Have you seen the Everglades Skunk Ape? It’s just been named a top attraction in the US

The Everglades Skunk Ape has gone national.

The headquarters for the mysterious creature has been named one of the top roadside attractions in the country by USA Today’s “10 Best” reader choice rankings.

Shealy’s Official Skunk Ape Headquarters in Ochopee, Florida, was ranked the No. 2 best roadside attraction in the country. Lucy the Elephant, which stands six stories high in Margate, New Jersey, and is not a real elephant, is the No. 1 roadside attraction.

The rankings have this to say about the only Florida attraction on the list:

“Sometimes called the Sasquatch of the Southeast, the skunkape is rumored to live in the Everglades near Ochopee. At Shealy’s Official Skunk Ape Headquarters, interested visitors can see a plaster cast of a skunkape footprint and Dave Shealy’s photographic evidence of the creature.”

The rest of the top 10: World’s Largest Ball of Twine (Cawker City, Kansas), Carhenge (Alliance, Nebraska), Dalmatian Fire Hydrant (Beaumont, Texas), Paul A. Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum (Logan, Ohio), Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox (Bemidji, Minnesota), Wheat Jesus (Colby, Kansas), Wall Drug Store Inc (Wall, South Dakota), Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum (Gibsland, Louisiana).

But what about Florida’s own Skunk Ape Headquarters?

Well, we have some information for you:

Skunk Ape Headquarters

What: Tours, gift shop, camping, animal exhibit

Where: 40904 Tamiami Trail East, on the Trail Lakes Campground property, Ochopee, Florida

Contact: Call 239-695-2275 or email evergladesadventuretours@gmail.com

What’s the Skunk Ape all about?

Is the Everglades Skunk Ape real?

Real or not, it’s now been listed as one of America’s top roadside attractions. So there must be something to the mythical Miami creature (and its real-life sightings, of course).

Whatever you think about Florida’s version of Big Foot, Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster, you have to admit the Skunk Ape is interesting.

So let’s go through the Miami Herald archives and see what it’s all about:

Have You Seen The Skunk Ape?

Some “facts” about a creature reportedly seen, but never quite well enough, in Florida:

▪ Size: Sometimes described as similar to its northern Bigfoot cousins, typically is estimated to reach seven to eight feet in height and weigh in at 300-pounds plus. But noted “cryptozoologist” Loren Coleman describes true Florida skunk apes as smaller, perhaps four to five feet.

▪ Appearance: Furry and lumbering. Larger Bigfoots are reported to walk erect on two legs, but the smaller skunk is more apelike in movement, hunched and scrambling on all four limbs with a distinct monkeylike jutting toe.

▪ Smell: Worse than its namesake, a nostril-searing combo of rotten eggs, animal dung and soggy compost.

▪ Range: Reportedly seen across much of the South, including Georgia’s Okeefeenokee Swamp -- more famous as home to a clearly fictional character, Pogo of cartoon fame - and everywhere in Florida.

Chasing after the Everglades Skunk Ape

Published Jan. 2, 2007

By Curtis Morgan

The scene: the Everglades, mysterious in the darkness.

Four college kids, armed only with a night-vision camera, trudge through a palmetto thicket, guided by a snake-booted man who claims to have had multiple encounters with the state’s most elusive creature.

They seek a half-man, half-simian, fully reeking legend known as the Skunk Ape.

A curious rustling draws them closer. Nervous patter. Closer. What is making those sounds? Closer. Suddenly, a blinding flash, screams and . . . .

This is not some cheesy monster movie. It’s the real experience of Florida International University film students who spent months on the trail of one of the shaggiest tales in folklore -- the Skunk Ape, a k a Florida’s Bigfoot.

What they found in Footprints, a brisk and engaging documentary completed last month for a class project, won’t rewrite anthropology texts.

Turns out that unsettling flash came from an automatic camera set up by their guide to record what a skeptical world still awaits - ironclad evidence of the existence of the Skunk Ape, Yeti, Sasquatch and other hulking, hairy relations.

