The Florida Skunk Ape Mystery...

Ahh, Florida. Stereotyped home of bizarre, usually drug-related shenanigans, leather-skinned geriatric sunseekers and the most magical place on earth. It’s surrounded by water on three sides, it has wetlands, uplands, lowlands, plains, tons of forests, extra mini bonus islands and the place you are least likely to find me in the world, the Everglades, which is full of swamps, alligators and mosquitoes.

There are lots of places for people and things to hide all over the state, one of these things being local legend, the Florida Skunk Ape. Often referred to as a cousin of the sasquatch, it’s usually described as a large, hairy, bipedal creature with a strong smell, hence the “skunk” part of its name. Sure, just another fictional cryptid, you might think, but this one comes with more receipts than its better-known relation and some photographic evidence that can’t easily be explained.

Let’s hack through the swamp together and see if we can solve the mystery of the creature that’s been plaguing Florida for over 200 years.

The Story of the Skunk Ape

First things first, you might be wondering if a “skunk ape” is actually an existing animal or a term made up specifically for this creature. Well, it’s the latter. The moniker has been given to this cryptid because it looks like an ape and smells like a skunk, there’s no other ape or skunk variety called this.

It’s sometimes referred to as a “swamp ape” as it’s generally been spotted in swampy areas in Florida but we’ll call it a skunk ape because that’s the more common name for the thing. Like its more famous cousin from the Pacific Northwest, the skunk ape has been described pretty inconsistently over the decades. Early reports had it as not crazily tall for a potentially fictional creature, but very tall for an ape, seeming to hover at the five to six feet mark, or 1.5 to 1.8m.

More modern reports have upped the size of it to between 6 and 8 feet tall, or 1.8 to 2.4 metres, potentially a three-fifths of a Danny Devito difference. It has been described as having dark brown, reddish, reddish-brown or orange fur and, from some footprints left behind, it has four toes. In case you didn’t know, large primates such as gorillas and orangutans all have 5 digits on their hands and feet.

Even casts made of supposed Bigfoot tracks have had five toes on them. It apparently pongs like rotten eggs and I’m assuming it smells like the animal skunk and not the strong marijuana skunk, although having never smelled either, maybe they’re actually very similar and I just have no idea. Anyway, the current USP of the skunk ape is the smell, and the fact that it can travel across swampland with the greatest of ease, as per witness sightings and photographic and even video evidence, which we shall, of course, come back to later.

For a seldom-seen creature with an established identity, however, there’s already a contradiction. Filmmaker Stacy Brown Jr, who’s a man called Stacy by the way, has dug into the history of the skunk ape after a close encounter in 2013 and has concluded that it didn’t get its name from the smell after all. There was a sighting in the 1940s where the witness described a creature with a white stripe running over its head, making it look a bit like a regular skunk, thus creating the name “skunk ape”.

Well, whatever the origin of the name, there have been sightings of large bipedal ape-like humans or human-like apes since the Europeans first found their way to the American shores, and indeed, before that. According to a piece on AllThatsInteresting.com by Mark Oliver: “The Muscogee and Seminole tribes that lived in the Everglade forest before European settlers arrived claim they’ve been seeing Skunk Apes in the woods for hundreds of years. They called it ‘esti capcaki’, or the ‘tall man.’

He is the protector of the woods, they say, and he keeps away those who would damage the forests. Even when you don’t see the Florida Skunk Ape, they believe, he watches you, forever vigilantly gazing over those who enter his domain and using his mystic powers to vanish into thin air.”

I’m sure a lot of these are conflated with Bigfoot now and we did do an episode on that, but we’re not going to rehash all that information again so we’ll stay focused on the Florida-area activity for this one.

The most-agreed upon earliest mention of the Skunk Ape was in a newspaper article from 1818. While the original story has been attributed to the “Apalachicola Gazette”, I couldn’t find that anywhere but there is a reference to it in the Edinburgh Advertiser, also published in 1818. It states:

The Apalachicola Gazette states that the habitation of some unknown animal has just been discovered in the upper part of that city, which has given rise to many strange conjectures. (…) It is said by those who saw it to resemble somewhat the baboon, and from the size of the nest it is judged to be five feet in height, and of a carniverous description, as many bones were found about the premises. The nest was nicely made of loose cotton between several bales.

