Every state seems to have its cryptid. The Pacific Northwest has Bigfoot. Scotland has the Loch Ness Monster. And Florida — bless its humid little heart — has the Skunk Ape.
Imagine Bigfoot, but smaller, smellier, and more confused. That’s the Skunk Ape.
A creature said to lurk in the swamps and Everglades, staggering through the palmetto underbrush and occasionally photobombing hunting blinds with the dazed expression of someone who just realized they left the oven on.
Eyewitness accounts claim the Skunk Ape is about six feet tall, covered in reddish-brown hair, and smells like a wet dog who lost a fight with a compost pile.
Some say it’s aggressive. Others say it’s shy. A few claim it telepathically communicates feelings of sadness, which honestly tracks if you imagine what it must feel like to be the Dollar Store version of Sasquatch.
The famous evidence is even better. There’s a blurry photograph that could just as easily be a bear with bad posture. There’s a grainy video that might be a man in a ghillie suit staggering toward the porta-potties at a county fair. There’s a matted clump of hair that, after rigorous scientific testing, turned out to be slightly less interesting than what you’d find in the lint trap of a cheap motel’s dryer.
And yes, there’s an actual Skunk Ape Research Headquarters operating out of a trailer deep in the Everglades, selling t-shirts, bumper stickers, and survival guides on how to “encounter” the Skunk Ape safely — advice which boils down to “don’t wander drunk into a swamp at two in the morning.” Solid life advice, but not exactly what I’d call a paranormal breakthrough.
I visited the Research HQ, naturally, because I enjoy suffering. There were maps covered in brightly colored “encounter zones” that mysteriously overlapped with gift shops, bait stores, and boat rental kiosks. There were plaster footprint casts that looked suspiciously like someone had stomped a work boot into wet cement and added artistic flourishes afterward. There was a life-sized Skunk Ape mannequin wearing board shorts, sunglasses, and a tragic air of inevitability.
It wasn’t a bad way to kill an hour a two, but I left with just one conclusion: the Skunk Ape isn’t Florida’s answer to Bigfoot. It’s Florida’s answer to why critical thinking should be a required subject starting in preschool.