FLORIDA’S OWN BIGFOOT: The Skunk Ape Has Been Walking Our Swamps for 100 Years

By Staff Reports

🌙 FLORIDA AFTER DARK — Bigfoot has the Pacific Northwest. Florida has something smellier.

The Skunk Ape — seven feet tall, covered in reddish-brown hair, walking upright through the swamp, and named for a stench witnesses say they’ll never forget — has been reported in Florida for a century, concentrated in the Everglades, Big Cypress National Preserve and the Myakka River country.

The modern legend has an address: the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters on the Tamiami Trail in Ochopee, run by Dave Shealy, who says he first saw the creature at age 10 in 1974 and has hunted it ever since. In 1997, Ochopee’s own fire chief, Vince Doerr, photographed a dark upright figure after it crossed the road in front of his car. In 2000, Shealy released swamp video he says shows the animal moving through the grass — the same year an anonymous Sarasota County woman mailed two flash photographs to the sheriff’s office, writing that a big ape-like creature had been raiding apples from her porch three nights running. Those “Myakka photos” remain the most debated evidence in Skunk Ape history.

And the honest bottom line, as always in this series: a century of sightings — the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization logs more than 340 Florida reports — and not one bone, body, or verified DNA sample. Science files the Skunk Ape under folklore and misidentification. The swamp, so far, isn’t talking.

Join the conversation: This is the one we really want to hear about: have YOU seen something in the Florida swamps that you can’t explain? Florida After Dark wants your stories: send them to tips@floridachatter.com and yours could be our next feature.

Sources: Skunk Ape Research Headquarters; Sasquatch Chronicles; National Park Service position; BFRO Florida sighting reports.

Photo: Antonio Chaves, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) — Big Cypress National Preserve, Skunk Ape country.