In January 1829, there was a gruesome story printed in the Georgia Messenger about an encounter some hunters had had with a “man mountain” in the Okefenokee Swamp which is on the Georgia - Florida border. Apparently, according to native tribal lore, there was an area in the swamp that was home to “mortals of super human dimensions and incomparable beauty”. A group of men ventured into the swamp one day and found “the print of a footstep so unearthly in its dimension, so ominous of power, and terrible in form” that they remembered the local legends of the giant people and ran away to spread the tale. The footprint was 18 inches or 46 cm long and 9 inches or 23 cm across and the estimated stride length of the being that made it was six feet or 1.8 metres.

Then, a group of nine men decided to check out the area. They are described as “A company of Florida hunters, half horse and half alligator.” Does that mean that half of them hunted horses and half of them hunted alligators?

Does it mean that half were riding on horses and the other half were riding on alligators? Were they themselves weird horse-alligator hybrids? We’ll never know.

But they carried on into the swamp, set up camp and fired off a few shots at a wild animal. The noise of the rifles “startled from his lair the genius of the swamp, and next minute he was full in view, advancing upon them with a terrible look and ferocious mien.” They then fired seven rifles-worth of bullets into him but that didn’t take him down “until he had glutted his wrath with the death of five of them, which he effected by wringing off the head from the body.”

Whether these were horse or alligator heads is not specified. The giant eventually expired and was measured to be 13 feet or nearly 4 meters tall. No smell or stripe was reported in the article or anything vaguely skunk ape related at all now that I think about it, but this was a tall bipedal thing living in a swamp and Stacy Brown Jr apparently used it as an opening to “The Skunk Ape Lives”, a documentary released in 2020 that is sitting at a 5.8 on IMDb right now, which isn’t great but is higher than other cryptid docs we’ve referenced before.

I couldn’t find it available to watch anywhere but did sit through two hours of “The Skunk Ape Experiments”, also by Stacy Brown Jr, more on which later.

Sightings pop up throughout the early 20th century, most of which report a tall, hairy creature staring at people from the ends of their gardens or sometimes stalking them through the woods. Encounters really started picking up in the 1960s and 70s, though.

According to Florida-based newspaper Boca Beacon’s website, there were over 250 skunk ape sightings over just a three year period in Venice, Florida. Unfortunately, it doesn’t say which three years these were, which makes it difficult to research, but from other articles I’ve read, it was probably in the early to mid 1970s.

Sports Illustrated reports a story in 1971 of Officer Henry Ring from the Rabies Control Unit who was tasked with checking out stories of a hairy beast running riot through a trailer park in southeastern Florida with a smaller one in tow. Various eyewitnesses gave such descriptions as: “One was brown and one was gray with splotches (…) And they smelled so bad they made us sick.”

and:

“It was about six feet tall; gray, with splotches and sores all over it. Wow.”

An officer who patrolled the park said: “We heard him early one morning. And it ain’t what you think. What kind of animal pounds its chest? I put it in my log book. The damn thing sent ice cubes down my back.”

Officer Ring found “a bunch of strange tracks, like someone was walking around on his knuckles” but nothing more was seen that night or the next. Eventually, a patrolman and a gun-toting granny shot at something in the dead of night but no skunk ape body was recovered and let’s hope they didn’t actually hit anything.

In 1973, Florida animal catcher, Michael Corradino, was called into action after a young boy saw a large, hairy animal trying to mess with his ducks. He went outside but promptly ran back in when he saw the animal was well over 6 feet tall. When Corradino arrived, he saw dead and injured ducks everywhere but the hairy perp was long gone. This was just one of several calls Corradino attended in a few short years.

The Boca Beacon article states: “Certain facts were common to all the sightings. The creature looked manlike but was hairy and very heavy. It often killed and ate small animals such as ducks, rabbits and chickens, usually eating the head and drinking the blood, leaving the rest of the body behind. It possessed great strength, often ripping down gates and cages to get to animals.

And it was always spotted near the Myakka River or a waterway leading to it.

Corradino pointed out that sightings usually occurred during the dry season and disappeared when the rainy season began.

‘We used to call it the Abominable Snowbird,’ Corradino said.”

