Growing up on a North Florida farm, I had grown accustomed to a myriad of sounds. Gunshots from the shooting range across the street, bullfrogs bellowing from who knows where, my parent’s severe weather radio sending its Purge-like alarm out in the middle of the night. The shriek I heard that day was not one of them.
It was an unusually cool afternoon after a tropical storm. Trees were down, leaves were everywhere, and something was screeching repeatedly in the poison ivy–filled forest by my house. It was like a monkey and a bird had a baby. A few possible suspects ran through my head (did my neighbor shoot one of our pigs for going into his yard again?), but there was only one I wanted to be right. I felt sure I had just heard my first Skunk Ape.
The Skunk Ape is a uniquely Floridian cryptid, occupying the diverse wilderness between the Everglades and Panhandle while somehow understanding that the human-made Florida-Georgia border is where its domain ends. It’s believed to be a tall (but not Bigfoot-sized), tremendously hairy, musky, orange, four-toed beast of a primate.
The sound in the woods was my first “encounter” with the creature, but my fascination had begun when I was ten, glued to TV reruns of Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot. When that team of cryptid chasers and skeptics visited my home county once, I was surprised. When they visited a second time a few seasons later, I felt I was destined to meet this beast. And I eventually did, along the Tamiami Trail smack dab in the middle of the Everglades.
As a child, I knew the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters as that building with the gorilla statue a mile down the road from the massive alligator corpse my dad and I had swerved around that one time. Now, I know it as the premier institution of Skunk Apedom.
From giant pythons to taxidermied alligator heads, the Skunk Ape Headquarters has all the makings of a typical Florida gift shop. But then there’s the section of evidence, complete with casts of alleged footprints, grainy photos, and research field guides. The shop is operated by Jack Shealy, who is one in a family of Skunk Ape enthusiasts. In the nineties, Shealy’s dad captured the most infamous photo of a supposed Skunk Ape as it swept its long, hairy limbs across a swamp.
Shealy himself hasn’t seen the creature, but he’s “spent his whole life out in the Everglades looking,” he says. The closest he’s come was in a marsh as a child. “We found a dried-up minnow pond where the wading birds had been through, and there was a set of four-toed tracks,” he recalls. “Of course, nobody wanted to believe me.”
But Shealy gets an overload of other people’s sightings. (The shop phone, he notes, is not supposed to be a Skunk Ape hotline, just a business number.) From die-hard Bigfoot believers to bemused skeptics, visitors pour into the headquarters. When I was fourteen, I was one of them, and I’ve hoped to see a Skunk Ape of my own ever since.
Now, I’m a woman of science. But even Jane Goodall won’t rule out the possibility of a Bigfoot-like creature. And if there ever was a place that could harbor such a large, elusive being, I know my home state would be it.
On that day in the woods, when the haunting howl lingered in the humid air, I didn’t feel terror or concern but something like pride. I had finally heard the beast so many called a hoax, and I was lucky enough not to have my phone on me. (All the best Squatch sightings go unrecorded.) It wasn’t until earlier this year, when I was listening to birds in my backyard, that I heard it again. The cry pierced the air with the same monkey-like cadence it had years before. At the same time, my phone screen lit up with a notification from the Merlin Bird ID app, and my face fell: “Barred owl call identified,” it read.
Technology giveth, and technology taketh away. Still, I’m keeping my ears and eyes open, just like Shealy. “You would imagine a bipedal mammal like that would have been found by now,” he says, “but one of the coolest things is that Florida still has wild lands to sustain an idea of something like that.”
