Haunted Florida - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 9/6/17

George Noory and guest Mark Muncy discuss his work collecting strange and scary paranormal stories from across the state of Florida.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
For just one corporate job, only four to six people
will get an interview for every two hundred and fifty
resumes received. Those aren't very good odds if you're counting
on that job. The fact is you need a real
person advocating to a real employer that is a real job,
and that's where Express Employment professionals come in. Expresses your
local resource to help you get a new job. Expresses

(00:21):
more than eighteen thousand jobs available weekly. That's eighteen thousand
jobs that need to be filled right now. Find your
nearest office at Express pros dot com and Express never
charges a job secret. To find employment. Your locally owned
Express office can connect you with available jobs in your
community on Express pros dot com. Find jobs in manufacturing, accounting,

(00:42):
customer service, sales, distribution, and information technology, you name it.
Visit the nearest Express office today to speak with hiring
professionals connected to the available jobs in your community. Visit
Express pros dot com today to find a location near
you Express pros dot com. Now here's a highlight from
coast to coast am on I Heart Radio. Tell me

(01:05):
about the book Erie Florida. Okay, Well, while we were
doing the Haunted House for years, I was like, okay, um,
we could have a werewolf jump out at somebody. But
what if we found oh wait, there's the Skunk Cape
of Florida. Oh there's you know, Dogman in the Ocala
National Forest. And suddenly it was you know, let's start

(01:26):
basing these on local legends and so and of course
we we used to quote call it hell viewing them up.
We would make them a bit spookier and all that.
And so for years and years I collected all these
stories and decided to be I was gonna be Stephen
King a couple of years ago, and I wrote this
fictionalized versions of all these stories in a book called
thirty one Tales a Helve You Cemetery. And they're you know,

(01:47):
creepy little nods to the legends. But I got all
these emails saying, well, you say it's based on this legend,
Well what's that legend? And I assumed everybody knew these
local legends, and apparently nobody did. So that's what this
book came out to be from History Press. And you
had fun doing this too, it seems, oh yeah, we uh,

(02:10):
three thousand miles driving around Florida without ever leaving the
state and uh and you know, historical archives, museums, you know,
nature trails, abandoned cities, all kinds of fun stuff. Favorite
story in the book, Oh, my gosh, my favorite story
in the book. There's a lot of good ones, but

(02:30):
my absolute favorite was one, uh that we got when
we originally put up our website for the Haunted House.
I put up an email address. And this will pay
a little bit of the time period. It was a
Geo cities website and my address was a O L
A little bit let's say, oh well exactly uh and

(02:51):
the letter and I got this nice, lovely email from
this little lady in Lake Wales, Florida, which is kind
of a spooky area. It has the infamous Spook Hill,
which is one of those gravity hills, and has a
Buck Tower Gardens, which is a beautiful is the highest
point in Florida, a whole two d and twenty three
ft above sea level the and um, you know it's

(03:14):
bigger in space mountain and uh. Anyway, the tail there
is this lady lived out on this uh orange grove
out there with her family, and this is in the
late forties, early fifties, and they notice all their fruits
disappearing and they don't know what to do about it.

(03:36):
So they put out traps, thinking it might be fruit rats,
but normally they leave like just holes in the fruit
and stuff, but this fruit is just gone. They type
some ropes, thinking, you know, maybe somebody's coming to steal
their stuff. And what they catch is a little man, naked,
little man who with a full beard, so they know
he's not like like a gnome or eleprecon. He's bigger

(04:00):
than a bottle of water. The lady who told me
this story, and um, they don't know what to do
with them, so they called the police, and the police
come out and they they don't know what to do
with the guy. They can't handcuff him because he's so tiny,
and you know, the best at best, they got him
for trespassing. Um, so you know, and this is late forties,

(04:23):
early fifties, so they just, you know, let it go.
It's like just yeah, whatever, this is obviously not who's
stealing your fruit. So they let him go. And then
a couple of days later, more fruits missing, so they
set up more traps and sure enough they catch him again.
Then they call the police and the police are like, okay,
we'll take him, and they didn't have anything to put
him in, so they put him in one of the
orange crates. I mean, how small was He was no

(04:45):
bigger than water, but maybe six eight inches the lady. Yeah,
so yeah, Now they weren't freaking out too much because
Ripley's was around at that point, you know, as if
you know, we had ringling down wintered down here, so
people were kind of used the circus folk and you know,
Tom Thumb and all that. Completely out of the ordinary.
Did it communicate? It was screaming in a language they

(05:08):
couldn't understand. They were so they didn't know what it
was screaming at them. So the police took it to
find a translator, thinking it's Spanish or Portuguese or something
and u And once they leave, you think that's the
end of the story, and that's kind of the beginning.
The next night, the house is pelted with rocks, the

(05:29):
trees are going crazy and branches are being thrown at them,
and they don't they come outside and there's dozens of
these little guys and at the house, so they called
the cops again. The police come back with the little guy.
They obviously they can't figure out what language he's speaking
and all this, and you know, it's nice to know that,
you know, policing hasn't changed that much in you know,