In 1977, Republican House member Hugh Paul Nuckolls introduced a bill that, according to the Gannett News Service, “would make it illegal for anyone to possess, harm or molest ‘any anthropoid or humanoid animal which is native to Florida, popularly known as the skunk ape’”. Apparently the bill made it through the committee round before Nuckolls later withdrew it.

In 1997, a bus full of tourists in the Everglades preserve all witnessed “a seven-foot, red-haired ape” and later that same year, Vince Doerr, chief of the Ochopee Fire Control District managed to snap a photo of a large creature that crossed the road about half a mile away from him. He said: “It took long steps, kind of like a man, but it wasn’t a bear. A lot of people thought it was a bear, but a bear doesn’t go on two, it goes down on four.”

Wow, Vince sounds like he really his stuff about bears.

Moving on to more recent skunk ape activity, there are a plethora of local Floridians who say they have had encounters with the smelly creature, including Dave Shealy and the aforementioned Stacy Brown Jr. and now we’re talking about some actual proof. Shealy, who had been obsessed with the skunk ape after allegedly having seen it as a child, managed to snag some photos and took a cast of a large four toed footprint in 1998.

He also took a video in July 2000 that’s a little over two minutes long and shows what looks like a tall, hairy or furry bipedal creature, making its way from one side of a swamp to the other with speed, grace and ease. Is the footage a bit shaky and grainy? Of course, this is a cryptid video we’re talking about, however, compared with most other supposed footage of stuff like this that’s out there, it’s quite clear what it’s showing.

It’s the ease of movement that has most viewers convinced this is more than just a person in a gorilla suit. It’s July in a swamp in Florida and someone wearing a hot, heavy costume just wouldn’t be able to move that fast and effortlessly through what might have been a foot or so of swampy water.

In 2013, Mike Falconer pulled over to the side of a road in the Myakka River State Park when he saw several other parked cars and people with cameras looking at something out over the swamp. He caught some far away footage on his iphone of a large, dark creature which you can hear other bystanders describing as “huge”. He and his son got closer and he stopped recording to take some photos on his phone as you couldn’t zoom in while recording on the one he had. This sounded like a cop out to me but I checked and it’s true, there was no zooming while recording on the iphone 4S that he had.

Sad times.

Perhaps the most enduring image of the skunk ape was taken by a woman in December 2000. In a letter that accompanied the photos she sent to the sheriff to complain about the animal stealing fruit, she labeled it as an orangutan. The letter contained such details as “From where I was standing, I judge it as being about six and a half to seven feet tall in a kneeling position. As soon as I realized how close it was I got back to the house.

It had an awful smell that lasted well after it had left my yard. The orangutan was making deep ‘whoop’ noises.”

She said that after they let their dog stay in the backyard, the animal hadn’t returned.

The two pictures she enclosed show a creature hiding behind some palm fronds with much darker hair than your average orangutan. The arms seem to be a lot stockier and if the height details were correct, the thing would be pretty massive.

There have been many, many other sightings in and outside of Florida but the most recent ones we’ve mentioned are going to be the ones we take a closer look at as witness accounts from the past are a bit hard to do anything with without some sort of evidence to examine. We may make an honorable mention of a video from 2013 that was supposedly shot in Mississippi but we’ll see how we go.

The Obligatory Supernatural Part

It’s part of the large, bipedal ape-human lore that there is a potential paranormal aspect to the creature. The Himalayan yeti has mystical qualities about it, Bigfoot is thought to have supernatural abilities such as teleportation or being able to travel between dimensions which presumably is a handy excuse for why we’ve never been able to get a good look at one. The sasquatch-type creature in the Portlock, Alaska video was said to be able to “energize inside a tree”, whatever that means.

So what about this smelly version then? Here’s where I wasted two hours with Stacy Brown Jr and learned a big heap of nothing. Over two videos called “The Skunk Ape Experiments” part one and two, Brown and some pals hit up some Everglades locals to get a few weird stories of things going bump in the night, set out into the wilds themselves and then conduct their own series of “experiments”, the purpose of which is never really made clear.

These experiments involve one crew member taking some kind of hallucinogenic drug and vitamin C to open his consciousness “in the name of paranormal science”, an oxymoron if ever I’ve heard one. Another crew member sets up a load of lights which he calls a “techno paranormal rave” which is supposed to attract foo fighters - I presume he means extraterrestrial craft and not the band, although - spoiler alert - he could have meant either as neither have materialised by the end of the show.