“We looked and we looked and, of course, we didn’t find anything. We came to the conclusion that it’s a myth,” said Romy Santana, one of eight seniors who teamed on the film.

And yet after much digging, talks with claimed witnesses, interviews with scholars of Bigfoot lore and other experts, they’re not dismissing every believer as hoaxer or wacko either.

“There are a lot of things going on in the Everglades, a lot of reports of smells and sightings and a whole bunch of things,” Santana said. “Who are we to say because we didn’t see it, it doesn’t exist? Maybe there is something out there.”

At least in the public imagination.

Several websites about “cryptozoology” - that being the study of supernatural creatures - chronicle steady sightings.

Most recently, there was 2004’s Green Swamp Ape episode in the Panhandle and the mysterious, much-analyzed Port Myakka photos of 2000 depicting an orangutanish beast hunkered behind saw palmetto. In 1997, a flurry of reports emerged from the Big Cypress National Preserve, including a supposed sighting by a busload of British tourists.

In the 1970s, the infamous Green Chimp apparently stalked south Broward County. A decade earlier, rumors circulated about a Bigfoot in Everglades National Park, possibly held under government guard.

Still, the students - Santana, Kallie Burke, Kirmaya Cevallos, Maria Delgado, Claudia Echeverria, Juan Carlos Gonzalez, Lino La Rosa and Luis Vale - confessed to knowing squat about Sasquatch when they started.

The project began when Bert Delgado, an associate professor of film at FIU, teamed them for a final test before graduating - make a movie, anything from a music video or a thriller to a documentary.

In a brainstorming session, Cevallos brought up a beast she had once seen on TV, a story that stuck in her mind.

“It just caught my attention about the Everglades, about how huge it really is and how little I knew about it,” Cevallos said. ‘It’s a myth you always think about.”

It offered an entertaining mix of mystery, history and nature. Plus, for students with a lean budget (ultimately, about $700), the story had the practical benefit of providing a beautiful and absolutely free scenic backdrop.

What they wound up putting together looks as slick as much of what airs on cable. They filmed on location in the Everglades and Big Cypress. Vale even managed to sweet-talk a helicopter business into a free flight over the Glades.

Though at less than 15 minutes, it’s shorter than professional features produced in the past, including episodes of the In Search Of and Unsolved Mysteries series, Footprints covers a lot of ground and never stumbles into spoof or hype. Nobody, for instance, shows up in an ape suit in the few “re-created” sightings.

“The topic really surprised me,” said Professor Delgado, who gave a thumbs-up that echoed reviews from friends and fellow students. “They were really interested in this thing, and they went after it. To me, it was very appealing.”

Though it uncovers nothing shocking, the film features interviews with both notable and notorious Skunk Ape authorities, who offer thoughtful and sometimes surprising ruminations on the phenomenon.

There’s David Shealy, tireless promoter and proprietor of a Skunk-Ape theme campground in tiny Ochopee on the Tamiami Trail, who guided them on that semi-scary walk.

There’s Scott Marlowe, a cryptozoologist who recounts the eerie feeling of a Skunk Ape staring at him in woody outskirts of Orlando.

And Loren Coleman, perhaps the foremost cryptozoologist and author of Bigfoot books, including a field guide describing five types going by about 500 different names.

Coleman, based in Maine, said he has spent years sifting through reports and dismisses perhaps 80 percent of them as hoaxes or misidentification.

“Being a cryptozoologist doesn’t mean you just openly, hook, line and sinker, take everything in,” he said. But tossing those aside, there’s enough hair, prints and reliable reports that “I accept right now that there seems to be an abundance of evidence that the Skunk Ape exists.”

One well-respected South Florida anthropologist - Bob Carr, executive director of the Archaeological and Historical Conservancy in Davie and a man who helped uncover and preserve the Miami Circle - won’t go that far.

But Carr, long fascinated by the sociology and psychology behind Bigfoot, would “never eliminate the possibility” of something like a Skunk Ape. He has interviewed credible witnesses himself, he said, and seen reputed hair, footprints and a lot of collected material to support a hoary myth.

