1987, 51 people jumped to their deaths from the previous Sunshine Skyway Bridge. Two famous cases include Michael Plezia, who had been kidnapped and tortured and was forced to jump at gunpoint in 1981. On the Fourth of July in 1992, a young man from Sarasota hanged himself from the bridge.

There are now six crisis hotline phones along the span of the road. The state now has officers cross the bridge constantly, with a “suicide watch patrol” trained specifically for talking down potential jumpers. Stopping on the bridge for any non-emergency, including photography or sightseeing, is strictly prohibited. Since it is a controlled-access highway, pedestrians and bicycles are also prohibited. Many lives have been saved since the implementation of these prevention methods, but attempts and successful suicides still occur with frightening regularity, and as stated by some members of the highway patrol, the number of attempts actually seems to be climbing in recent years.

Is it any wonder that a bridge so associated with death would have a haunted history to coincide with it?

The most famous and most frequently spotted ghost along the span is that of a lone hitching ghost. A young girl wearing white seems lost and dazed as she crosses the span. Friendly travelers stop to help the poor girl and hopefully prevent a tragic situation that so frequently occurs on the bridge. The girl gets into the vehicle and says nothing, usually shaking and looking very wet. At some point, the driver looks away, and she vanishes without a trace, as though she was never there at all. Her appearance is so commonly reported to the tollbooth operators that most simply reply with, “Oh, you met our ghost.” Her initial sightings go so far back that they were on the old span. This ghost seems to have migrated to the new bridge, as reports of her continue to this very day.

The Blackthorn memorial, with the ship’s original anchor at the park near the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

A less common sighting occurs on the fishing piers that were created from the remains of the span of the older bridge. This sighting is spoken of by fishers along that pier. They state that in the early morning just as the sun rises over the bay, they hear the engine of a large vehicle coming down the span. As it is closed to traffic, that alone is cause for concern. Then the image of the old Greyhound bus that crashed on that fateful day can be seen driving along the bridge toward its inevitable final destination once again. The most terrifying piece of this story was told by one eyewitness, who claimed that he could see every one of the faces of the passengers just screaming as they hurtled past—except for the last passenger in the passing windows. “He was just smiling.”

The area around the bridge is so associated with tragedy and death that local boaters have a legend of their own, a legendary creature drawn to the blood in the water. A creature supposedly at least twenty feet long and as white as a ghost. While certainly no Moby Dick or Jaws, it is another legendary albino marine creature. This giant hammerhead shark has the unusual nickname of “Old Hitler.” Reports of his sightings and “almost caught him” stories abounded in the mid-’80s and late ’90s, but there are still reports of encounters with him as recent as the time of this writing in 2017.

The view of the new Sunshine Skyway Bridge over the mouth of Tampa Bay, where you can see pieces of the old bridge still crumbling in the waters below.

A photo showing the capture of a large hammerhead in St. Petersburg in front of the old electric trolley system from the early 1900s. Courtesy of the St. Petersburg Museum of History.

For decades, the shark has dodged fishers, and it is supposedly covered with scars from near misses with harpoons and hooks. Apparently one person attacked it with a machete. The stories of the shark are as legendary as the beast himself. There are tales of him jumping into boats to steal fish off hooks. The greatest tale is of Old Hitler dragging a jeep off the old Skyway Bridge after getting jabbed with the car’s tow cable, which was in the waters of Tampa Bay.

The stories drew the attention of the Discovery Channel in 2014, and it was featured on the program Monster Hammerheads during the channel’s popular annual “Shark Week” event programming block. The show spotted numerous sharks in the bay but not the ever-elusive Old Hitler.

The “Old Hitler” moniker came during World War II. German U-boats were a significant threat to ships off the Florida coastline. The coast guard and the navy used blimps to try to spot the submarines. Many of the sightings turned out to be large hammerheads that frequent the waters of the Gulf and the mouth of Tampa Bay. The “Old Hitler” reference was one that was too easy to simply ignore, and the legend grew from there. There are more recent reports that the shark even has a scar on his hammerhead that resembles a swastika.

It is very unlikely that all the legends come from the same shark; however, there are hammerheads greater than twelve feet long sighted in the Gulf of Mexico regularly. The sharks follow the tarpon school runs that run all over the Gulf coast of Florida from the Keys up to the panhandle. Large hammerheads would be capable of nearly all of the legendary exploits attributed to Old Hitler. The largest hammerhead ever captured in the Gulf of Mexico was in 2008 and was over thirteen feet long and weighed nearly 1,400 pounds. Thankfully, hammerheads are rarely a threat to humans, but blood in the water can cause any shark to change its demeanor. Included on the previous page is a picture from the archives of the St. Petersburg Museum of History’s Archives where two St. Petersburg fishermen stand next to a landed hammerhead shark over ten feet long as early as 1914.

So when driving across the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, keep your eyes open for the beautiful drive. The sunsets and sunrises are particularly splendid as you drive the long bridge at the dizzying heights. Just make sure to watch for hitchhiking ghosts, a haunted bus and a legendary shark that might give the Loch Ness Monster a run for its money.

If you’d like to know more about the history of the bridge, you should read The Sunshine Skyway Bridge: Spanning Tampa Bay, written by Nevin and Richard Sitler, also by The History Press. Written in 2013 with the help of the St. Petersburg Museum of History, it is a fascinating tale of every attempt to span the bay and all that went into completing the original span and the more modern replacement that had to be built after that fateful day in 1980.

SARA DE SOTO
AND THE SPIRITS OF THE BAY

Sarasota

The area of Sarasota is beautiful and peaceful. This idyllic land was to be the winter home of John Ringling. There he built a beautiful mansion with an amazing collection of art. The gardens and beaches of Sarasota are among the most popular destinations for tourists in the world. They also seem to dodge the worst of the hurricanes and tropical storms that frequent the Gulf coast of Florida. Of course, there is a legend as to why.

In 1900, a historian named George F. Chapline of Clarendon, Arkansas, overheard some local natives telling the tale and wrote an account of the legend that Sarasota still proudly displays on its website....

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Wiccademus: Fernandina Beach
• Kingsley Ghost Horde: Fort George Island
• Tomoka Park’s Flesh-Eating Cloud: Daytona
• “Pinky,” the St. Johns River Monster: Jacksonville
• The Ghosts and the Exploding Bishop: St. Augustine
• The Slaughter of Fort Matanzas: Anastasia Island
• Devil’s Millhopper: Gainesville
• Toad Invasion: Longwood
• The Devil’s Chair: Cassadaga
• Skunk Apes: Ocala and Everglades City
• Spook Hill: Lake Wales
• Gnomes of Bok Tower: Lake Wales
• The Bradley Massacre: Brooksville
• Mermaids: Weeki Wachee
• The Trestle Bridge Spider Monster: Tampa
• The Lady in White at the Boatyard Village: Clearwater
• The Cinder Lady: St. Petersburg
• Mini Lights: St. Petersburg
• Lost Cemeteries of Tampa Bay: St. Petersburg
• The Dancing Gentleman Ghost: Gulfport
• The Sunshine Skyway Bridge: Tampa Bay
• Sara De Soto and the Spirits of the Bay: Sarasota
• The Coral Castle: Homestead
• UFOs and USOs: Gulf Breeze
• Dozier School for Boys: Marianna
• Robert the Doll: Key West
• In Closing
• About the Author and Illustrator