Someone else is doing “mirror gazing” to try and see into another dimension and Stacy Brown Jr is working himself into a lather reciting the Hymn to Pan by granddaddy occultist, Aleister Crowley. A disclaimer came up to warn viewers that if weird stuff happened when they watched it, they couldn’t blame the film crew. The only negative experience I had was googling the poem after Stacy had been at it for a while and seeing how long it was. 67 lines!

And he read every one of them. Anyway, nothing spooky happened either in their dark, creepy room or in my sunny living room and the ten year-old beside me remained unimpressed throughout.

They even had a psychic medium set up in a room with her dowsing rods and various pendants. Don’t worry, to prove her dowsing rods were the real deal and not manipulated by her in any way, she asked them to point to her daughter who was just sitting in the same room. Wow! They did it! The medium said that if she had been doing it herself, she would have lost control of them. Well, chalk me up as convinced. The medium did not play a significant part in the rest of the video.

The only vague success the team had was picking up some apparently otherworldly messages through a radio but it was difficult to confirm what they were hearing and throughout the brief conversation, and indeed, all of these bizarre experiments, no-one mentioned a skunk ape so, while it was kind of fun seeing nothing happen, it was also a complete waste of my time.

They did actually go out into the woods at night, though, with the somewhat harebrained scheme of using wild pigs with GPS trackers on them to flush out any potential skunk apes. This came to nothing apart from occasionally using squealing pig footage as a jumpscare cut. At one point, the team saw lights in the trees but immediately recognised them as being from another film crew, presumably on a similar mission. I question why they left this in.

During an interview with a local who claims he had been cursed by the skunk ape for reasons I can’t recall, a member of the sound crew picks up a strong electric signature coming from a specific direction of a large hay bale. Does anyone even mosey on over there to see if there happens to be a skunk ape crouching behind it, eavesdropping on their conversation? No. They think it’s weird, but no further investigation is carried out.

At the end of the day, the team found zero evidence of a skunk ape apart from a few tall tales from locals which, without any corroborating proof, you can’t really put too much stock into. I think their inept attempts at psychic experimentation will also serve to close the paranormal aspect of this story. As to whether Stacy’s mum has got it going on, I didn’t research into the Brown family tree but one can only assume that she has. I hope Simon is not too confused by that reference.

Identifying the Skunk Ape

You’ve probably been thinking the same thing I was thinking when I first started looking into this: that the skunk ape is a real creature or many creatures that have all been labeled as this one not-actually-real thing. You hear something rustling in the bushes in the dead of night. It’s a skunk ape. You smell a horrible smell and maybe see something larger than a skunk disappearing through the trees.

It’s a skunk ape. You hear bloodcurdling hoots and hollers in the middle of the night that can’t be attributed to your friendly neighbourhood meth-heads. It’s a skunk ape. The most obvious thing for the skunk ape to really be, is a large ape of some sort.

The one sticking point here is that there are no apes native to North America so where would it have come from?

There are several attractions in Florida, such as Busch Gardens and Disney’s Animal Kingdom that house gorillas, orangutans and chimps. While it doesn’t appear that any of the big boys have ever escaped into the wild from the parks, I suppose there is a possibility that it might have happened accidentally during transportation or something and word might not have spread, especially if it happened several decades ago. If the thought of these apes lounging about in a zoo gets you feeling upset though, get a load of this. According to the Florida Bar Animal Law Section:

The Florida Keys were previously home to primate breeding facilities in the 1970s and 1980s. It was believed that the water surrounding the keys would act as a natural, and cost-effective, barrier to prevent monkeys from escaping. However, that was not the case. Monkeys escaped the facility and wreaked havoc on the Florida Keys, destroying federally protected mangroves and other vegetation.

Hence, when Primate Products was searching for a place to build their primate breeding facility, the Florida Keys were out of the question.

Instead, Hendry County, Florida became home to its own collection of primate breeding facilities. Hendry County has become home to four primate breeding facilities which house approximately 10,000 monkeys (about one monkey for every 4 Hendry County residents). These Hendry County facilities import wild-caught monkeys to be bred and sold to companies and universities for experimentation, while also conducting their own experiments

Hmm, a load of escaped monkeys and a huge captive monkey population you say? Well, the clue’s in the name here as to why these might not be candidates for the skunk ape. Yes, I’m one of those people who will correct you if you call a gorilla or a chimpanzee a monkey. Monkeys are usually smaller and have tails if you want a quick and easy distinction.