“If you tried to pin me down, I’d have to say, ‘Well, there is no proof that the creature exists,’ “ he said. But, “It’s a complex answer, and it doesn’t fall easily into saying yes or no.”

Carr and Ron Magill, Metrozoo’s director of communications, are the film’s voices of logic and skepticism.

Magill points out the utter absence of verifiable evidence: no body or clear photo after a century of sighting. No conclusive DNA tests on dung or hair. And with so few, just where are Bigfoot babies coming from, anyway?

“I’m one of those people who want to believe the thing exists,” Magill said.

“It would be one of the greatest discoveries of the millennium.”

The Skunk Ape expert

Published April 19, 2005

By Cara Buckley

David Shealy’s life mission is singular, a little lonely, and sometimes jinxes him with the ladies. None of this may be surprising, given that for more than a decade Shealy has tried to convince the world that outsized, lumbering ape-men call the Everglades home.

“It opens up a whole Pandora’s box of bull--,” Shealy, 41, conceded one recent sweltering morning as the sun made soup out of the air in Ochopee, a blip of a town in Big Cypress Nation- al Preserve, 30-odd miles west of the Miami-Dade County line.

Shealy is the self-appointed world expert on the Florida skunk ape, a legendary seven-foot-tall mangy creature and presumable cousin of Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yowie, the Abominable Snowman, el Chupacabra, Harry of Hendersons fame and possibly Chewbacca the Wookiee.

The skunk ape, alias swamp ape, apparently smells like bad eggs and goat dung, an odor attributed to its poor bathing habits and penchant for sulfurous alligator caves. Tales of its existence percolated in Everglades City and points north for a hundred-plus years, with various people - including a busload of highly excited British tourists who swore the creature revealed itself to them in 1997 - finding massive footprints and claiming sightings.

But Shealy, tall, lanky and goateed, a man rarely seen without his snakebite-proof boots, is the first to make the Florida skunk ape a full-time, if struggling, business. He guesses about seven apes wander about Florida, with Miami-Dade’s expansion flushing them his way.

“I don’t have a choice to believe, because I’ve seen him three times,” said Shealy, blue eyes a-twinkle beneath the brim of his gator-tooth-embossed, black leather outback hat.

Shealy sells skunk ape ball caps, camouflage T-shirts and bumper stickers in the curio shop run by his brother, Jack, at the pair’s dusty, sprawling campground in Ochopee on the Tamiami Trail. He hosts a somewhat annual Skunk Ape Festival, replete with bands and hippies. He talks the creature up on local radio. He believes the skunk ape legend could bolster tourism for Collier County, and once convinced its Tourist Development Council to part with $44,000 for a skunk ape hunting expedition, a plan the County Commission shot down.

“It serves the tourist promotion business best as legend,” Jim Coletta, a county commissioner, wrote in a solemn consolation letter.

Shealy’s efforts drum up a mixed local response. Staff members at nearby Everglades City’s visitors center roll their eyes at the mention of his name. A young woman at another tourist spot said the skunk ape was hooey, but noted Shealy’s parties rocked. Debbie Hooks, a waitress at the Oak House restaurant, said the Shealys were odd to start with, and that kids used to pick on them on the school bus.

“It’s a joke,” she said of the skunk ape. “It’s one of them in a monkey suit.”

But others, reflecting the almost gothic, Old Florida air that still permeates Everglades City, believe a darkly mysterious and otherworldly creature could lurk in the swamps.

Floyd Brown, a 67-year-old wizened, devout drinker, said old-timers always avoided certain areas for fear of an apelike beast.

Sandy Steele, a clerk at Glades Haven Grocery Store, said grown men often return shaken from expeditions to isolated, mangrove-blanketed islands.

“You hear bloodcurdling screams, things you can’t describe,” Steele said. “Maybe things got stranded on those islands. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Shealy said he has spotted the creature thrice: first when he was 10, second in 1987 when he was up a tree in a deer blind, and lastly four or five years ago. He shot pictures and later videotape, which he said he sold to a California man for $10,000.

