FLORIDA’S DEVIL’S TREE: Would You Dare Visit This Twisted Oak After Dark?

By Staff Reports

🌙 FLORIDA AFTER DARK — Some Florida legends are harmless fun. This one comes with a warning: behind the Devil’s Tree stands a real horror, and real victims. We tell it with respect.

In Oak Hammock Park in Port St. Lucie stands a massive, gnarled oak with limbs shooting in every direction. Local legend says the tree can’t be cut down, that the air around it feels wrong, and that people have heard and seen things near it after dark. The city of Port St. Lucie has told reporters plainly that the supernatural legends have no validity.

But the darkness attached to that park is not invented. In the early 1970s, Gerard John Schaefer was a Martin County sheriff’s deputy — a lawman — who used his badge and patrol car to prey on young women. In 1972, two teenage girls he had tied to a tree escaped and reported him. While he was out on bail, Susan Place, 17, and Georgia Jessup, 16, disappeared. Their remains were found in April 1973. Schaefer was convicted of their murders and sentenced to two life terms; he bragged of many more victims, and he was killed by another inmate in 1995. In 1977, the remains of two more young women were found near the tree locals now call the Devil’s Tree, and the legend fused the tree to the crimes forever.

So is the Devil’s Tree haunted? Nobody can prove a haunting. What is proven is that evil once operated in those woods wearing a deputy’s badge — and for many visitors, that’s haunting enough.

Join the conversation: Florida is full of places where legend and real history collide. Which one should Florida After Dark investigate next? Send your stories and tips to tips@floridachatter.com.

Sources: News 6 Orlando (WKMG); court records of the Schaefer case; City of Port St. Lucie; Tripping on Legends.

Illustration: Florida Chatter (no free photograph of the actual tree exists — this is an artist’s rendering, not the real location).