Therefore, the tailless, tall skunk ape is no monkey. This isn’t the platform to go into the ethics on monkey farms or animal testing, we’re just mentioning it because it doesn’t seem like large primates are used by the Primate Products company, therefore, a potential real life skunk ape must have come from elsewhere.

We have no idea how many apes might be kept in private collections or as pets by Floridians, but you know there are going to be some out there. A very conservative estimate suggests there are at least 15,000 primates being kept as pets in the US but some states don’t have very rigorous laws around having exotic pets and some people wouldn’t care about the law anyway if they just had to have them a chimp. So it’s very possible that at some point in history, someone’s orangutan or possibly even a gorilla managed to break out and spend their time scaring locals in the Everglades.

There are also at least two primate sanctuaries in Florida that care for animals including gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans between them. What we’re saying is that there is an existing pool of large apes in various locations in Florida, any one, or more, of which could have escaped and started a new life as an urban legend.

Because of the size, a gorilla would be an obvious candidate, however, the video footage and some pictures have the creature looking proportionally much more humanoid than a gorilla and also much lighter in colour than your average silverback. While gorillas can top 6 feet or 1.8m in height, this is obviously when they’re standing up. Most of the time they walk around on all fours so would look a bit shorter. Could a gorilla that was maybe born in the swamps adapt to walk upright most of the time?

Maybe, but I think most people would report that they’d seen a gorilla if there was a gorilla walking around.

The photo sent to the Sheriff in the year 2000 definitely looks more like an orangutan, albeit with much darker fur. You can kind of make out those things orangutans have on the side of their faces which I just found out are called “flanges” and I also just found out that there are rare black orangutans in existence so maybe this hypothesis isn’t so outlandish after all. From the picture, the arms on the thing look way too solid to be orangutan arms, although it’s a slightly unfocused picture taken in the dark so it’s not 100% clear what’s what.

Gorillas and chimps don’t mate, and neither do gorillas and orangutans so this thing isn’t going to be some great ape hybrid either, unless someone’s been experimenting on the downlow and their creation escaped into the swamps to steal apples off a woman’s back porch.

People have also reported hearing strange noises in the night that they assumed were the skunk ape. Helen Bradshaw, in a piece called “A Close Encounter with the Florida Skunk Ape” from October 2024, writes about once hearing a shrieking howl “like a monkey and a bird had a baby”. She had grown up on a farm but had never heard anything like this and filed it away as a skunk ape encounter. Later in the article she writes that in 2024, she heard the noise again: “The cry pierced the air with the same monkey-like cadence it had years before.

At the same time, my phone screen lit up with a notification from the Merlin Bird ID app, and my face fell: ‘Barred owl call identified,’ it read. Technology giveth, and technology taketh away.”

It’s easy to get freaked out when hearing unexpected noises in the night. We all know that foxes sound like someone getting murdered and even cats fighting can scare the crap out of you. If you’ve got a skunk ape on the brain, any strange animal noise is going to scratch that itch. I was also pointed towards the great blue heron as a scary sounding bird and one recording I heard was full of guttural squawks that sounded equal parts like a monkey and a lion.

It was extremely disquieting and didn’t sound like it was coming from a single scrawny heron. And yes, these birds can be found in Florida.

Other possible suggestions for the skunk ape include the infamous “mangy bear”, especially because animals with mange can smell really bad. Bears can walk upright, despite what our friend Vince Doerr said earlier, and although people swear they know what bears look like, do they know what bears with mange look like? They obviously look much scrawnier than the average bear, making their front legs especially, seem longer, and their colour will vary depending on how much of their fur has fallen out.

The “it’s a real animal” is one of the obvious suggestions ticked off, so what’s the next most obvious? That it’s just a guy in a suit. Why do people dress up in costumes and pretend to be fictional creatures?

I don’t know but it’s been done time and time again. When you see the footage Dave Shealy took in 2000, of course it’s far away, jumpy and a bit blurry but you can see a large, dark something making its way through a stand of trees. Yes, this could easily be a person in a suit as there’s no definition in the picture.