His transformation into a self-styled Skunk Ape Hunter began a decade ago. Life had never been easy. The Shealys’ campground steadily lost business to Big Cypress National Preserve, which all but subsumed their tiny town. Shealy left school after the seventh grade and later began running bales of marijuana through the Everglades. After marrying in his teens, he had a kid, got divorced and was busted in 1989 for possessing 30,000 pounds of pot.

Three years in a federal prison left him eager to start anew. But the campground struggled, and does so still, even after the brothers added a motley coterie of abandoned and donated emus, lizards, mud puppies, pythons, cockatiels, alligators and goats. Jack Shealy is currently facing animal cruelty charges, which his brother says are unsubstantiated, for allegedly trying to lure a sick panther with a tied-up goat.

In the mid-1990s, Shealy began pursuing skunk ape lore, with dreams of spinning legend into gold. He made plaster casts out of purported footprints and tacked a sign, “Skunk Ape Research Headquarters,” onto the gift shop.

A few years later, a busload of British tourists returned from an Everglades excursion in a tizzy: Something tall and hairy appeared on a dusty road roughly two miles from the brothers’ gift shop. A park ranger later admitted to spotting something similar nearby, too.

Statewide sightings had been reported before, though some turned out to be monkeys on the loose.

“There’s plenty of evidence, but no scientific proof,” said Bob Carr, executive director of the Archaeological and Historical Conservancy in Davie. “But Dave has done a heck of a job to promote it.”

Another expert, Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum, an associate professor in biological science at Idaho State University, said he has seen compelling, extra-large footprints before, some with textured imprints of skin, from the Pacific Northwest and southern Georgia. But a cast footprint from Shealy, obtained by a cryptozoologist, left him unconvinced.

“It was not anatomically satisfying that this was left by a living animal,” Meldrum said.

Shealy, for his part, swears that he is neither the skunk ape nor a hoaxer, even though he keeps 13 assorted gorilla masks pinned to his bedroom wall and donned an ape suit to reenact the beast for the TV show Unsolved Mysteries.

Curiously, Shealy seems to identify with the creature, too.

On a recent drive past the visitors center, he muttered, “They don’t like the skunk ape there.” Once he interrupted a County Commission meeting with the howl, “No one likes the skunk ape!”

Now though, after years of dead ends, Shealy’s ship may be coming in. After performing at a Skunk Ape Festival, Nate Martin, a local musician, made a film about Shealy’s skunk ape quest.

Footage includes Shealy setting out piles of wet lima beans to entice the creature, Shealy locating a tuft of long brown hair on a wire fence - “Yep, definitely a skunk ape!” Shealy announces after taking a deep whiff - and the creature itself, tall, lanky and slightly auburn, bounding through the woods.

The film debuted last week at a Marco Island club and was apparently warmly met. Shealy said he could barely keep up with demand for his T-shirts, the backer started talking about film festival distribution, and David Letterman’s show called.

“It’s all good, so many people came. People came from Lion Country Safari,” an ebullient Shealy said. “The movie is the biggest thing that ever happened outside of getting busted.”

Reports of Skunk Ape sightings

Published July 28, 1997

By Cyril T. Zaneski

Something was lurking in the dark, mysterious swamp just a few steps away from the old gravel road in the heart of cypress stands about 40 miles west of Miami.

A small group of British tourists and their tour guide swear to that.

They reported seeing the hulking, ape-like creature lurking one afternoon last week behind a veil of Spanish moss that drips from the towering cypress trees at the swampy edges of Turner River Road.

Could it be . . . the skunk ape?

That’s right, the skunk ape.

Florida’s Bigfoot, the Sasquatch of the Swamp, the Abominable Snowman of the subtropics, the Yeti of the Glades. A distant cousin of the more famous apemen of the northlands, the skunk ape’s reported description usually closely follows those of its primitive relatives: about seven feet tall, flat-faced, broad-shouldered, covered with long hair or fur and -- of course -- reeking of skunk.