(05:51):
sixty years. They just let him loose because they're like,
this is too much paper, So they let loose and
then all the people, you know, the little guys, just
run off into the woods, into the orange grove and
they're like, what do we do in the coups, like, oh,
I guess you're gonna have to deal with your orange
is a bit disappeared. Thankfully, they find a farm hand

(06:15):
from a nearby farm who tells them that it's red caps.
They're you know, they're fairies or gnomes and you've offended
them in some way and well known in that area,
I guess exactly a lot of Irish farm hands and stuff,
and they're thinking this is maybe a different strain, because
that's you know, they're they know, they're speaking a different
language and all that. So they so they find out

(06:37):
they have to get a blessed rock from Ireland and
they go through the trouble yeah yeah, some sort of
stone of some sort, yeah exactly, And they go through
the trouble of getting this stone ship to them from
Ireland and they put it in the Orange Grove and
never had any problems. After lady was adorable, told me

(06:59):
the whole story in the directions, and sadly she passed
away a few years ago. This is one of our
like I said, one of our older stories. And I
was like, well, I can't use this in the book
because I'll never get any verification. Sure enough, one of
the original police officers contacted me and said, oh, yeah,
it was a true story. It is a true story.

(07:19):
So we went out and followed the old directions that
the lady gave me, and we found this orange grove
that's withinside a buck tower and it's this old dirt
road you're driving on. It's it's amazing. It's like driving
through Florida, you know. You realize what the tourists were
going through and uh. And you go into this orange
grove and we're following the directions to where the rock

(07:41):
is and we find the clearing and we're like, yes,
this is it. Now it's owned by a big conglomerate
now that sells orange juice. Imagine that. And so we
go to get out of the car and are all
these white boxes on the side of the road and
we're like, what are these white boxes? And sure enough,
that's where they keep their bees to pollinate the oranges.

(08:02):
So so we didn't get a picture of the rock. Jeez,
what a story now any more reports of these little critters?
Apparently not, but you know it's it's a fun story.
And carry Schultz, my illustrator, did an amazing illustration for
the gnome and uh and the cop, who was super
nice about it was he was just like, look, I

(08:25):
can't I don't know what I can say. It was weird. Yeah,
that's the best I can say. So putting together the book,
was it easy or difficult to find the stories? Well,
I'd like I'd had mostly stories for years. I think
the hard part was narrowing it down. We had so
many stories we wanted ones. We we did the you know,

(08:46):
the old weekly world news used to be if one
person told it to you, it's real, use it. And
then you know, modern journalism likes three to five sources.
We kind of went split the difference. As long as
long as we had two sources, we could run with
it and narrowed the stories down quite a bit. And
that's that was kind of how we went tell me
about the story of the Wimus Grave. Oh my gosh, Wiedemus.

(09:11):
That was one of the craziest places we went to. Uh.
It is near Fernandina Beach, which is way up on
the northeast corner of Florida, almost the Georgia border. And um,
there's this beautiful place called the Eggans Creek Greenway, and

(09:31):
that is this just beautiful uh nature preserve and it's
you know, got wetlands, it's got all this other stuff.
Is this amazing place. And there's this other side of
it that is not on the map, that's no longer
part of the Eggan's Creek green Way, And there's a
bridge over to it, and suddenly you're in this old

(09:53):
live oak forest and it's right across from Fernandeta Beach
High School. And I think the picture is up on
your Coast to Coast website. It's this abandoned nature trail.
And of course there's a legend behind it that the
high school students tell that if you walk down this
creepy trail, that says it was a student nature trail,

(10:16):
but the school has no records of it ever actually
being used. Um. And you walk down it and you
find this old oak tree, and at the base of
the oak trees a stone where it's the grave of
a witch from a lost colony that might predate Roanoak
on this island. And the witch had a pet demon

(10:38):
named Wickedemus, And if you say the demon's name three times,
the wind will roar, the earth will shake, and you know,
and the demon will give you a piece of its power.
And and then there's other versions of the legend where
you have to go there three nights and the girl
will haunt your dreams and and give you, you know,

(11:01):
witch witchery and spells. And then my absolute favorite version though,
was if you go there on four nights, Uh, she'll
kill you. She'll kill you. Yeah, she'll kill you in
your sleep. So I didn't see an upside to that one.
So we didn't try that one. That's smart mark. But
we did say Wickedemus a few times and the ground

(11:25):
shook really as the wind picked up and it roared,
and we tried to do video for the website, and
the wind is so loud we couldn't actually record anything.
At that point, you were summoning up this entity somehow
who knows what was but it was the first time Carrie,
my illustrator, who's uh a open mind but you know,
but has not really had any crazy experiences, that was

(11:47):
the first time I saw her shaken because it was
definitely unusual. Listen to more Coast to Coast a m.
Every weeknight at one a m. Eastern and go to
Coast to Coast am dot com for more ar