The thing picks up speed nearer the end of the video, coming nearer and more into focus as it crosses through some tall grass with, according to Shealy, at least a foot of water. It then starts running even faster before disappearing into another stand of trees. As per some comments on the video on YouTube: “Idk if it’s fake or not but just saying, this creature is flying through sawgrass swamps.

A man in a suit would be weighed down from the water, and exhausted from humidity. Not to mention this thing is well above the grass line.”

Other examples are: “No human dressed in a costume could walk that fast through that swamp!” and:

“Anyone familiar with this marsh knows how soft the ground is yet this creature flies thru it as if on solid ground. To pull your foot out of the muck and at that speed no NO man has the leg strength to do this!” You get the idea.

Sure, on the face of it, it seems that this can’t be a person due to the difficulty of moving in those conditions but let’s just think about it. Shealy is some distance away and the view of the creature’s legs when it crosses into the open is blocked by grass in the foreground. Is it beyond the realms of possibility that they just threw down some planks over the marsh?

People have gone to much more extreme lengths to perpetrate significantly less impactful hoaxes. I’ve watched this video quite a few times now and there are points, especially as the supposed skunk ape comes a bit closer to the camera, that it definitely looks more like a person in a costume trying to remember to move their arms in a more free-flowing ape-like way, than it does a real-life giant ape. Shealy happened to be in the perfect spot to track it going from trees on his right, across an open space and then finishing in trees on his left.

There’s also no audio so you’ll just have to imagine him shouting at his friend to move their arms a bit more whenever the creature momentarily halts and looks a bit awkward. It’s a valiant attempt but unfortunately for Shealy, it’s not been the mic drop, bombproof cryptid evidence we’ve all been waiting for. That hasn’t stopped him creating the Skunk-Ape Research Headquarters in Ochopee, Florida, though.

As far as I can tell, no actual research goes on here, but Shealy shows off his videos, self-published “field guide” and, of course, does a mean line in skunk ape merch. He also has the four-toed plaster cast of the footprint he found, although all the footprint merch available appears to have five toes, so I guess he’s just getting that from the general sasquatch merchandise warehouse.

Shealy believes there are 8 or 9 different skunk apes living in the area and that many people don’t report their sightings for fear of being laughed at. There’s also this anecdote in a story on RoadsideAmerica.com:

Dave recalls that in 2003 two European women were in the Big Cypress Swamp, photographing plants, when they were surprised by ‘a huge male Skunk Ape’ with an erection. ‘It was what I believe was the mating season,’ Dave explains. The women escaped unharmed.

Just thought I’d throw that one in there. And yes I did check and apparently gorillas and chimps have much smaller penises than the average male human so it might not have been that intimidating.

I think we can dismiss, or at least cast doubt on any of the photos of far away skunk apes that have popped up so far. People might have seen a genuine ape or a bear and been mistaken about the height because of skewed perspective or misremembering. They might also have seen a person in a suit.

You might think it’s weird that a person would randomly wear an ape costume on the off chance that someone will see them on the side of the road, but people do this sort of thing all the time. There was a guy wearing a horse head waiting for the Google maps car to come around in 2010 and those creepy people who dressed as clowns and hung out in various woods in 2016 to name but two modern examples. And of course, any of the photos could have been knowingly faked to start with.

Stacy Brown Jr himself might have added to the skunk ape stats when he entered a film competition in 2018. While I can’t find his footage, his friend was dressed in a sasquatch-type suit for the shoot which was reported by the Tallahassee Democrat.

That really only leaves the much closer-up photos of the black skunk ape taken by the woman at the end of the year 2000. Some people are convinced that the pics are genuine as they don’t appear to be obviously doctored. The mouth of the creature seems to move between the shots, making it unlikely to be a mask. A lot of people, on reddit at least, are convinced that these photos are genuine.

After I had perused the comments section for a while, I eventually happened upon a story of two men. One who is driven by a seemingly endless desire to prank people about skunk ape related things and another who is equally hellbent on bringing him down.

Someone who goes by the name “BarrySpencer” on reddit has been calling out a myriad of supposed skunk ape footage and a few other weird animal things as all being the work of one person, Justin Arnold.

He has a lot to say about this, however, to many people, including myself, there is not very much tying each individual instance to the same person. Let’s take a look at the original pictures again.