In recent weeks, several people have phoned in reports of creatures that fit that description to officials at Big Cypress National Preserve. The reports were believed to be the first since a flurry of skunk ape sightings in Southeast Florida 20 years ago.

Vince Doerr, chief of the Ochopee Fire Control District, saw a strange creature cross Burns Road near his home last Monday morning.

“I was riding along when, 800 feet ahead of me, a brown-looking tall thing ran across the road,” Doerr said. “It wasn’t a bear - that’s for sure. It ran into the woods.”

Doerr said he grabbed his camera and snapped away, but he thinks the creature was too far away for a good shot. He hasn’t developed the film yet.

There were also reports from tour operators who travel one of South Florida’s best places to see wildlife -- Turner River Road. The unpaved state highway cuts through a slough crowded with bald cypress trees laden with Spanish moss and spidery air plants.

Dow Rowland, 54, a guide for Everglades Day Safari, said he was hauling six British tourists up Turner River Road last week when they spotted the apeman loping along the cypress trees on the west side of the road, about two miles north of Tamiami Trail.

“It was about six feet tall with brown, long fur,” Rowland said. “It loped along like a big monkey or a gorilla, then it disappeared into the woods.”

Rowland said his group was not the first to see the apeman this summer.

“There was a sighting from the Naples Trolley Tour out of Marco Island,” Rowland said. “That driver was really shook up.”

David Shealy, 33, owner of Florida Panther Gift Shop on Tamaimi Trail here, has a theory about why the skunk ape has shown itself lately.

“The mosquitoes have been so bad this year that they probably ran the skunk ape out of the mangroves,” said Shealy, who claims to have seen the ape at a distance many years ago and sees its large, mushy footprints in the mud during hunting seasons.

The tales go back decades in South Florida.

“There were rumors in the 1960s of a Bigfoot or a really large skunk ape being held by the armed services at . . . Everglades National Park,” wildlife biologist George Dalrymple said.

The ape escaped by ramming itself through a concrete block wall, as the story went. Some investigators made plaster casts of its prints, but those casts are top secret, probably locked away in federal vaults, Dalrymple said with a sly wink.

Sightings of the skunk ape were most frequent in the 1970s in the wake of 1967 film that allegedly showed Bigfoot strolling the California woods and a flurry of news reports of Sasquatch sightings in the Pacific Northwest. Not coincidently, this was also the time in Southeast Florida when developers were working their way west into the Everglades, bringing newcomers -- suburbanites -- into close contact with country folks who spent their weekends at hunting or fishing camps in the marshes.

“Back when everybody had camps out there, people would come back to town with stories,” said J.A. Wasilewski, a biologist who once worked at Everglades Holiday Park, the airboating and fishing stop on U.S. 27 in western Broward. “People were seeing shadowy things, but that was usually after a couple six-packs of Bud out there in the swamp.

The stories have faded as the marshes and the camps have disappeared under suburban pavements. The sightings in the untamed swamps now being reported in Southwest Florida, which is now experiencing a housing development and tourism boom of its own.

Richard Greenwell, secretary of the International Society of Cryptozoology in Tuscon, Ariz., a group that investigates reported sightings of animals unknown to science, expects there’ll always be reports of sightings of strange creatures somewhere.

“We live in a world where everything is structured by technology and predictable things,” Greenwell said. “People like to know that in this modern, humdrum world, there still unknown places. Still places wild enough to harbor animals still unknown to science.”

To be sure, not everyone is curious. Ron Clark, leader of Big Cypress’ resource management team, said the preserve doesn’t investigate skunk ape sightings.

“I think we’re safe in assuming that there are probably no previously unclassified primates roaming the Big Cypress,” Clark said.

“We think somebody’s playing a prank on our tourists.”

Doerr and Rowland both believe what they saw was probably a man in a gorilla suit.

“If I thought it was real, I would have run in there, beat it to death and sold it to the National Enquirer,” Doerr said. “I think it’s just somebody playing games.”