Spooky stories: Mystery in South Florida

floridaHalloween is right around the corner, and the Everglades region has plenty of spooky stories of its own. Here are just a few!

–The Ghost Ship of the Everglades has been haunting Florida’s south coast since the days of pirating marauders — its phantom crew cursed to sail the seas for all eternity, after giving chase to a merchant ship and getting lost in the twisting channels of the Everglades’ swamplands. The story has been told in one form or another for hundreds of years.

–The story of Edgar Watson is a strange one: No one knew where he came from, but he built a cabin in the Everglades over 100 years ago and largely kept to himself, until a fisherman found the gutted body of a woman floating in the Chatham River. Authorities eventually found dozens of human bodies buried on Edgar Watson’s farm, and a former farmhand reported seeing him take lives ritualistically. The property is thought to be haunted to this day.

–It’s not clear what happened to the Calusa, an ancient tribe of Native Americans that resisted incursion by the Spanish and fatally injured explorer Juan Ponce de Leon in 1521. The Calusa practiced human sacrifice and believed their leaders had supernatural powers. The mass remains of their civilization were found hundreds of years later in the form of human skulls. Piles of them!

–Numerous planes have disappeared in the Everglades over the years, never to be seen again. In December 1972, Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 was headed to Miami from New York, but due to an electronic failure and pilot error, it crashed in the Everglades, killing 96 of 163 people onboard. Paranormal events were soon experienced on other Eastern Air Lines planes that used parts cannibalized from the wreckage of Flight 401. The odd occurrences were documented in the 1976 book “The Ghost of Flight 401,” and the airline eventually replaced all of the parts salvaged from the doomed flight.

In May 1996, a fire broke out on ValuJet Flight 592 shortly after takeoff from Miami. The plane plunged into the alligator-infested water and very little of it was ever found; all 105 passengers were killed. Some consider it to be one of the most baffling airplane mysteries in modern aviation history.

No one knows the Everglades like Captain Mitch’s Airboat Tours in Everglades City, Florida. To book a tour, visit our website or call 800-368-0065.