To summarise an extremely lengthy investigation, BarrySpencer claims that these photos are, in fact, photoshopped images containing a few different elements. One of them is a photo of a Bigfoot in a Ripley’s Believe it Or Not museum in Wisconsin. When viewed side by side, there are similarities in the posture and fur details on the two creatures, however, the skunk ape version is a different colour with seemingly more luxuriant hair. The Bigfoot is a bit patchy.

Spencer also claims that elements of a raccoon have been used to mock up the skunk ape’s face, which seems a bit more likely in the second of the two photos where the bottom jaw looks more squashed up towards the nose. According to BarrySpencer: “It’s a photoshop collage of five elements: photo of saw palmettos in the hoaxer’s front yard, cut out of Ripley’s Bigfoot, overpainting, raccoon face, and cut out palmetto frond.”

According to Spencer, the foliage seen in the photos is from Justin Arnold’s childhood home and all of these elements have been stitched together, as opposed to someone dressed in a suit hiding behind the shrubbery. That’s as good an explanation as any, however, there are many commenters saying that this is not a photoshop job, especially as it was done so long ago - 25 years by now. Personally, I have no idea if it was possible to create a photo like this back in 2000, but another element to the story does raise suspicions: This “lady” who took the photos remained anonymous in her letter so we can’t corroborate any of the story.

Spencer lists more supposed hoaxes by Justin Arnold many years after this one, however, the photos are all worse than the original one we’ve been talking about, which seems an unlikely trajectory.

There are a couple of videos floating around of a “skunk ape”, both of which show a large ape-like creature just minding its own business in a marshy area somewhere while the person behind the camera is spying on it. One of these is the Mississippi video we referenced earlier, by the way. Comments include things like people being incredulous of the ape-like way it’s drinking and some behaviours it displays but to me, this just makes it more likely that there’s an actual large ape just getting on with its life somewhere in the wilds of Florida.

As we’ve said before, there is easily scope for a gorilla to have escaped or even been turned free from a private collection or sanctuary. Maybe it’s behaving like an ape because it really is an ape. Just not a supernatural one.

We never really see it from the front and because of the distance, it’s difficult to judge the real height of the thing too. Could it be a person in a gorilla outfit? Yes. Why not.

People can act like animals, Andy Serkis has been King Kong and Caesar the chimpanzee from the Planet of the Apes films so it wouldn’t be particularly hard for someone to scoop water with their hand in an ape-like way for their friend to film. BarrySpencer has linked these clips to Justin Arnold because of the subject matter and the way the accompanying text is written, but it’s hardly a smoking gun. If he’s right, though, and one man has been behind different skunk ape sightings under different names, that labels every video and photo as a hoax straight away.

Opinion appears split as to the authenticity of the anonymous black skunk ape photos and while the idea of one man spending years of his life dedicated to fooling people online with the legend of the skunk ape is appealing, there’s no real evidence that one person is behind multiple different sightings. BarrySpencer starts coming off as a bit stalkerish the more you look into it, so maybe we’ll just leave it there and admit that we have no idea what those two photos are all about.

Wrapping Up

Unlike previous cryptid episodes, I find it hard to totally debunk the Florida skunk ape as one thing or the other. Do I believe the skunk ape exists? No, not as some supernatural being of the swampland, but I think there might be a real creature or creatures unwittingly acting as its proxy.

As usual with cryptid stories, the huge lack of physical evidence is a stumbling block to either proving the existence of the thing or to identifying what it actually is. Those horsey alligator hunters from the 1800s apparently killed a 13 foot tall giant but seemingly just left it there to be reclaimed by nature, not taking any part of it as evidence that they were telling the truth.

Reports from the 70s such as the one documented in Sports Illustrated described a creature as having “splotches and sores” which points to something with mange. The animal control officer also asked, seemingly rhetorically, “what kind of creature pounds its chest?” I don’t know, how about a chimpanzee or a gorilla, my guy? They also found tracks which looked like something walking on its knuckles. Again, a chimpanzee or a gorilla, anyone?

None of the videos of a long-armed creature gliding through the swamps have been particularly convincing and it’s really only those two photos from the anonymous lady that have kept the story alive. There’s plenty of stuff out there if you want to go down this particular rabbit hole, but a lot of it gets combined into general Bigfoot lore and there haven’t been any dramatic updates in the last few years. Stacy Brown Jr was supposed to be making a new documentary about the skunk ape called “Monster of the Myakka” however, a crowdfunding effort in 2020 raised zero dollars so I don’t think it’s been completed, as far as I can tell.

We’ll give one of the last words to redditor “castrate ur fate” who wrote this comment in a thread about the skunk ape photos:

I find it hard to believe that a sasquatch would live in Florida without people knowing or at least finding out immediately. Whatever you have to say about Florida, it is pretty much fact that it’s hard to keep a secret there. Surprised nobody shot one, draped its corpse across their mini-van and entered a demolition derby. Those people are insane and throw gators at each other like water balloons and smoke enough meth to make a Heisenberg faint. These people aren’t afraid of no big monkey.

Apart from my strong belief that sasquatch reside in cooler environments (…), the one thing that really makes the skunk ape seem more myth and folklore to me is Florida being f*cking Florida. You don’t get a Blue Oyster Cult song written about you over nothing.

That’s the song “Florida Man” from 2020 in case you aren’t familiar. Whether you believe it’s a real thing or not, the skunk ape has landed as a wildlife icon in Florida. The Bigfoot-like figure appears on merch and signage across the state, not just in Dave Shealy’s research emporium or whatever it was called.

There is a Skunk Ape 100 Mile Endurance Race, which I presume you can just do in normal running gear and not be dressed in a full on gorilla suit. There are multiple skunk ape beers and the Everglades Skunk Ape Festival which has been going since 2003, hosted by Shealy’s Skunk Ape Research Headquarters. Shealy also apparently holds a “Skunktoberfest” in October which includes, Lord have mercy, a “Miss Skunk Ape Contest” but details of these are few and far between.

While I read many accounts of people seeing weird things in the woods, there’s never any evidence to back it up so until such a time as the skunk ape makes a more compelling cameo appearance somewhere, he’s going to have to stay firmly on the “mythical” side of the line.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Florida Skunk Ape?

The Florida Skunk Ape is a large, hairy, bipedal creature often described as a cousin of the sasquatch. It is known for its strong smell, hence the name ‘skunk ape.‘

How tall is the Florida Skunk Ape reported to be?

Early reports described the Skunk Ape as being 5 to 6 feet tall, while more modern reports suggest it can be between 6 and 8 feet tall.

What are some of the earliest mentions of the Skunk Ape?

The most-agreed upon earliest mention of the Skunk Ape was in a newspaper article from 1818 in the Apalachicola Gazette, which described an unknown animal resembling a baboon.

What is the significance of the name ‘Skunk Ape’?

The name ‘Skunk Ape’ comes from the creature’s ape-like appearance and its strong, skunk-like odor. However, some believe the name originated from a sighting in the 1940s where the creature had a white stripe over its head, resembling a skunk.

What are some of the most notable sightings of the Skunk Ape?

Notable sightings include a 1971 incident in southeastern Florida where a hairy beast was reported running through a trailer park, and a 1998 incident where Dave Shealy captured photos and a video of the creature.

What evidence supports the existence of the Skunk Ape?

Evidence includes photographic and video footage, such as the 2000 video by Dave Shealy and the 2000 photos sent to the sheriff. However, the authenticity of these pieces of evidence is often debated.

What are some theories about what the Skunk Ape might be?

Theories include it being a large ape, a bear with mange, a person in a costume, or even a hoax. Some suggest it could be an escaped gorilla or orangutan from a private collection or sanctuary.

What is the Skunk Ape’s cultural significance in Florida?

The Skunk Ape has become a wildlife icon in Florida, appearing on merchandise and signage across the state. There are events like the Everglades Skunk Ape Festival and the Skunk Ape 100 Mile Endurance Race.

What is the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters?

The Skunk Ape Research Headquarters is a facility in Ochopee, Florida, run by Dave Shealy. It showcases videos, a self-published field guide, and merchandise related to the Skunk Ape.

What is the Skunk Ape’s alleged behavior and habitat?

The Skunk Ape is often reported to live in swampy areas and is known for its strong smell. It is described as having great strength and the ability to move easily through swampland.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Florida Skunk Ape Mystery…
• Hero image source by Julian Lupyan / openverse, cc0.